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Anna And Beth's Practious Relationships Through Their Life

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So let's start by describing the basic form of a Frankfurt example, nowadays called a Frankfurt case. And we start with somebody doing something that seems odious. We could have used Damien and his stealing my money, but I think that you'll find that hard to get really worked up about, so let's use a fictional example of somebody who does something really bad. So imagine two sisters, Anna and Beth, and they're in middle age now, but they've had a slightly fractious relationship through their lives, largely because Beth feels a strong need to be the special one. And Beth has managed to cultivate the impression in Anna, aided and abetted to some degree by the parents, that Beth is the favorite. And their mother dies, and among the papers that …show more content…

She, the mother, loved them both equally, and she, the mother, wanted Anna to know that from the grave, so to speak. And it's a touching letter, and Beth reads it, and a little bit of her starts to be touched, and then she thinks, no, Anna I can't see this, and she burns it. So Beth burns the letter. Why does she burn the letter? Because she doesn't want Anna to know that she, Beth, wasn't the favorite. Anna thinks and will always think that Beth was more loved than she, Anna, was, and Beth doesn't want to do anything to change that impression. OK. So that's a pretty odious thing to do. Now, we'll fix that as our central example, the odious thing to do, and then we're going to change certain details of the story and then ask questions about how that changes Beth's blameability or culpability for burning the letter. So first case, just as I described it, she burnt the letter. There was nobody interfering, nobody watching, nothing unusual happening. She just did it out of her desire to retain a …show more content…

This is a central example of the case in which somebody is blameworthy for doing something. Second case, our first Frankfurt case. Suppose that when she burnt the letter, what happened was this: There was a third sister, call her Eve. Eve is kind of evil, and Eve also took pleasure out of Anna's feeling that she was the unloved one. And Eve, like Beth, wants Anna not to see that letter. And Eve is not just evil, but she's like derangedly, psychotically evil. And Eve says to Beth, I will kill you if you don't burn that letter. And Beth's had some experience with Eve, and she knows that when Eve makes threats like that, even hyperbolic threats that sound crazy, she is going to carry them out. She really is that psychotic in just that way. And so Beth knows that she's going to be killed if she doesn't burn the letter. And furthermore, Eve says, and if you at any time later tell Anna about this letter, I'll kill you, too. So before burning the letter, Eve has threatened Beth to such a degree that it would be crazy for Beth not to burn the letter. That's really the only option for her. And yet what's going on in Beth's head is this: "I want to burn the letter. This letter must be burned. Anna must not find out about her mother's love for

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