Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Reformed Theology - Analytic ...

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Paul L. Manata © 2011
because they claim that ultimate sourcehood is incompatible with our wills or
character being determined by anything other than us. This view is also
sometimes known as narrow source incompatibilism. Other libertarians, the
majority, argue that there must at least be alternative possibilities at the time the
person became the ultimate source of his action or character formation. They
claim it makes no sense to claim that someone is ultimately responsible for
choosing, acting, or forming their character if they could not have done otherwise
at the time. They claim that the person must be the “difference-­‐maker” in how
the future turns out, and so alternative possibilities are loaded into the scenario.
As Kevin Timpe puts it,
[I]f the agent is to be morally responsible for some feature of the future,
she will be the difference-­‐maker to the way that the future unfolds. But in
order for this to be the case, there must be more than one future that is
compossible with the [determining conditions] (or those parts of the past
that were not themselves determined by the agent).” 50
So these libertarians claim that the principle of alternative possibilities (referred
to as PAP) is needed at the time of character forming or will-­‐setting, even if it is
not needed afterwards. Not surprisingly, these libertarians are sometimes known
as wide source incompatibilists. Wide source incompatibilism means that moral
responsibility is incompatible with determinism and requires alternative
possibilities at the moment of character forming or will-­‐setting to ensure ultimate
sourcehood.
50 Kevin Timpe, Source Incompatibilism and its Alternatives, p.17. The entire paper is
a good introduction to the in-­‐house debate and strongly argues for wide-­‐source
incompatibilism, see here: < http://people.nnu.edu/ktimpe/research/source.pdf>,
last accessed, 7/11/11.