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Harry G. Frankfurt’s ‘Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person’ and it’s applications to Free Will
Adam GazdalskiHarry G. Frankfurt’s ‘Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person’ and it’s applications to Free Will
Harry G. Frankfurt believes that people are more than just a specific species with a genetic code that determines what it is to be a person. Rather he believes that a complex system of wills and desires is the differentiating cause. He shows that there are complex psychological differences that make up what it is to be a person, and that some human beings may not actually be people, as well as non human beings being possible persons. The differentiating principles that he speaks of are of ‘wills’ and are called first and second order desires. Only a person can participate in second order desires. Though he makes a point that this is a suspiciously human characteristic. This second order is more complex than it seems and he goes into great detail with many examples that most of the time prove helpful to his theory.
He than attempts to make a distinction between a ‘will’ and a ‘desire’, but I believe they might be one and the same. A desire is used to describe a short term will in many circumstances and may end up forming a hierarchy of questioned wills that account for other wills. To make a more practical hierarchy of what wills we choose, I also propose that there needs to be one or more ‘unquestioned’ wills at the base of such a system. Otherwise we may question ourselves for ever(which isn’t very practical). I believe that there are certain observations one can make about the use of his principles in his own examples, and see that some explanations need to be addressed when applying his principles to them. This as well as the problems that may arise amidst other hypothetical examples of the use of ‘wills’ pertaining to such wills that are no longer questioned by the individual.
He begins by discussing how previous views make the mistake of treating the word ‘person’ as a species. This is very important for if we do not distinguish philosophical terms from those used sometimes haphazardly in science and every day life we cannot conclude an argument on philosophical terms(or really any terms). He says, “What interests us most in the human condition would not interest us less if it were also a feature of the condition of other creatures as well.” So therefor our most discerning attributes are not species specific. This means that it is possible for some animals besides the human being to be persons, as well as the strong possibility that some individuals in the human race are not ‘persons’.
Human beings are undoubtably not alone in making decisions. So what makes us different than our pets? There must be different kinds of decisions, or at least different kinds of motives behind our decisions. Frankfurt specifically distinguishes two different kinds of motives or desires. The ‘first order’ desires are those that both persons and non persons may use. An example would be a dog wanting to eat out of a food bowl. This desire for the food is not challenged by the dog itself and so the decision is acted on immediately. If this were a second order desire the dog might have been reading a magazine and seen other skinnier dogs getting all the good looking dogs to mate with her, forcing our dog to question her eating habits. This questioning of a desire is a second order desire. It can also be classified as ‘self reflection’ and Frankfurt says that only man has this capability. It may be argued that it has been discovered that certain other animals have this capability as well, but the more important issues at hand would be just as applicable(and have the same problems) to any animal if it truly did have such capabilities as self reflection.
This ordering of desires sounds well and good until you apply the following example to it. In this example there is a man playing guitar on his porch. When asked why he made the decision to play he responds with, “Because I enjoy it.” We then question him further as to why he wants to enjoy it. He responds something along the lines of, “Because I need happiness in my life”. Why? “Just because I like happiness! Why should I have to question that? It makes me sad when I do.”
In this example I believe Jimi Hendrix was correct(metaphorically speaking) in saying he couldn’t ‘live’ without guitar, but what implications does this have on the ordering of desires? It shows that any true desire can be brought back to one of many initial desire that the desirer does not will to question. The fact that not everyone makes sure all of their actions stem back to a desire worth no longer questioning is a matter of wether or not the person wants to continue questioning such a matter. Or possibly even a matter of when the person gets ‘sick’ of questioning and may feel as if there is no will that is unquestionable(and they very well may be as we will see). The strength or clarity of that unquestioned desire and the extent of their wisdom that will help them determine what desire they no longer wish to question both stem from and adds to a person being ‘who they are’, psychologically speaking.
