What it means to say that agents have the ability to do otherwise? There has been much debate in recent philosophy about the meaning of this notion. G. E. Moore argued in his Ethics that one could do otherwise, only if one had chosen to do otherwise. Austin rejected the conditional analysis, and provides a decisive refutation of it. He argued that some "if-then" sentences, like "I could have done otherwise if I had wanted to”, are not genuinely conditional propositions. Chisholm and Lehrer have attempted to refute any analysis of ‘S can do X’ in terms of a conditional. They have argued that "If C, then S X's" cannot mean "s can X,". Bruce Aune objected to Lehrer’s proof. He argued that the above equivalence is true, and their argument is circular and it does beg the question. In this paper, I’ll present an overview of the debate and try to show that Aune’s objections are unsatisfactory.
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