ot due to any fact about abilities, but rather to a shortcoming of conditional analyses generally. One way of overcoming this problem, if this diagnosis is correct, is to analyze abilities directly in terms of dispositions.
Such an analysis is proposed by Fara 2008, who argues:
S has the ability to A in circumstances C iff she has the disposition to A when, in circumstances C, she tries to A. (Fara 2008, 848)
The similarity of this analysis to the hypothetical analyses canvassed earlier are clear. This raises several immediate questions, such as whether this analysis can overcome the problem of sufficiency that plagued those approaches (see Fara 2008, 851–852 for an affirmative answer, and Clarke 2009, 334–336 for some doubts). What is most striking about the new dispositionalists, however, is how they bring this sort of account of ability to bear on certain familiar cases.
Consider how the new dispositionalism bears on so-called ‘Frankfurt cases.’ These are cases due to Frankfurt 1969, where an agent chooses to and performs some action A while at the same time there is some other action B such that, had the agent been about to choose B, an ‘intervener’ would have altered the agent’s brain so that the agent would have chosen, and performed, A instead. One question about such cases is whether the agent, in the actual sequence of events, had the ability to B. Frankfurt’s intuition, and that of most others, is that she did not. Given the further claim that the agent is nonetheless morally responsible for doing A, this case appears to be a counterexample to the what Frankfurt calls the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP): an agent is morally responsible for Aing only if she had the ability to perform some action other than A.
The new dispositionalists disagree. Let us focus on Fara’s diagnosis of the case. The question of whether the agent had the ability to B turns, for Fara, on the question of whether she was disposed to B when she tried to B. Fara claims that she does have such a disposition. The presence of the intervener is, on Fara’s view, like the aforementioned styrofoam packaging in a crystal glass. It masks the disposition of the glass to break when struck, but does not remove that disposition. Similarly, Fara argues, the presence of the intervener masks the agent’s disposition to B when she tries to B, but does not remove that disposition. (There is some disagreement among the new dispositionalists about whether this is a case of finking or masking; see Clarke 2009, 340 for discussion). So, pace Frankfurt, the agent does have the ability to B after all. And so we have, in this case at least, no counterexample to PAP.
A natural worry at this point is that the new dispositionalist has simply changed the subject. For it seems clear that, in a perfectly ordinary sense of ability, Frankfurt’s agent lacks the ability to do otherwise. An account of ability which denies this seems to be speaking of some other concept altogether. One way of bringing out what is missing is the idea that there seems to be a connection between my abilities, in the sense of ability that is relevant to free will, and what is up to me. Clarke claims that this sort of connection fails on the new dispositionalist view of ability:
Although the presence of a fink or mask that would prevent one’s Aing is compatible with having a general capacity (the unimpaired competence to A), there is an ordinary sense in which in such circumstances an agent might well be unable to A … If there is something in place that would prevent me from Aing should I try to A, if it is not up to me that it would so prevent me, and if it is not up to me that such a thing is in place, then even if I have a capacity to A, it is not up to me whether I exercise that capacity. (Clarke 2009, 339)
Thus the objection is that, while the new dispositionalist has perhaps offered a theory of something, it is not a theory of ability.
How should the new dispositionalist respond? One thought is that we are here again encountering the distinction between general and specific abiliti