‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ and the principle of alternate possibilities

In his paper ‘What we are morally responsible for’,1 Harry Frankfurt claims, in passing, that while the ‘Frankfurt Counterexamples’2 are counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP: An agent is morally blameworthy3 for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise), they are not counterexamples to the famous Kantian maxim that ‘Ought’ implies ‘Can’. In an Analysis paper of a few years ago, David Widerker objected to Frankfurt’s claim by arguing that the ‘Ought’ implies ‘Can’ maxim (The Maxim: If an agent is morally obligated to act in a particular way, then the agent has the ability to act in that way) entails PAP; hence, counterexamples to PAP are counterexamples to the Maxim as well.4 Widerker’s argument points to a serious problem for those who believe that PAP is to be rejected for roughly the reasons that Frankfurt suggests, even though the Maxim is to be maintained. Such a position might be important for what John Fischer has termed ‘actual sequence’ views of freedom:5 views that see the status of an action as free or unfree as depend-