Moral responsibility and unavoidable action

The "principle of alternate possibilities" (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Ha rry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of co unterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample t hat have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed withi n the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: beca use Frankfurt's example relies on a "counterfactual intervener" to preclude alternatives to the person's action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot br ing it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for t he determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is al ways available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and ar gue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of nonco unterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Fran kfurt's original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liabil ity, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP's conceptual connect ion between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities.