Gettier counter-examples challenge the long-held Justified True Belief account of knowledge. The JTB holds that knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief. Gettier, in response to JTB, produced 2 counterexamples in which individuals have a justified, true belief regarding a claim but still fail to know it because the reasons for the belief, while justified, are actually false.
John Rawls proposed the “veil of ignorance” in his “original position” political philosophy. It is based upon the notion that when making political decisions one should imagine that when placed into the society of their construction they would not know the particular talents, abilities, tastes, social class, and positions they would have within a social order. In a hypothetical situation where 50% of people within the society were slaves it would follow that, when entered into the society, there would be a 50% chance that the constructor of the society would be a slave. If truly subjected to the veil of ignorance a party could not rationally make choices based upon their own self or class interest.
Buridan’s ass serves as an illustration in philosophy’s concept of free will. By placing a starving, dehydrated ass equidistant between hay and water it is unable to make a rational choice as to which to chose first and dies.
In 1969 Harry Frankfurt presented his counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities, which is to say that an agent is only morally responsible for their actions if they could have done otherwise. PAP had been formulated by the Libertarian Robert Kane.
Frankfurt’s examples involve agents who are intuitively responsible for their behaviour despite lacking the freedom to act otherwise. One such example involves a person chosing to vote Democrat, but if they tried to vote Republican would have been stopped, unbeknownst to them. His revision would have moral responsibility defined as an agent is not morally responsible for their actions only if they were done because the agent could not have done otherwise.