I couldn't help it!

Here Chisholm clearly articulates the widely accepted thought that a person is morally responsible for what he did only if it was, in some important sense, up to the person himself whether he performed the action in question. Moreover, Chisholm says, if it was up to the person whether he performed the action, then the person could have done something else (or perhaps nothing at all) instead. Together these two claims yield the principle that a person is morally responsible for what he did only if he could have done otherwise. In an influential article, Harry Frankfurt (1969) dubbed this the principle of alternate possibilities, and the name stuck