This may explain why it appears that a man sitting on a couch eating doritoes has less will to live than a man stuck under a boulder in the wilderness. The desire is forced out of the man in the woods, for his ‘unquestioned desire’(to survive in this case) is threatened and he might feel a moment of clarity. As if he had not ‘seen’ this ever so important desire so clearly as he does now. All he would need now is the wisdom to be able to carry out his newly ‘dusted off’ desire. Such as the wisdom of knowing enough about physics to be able to make a lever out of a stick to pry the rock off his legs etc. It could have been the very same man who was sitting on the couch, but when put in such a situation that threatened so many of his subordinate desires, it seems that his more basic desire, to survive, outweighs his desire to eat doritoes on the couch.
Is survival the most basic unquestionable desire that we have? No, it is just in many circumstances the more favorable one which would allow us to be able to carry out all of our other ‘second, third and fourth and so on...’ desires if we have both the clarity and wisdom for it.
Another example of an un questioned(and strong) desire is that of a religious man. When this man is asked why he was playing guitar on his porch he may respond, “To sing the joy of God!” Of course one might suppose that if this man was in the forest under a boulder, it is highly possible that he would call out to God and later say he derived his desire to live from his more basic(even more basic than ‘survival’) desire to please God. This may be how certain religious zealots have such strong will power and initiative as well as enthusiasm, as well as their capability to fly planes into buildings(their ‘will to God’, outweighed their ‘will to live’). This would also explain why the validity of religion can be such a ‘touchy’ subject to those who believe in it. Their religion becomes their most basic unquestioned desire and to take that away would make their lives seem utterly meaningless, lest they found another desire that was equally as strong(search for knowledge, love etc.).
There is one more very commonly used unquestionable desire(though there are possibly infinite) that is worth mentioning. This is one of the notion of ‘love’. If a man risks his life to save another, his basic desire in such a circumstance is most likely ‘to save the lives of his loved ones’. Though this may also be seen as the unquestioned desire of ‘survival of the human race’, it’s more likely is a projection of a ‘survival’ desire of the individual on those he cares for. In this situation I see no reason for not calling this rational first order desire, ‘love’. Though in the end, the question of why the man did what he did is more a physiological question rather than a philosophical one.
Frankfurt would probably not have totally disagreed with ‘unquestionable desires’. I believe he may have supported this idea. He says many times that having the freedom to do what we want to do is not enough to show our free will. He explains that it is possible for someone to want something even if he or she is denied of it, differentiating free will from free action. Along with this he says that to have true free will, one must ‘be free to will what one wills.’ Here is where I would add: If one must be free to will what one wills, than there must be an unquestioned will that your basing your wills to will on. Of course he attempts to answer this or at least confirm it in a way, on the end of the same page,
(Frankfurt 213) “There is no theoretical limit to the length of the series of desires of higher and higher orders...refusing to identify himself with any of the desires until he forms a desire of the next higher order... leads toward the destruction of a person.”
To clarify this quote one needs to understand that by ‘destruction of a person’, Frankfurt means the person would be stuck questioning his or her desires for eternity. To get a concrete, 100% and finite justification for a will must than be impossible. Leaving what ‘ought’ to be willed behind, it appears that even what ‘is’ willed has no finite explanation as to why it was willed. Does this mean that noone can be held fully accountable for their actions? On one hand yes, on the practical hand no.
On the ‘yes’ side of the answer we can see that there is no concrete and finite reason for anything to have been willed. It seems that whatever we will is only because of other wills we have. Is it even possible to will anything for no reason apparent to the one doing the willing? Let’s look at some examples and find out.
Example 1: Man ‘A’ claims to do action ‘X’ willfully. When asked why he did action X he responds, “For no particular reason”. Is X a willful action? When someone wills something, do they always have to have some ends of the action in mind? Such as eating a sandwich. Why? Because you were hungry. In the case of man A we can see that his justification for doing X was ‘for no particular reason’. The fact of the matter is that ‘for no particular reason’ is his ends to his will for the undertaking of X. Put more clearly: Even an action that is said to be ‘for no reason’ still has a reason behind it, the reason of ‘for no reason’. This reasoning may not be the most intelligent reason for an action, yet it is undeniably still a reason.
