Frankfurt-style cases and responsibility for omissions

Sammanfattning: Frankfurt-style cases are purported counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities, since they arecases in which agents appear to be morally responsible for their actions, even though they lack the ability todo otherwise. Philip Swenson has recently challenged these Frankfurt-style cases as effective counterexamplesto PAP by presenting a scenario in which an agent seems to lack morally responsibility for failing to save achild, since he couldn’t do otherwise. And since there’s no morally relevant difference between this case ofomission, and the traditional Frankfurt-style cases, we should therefore conclude that the agents in theFrankfurt-style cases lack morally responsibility for their actions as well. In the following paper I argue thatone could simply run Swenson’s argument in reverse, thereby showing that it is the agent in his case that ismorally responsible for his omission, rather than the other way around, and that Swenson therefore has failedto demonstrate that Frankfurt-style cases should be rejected as effective counterexamples to PAP.