Responsibility and alternative possibilities: The use and abuse of examples

The philosophical debate over the compatibility between causal determinism and moral responsibility relies heavily on our reactions to examples. Although we believe that there is no alternative to this methodology in this area of philosophy, some examples that feature prominently in the literature are positively misleading. In this vein, we criticize the use that incompatibilists make of the phenomenon of "brainwashing," as well as the Frankfurt-style examples favored by compatibilists. We provide an instance of the kind of thought experiment that is needed to genuinely test the hypothesis that moral accountability and causal determinism are compatible. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.