Abstract

In the free will-problem a lively debate over the correctness of interpretino “An agent could have acted otherwise” as “An agent would have acted otherwise, if she had chosen or decide or tried to” took place within the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, especially as a result of John Austin’s paper Ifs and Cans , directed mainly against the conditional analysis of could first advanced by George Moore in his Ethics . What I aim to show is that the Austinian attack on the Moorean conditional analysis rests on the mistake of misrepresenting Moore’s position on this subject: whether or not conditional analysis is defective, Austin’s criticism does not probably bear on the question as much as it seemed it did