Example 2: A man ‘B’ takes action ‘Y’. When asked why he responds with, “I didn’t mean to do Y”. In this case assuming that man B is not lying, one can pose the question of wether or not B actually willed Y to happen, and if Y was not a willful action, did B ever actually take action Y? Again we can see the problem with stating an action was taken by a particular person and yet that person did not will the action.
This brings up another point about wills and actions. If it is true that a willful action requires the will of a person to will the action before it is taken, than why is it that we as supposably free willed individuals sometimes regret our past actions? Were we not the ones who willed such actions? The apparent answer to such a question lies in yet another question. Who is this man A or man B? It looks like if B was regretful that he did action Y, it couldn’t have been B that performed the action Y. Apparently it must hold that B was not ‘himself’ at the moment of doing Y. Does this make Y an unwilled action? No, I don’t believe it does and here is why:
Y is still a willed action wether B was himself at the moment of the action taking place or not. We may not be able to blame the man B that regrets taking action Y, but we certainly can blame the B that took action Y. Now the question lies in the fact that if the present B is to not be held responsible for taking action Y, and B is constantly from moment to moment changing(as we all are), than how can we say we should be held accountable for any of our actions for every moment a changed person is present?
Here is where continuity comes into play. Sure it may be true that we are different from moment to moment, but the part of this statement that is so often overlooked is that something must be continuous for this something to be changing. Such as the famous example of a boat persisting as the same boat throughout a voyage if all of it’s planks are to be replaced one by one every mile or so. For all practical purposes I believe we must make the assumption that ‘the boat is the same boat’. It may be a changed boat, but what boat is this changed boat but the boat that participated in the changing? It must be the boat that set off, just the same. So long as there is continuity between it’s planks throughout time and they were not all replaced at once.
If we apply this to personhood we can see that even when we took an action in the past, repented and truly regret doing this action, it was still us that took the action. A problem arises when asked if this person should not only admit it was himself that took the action, but be punished for it as well. For if and when it is applied to actual legal cases there seems to be no room for ‘forgiveness’ and makes a correctional facility seem like a ‘holding facility’. The only reason for a sentence to be handed out would be to deter others from doing this action. Of course this is all assuming it was an unlawful action that was taken.
Getting back to first and second (and ad infinitum) desires we can establish that it is true that if we were to question every higher order desire we have we would not be able to do anything but question those desires. This I believe is along similar lines as Descartes’s famous ‘Evil Genius’ scenario. For if we did honestly question everything, and base all our reasoning on simply empirical evidence we would necessarily end up realizing the only thing we can’t question is that we’re questioning.
How do we cope with this issue of practicality than? It looks like there must be at least one unquestioned desire in order for us to take any willful action. One or more desires that we can deem ‘not worth questioning’ for this moment or one of the next. Ones that appeared in the previous examples especially(Survival, God, ‘Love’). An important part to understand about these ‘basic desires’ is that they can and do sometimes fluctuate from one to the other.
A typical ‘bad decision’ will be used in the following example. Here we see a man finishing off a few more beers than he had previously desired. He might at first say to himself, “I will only drink three beers at the party tonight”. The man making the willful action of drinking only three beers is undeniably the same person throughout the night. The problem arises an hour later when the person decides he no longer cares how much he drinks(due to the three he had drank for they blurred his long term desires and heightened the shorter ones). The ‘unquestioned will’ of the person changed after he drank the three beers. It is the same person, it is his will that changed! So the next day when he wakes up with a hangover, it’s himself that should be blamed for taking the willful action of drinking too many beers.
Here I would like to add that there is a difference between the two desires represented in the previous example. The first desire was one that looked into the future. One that made the man realize he would regret his willful action the next mourning. The second desire came about only to satisfy a momentary will. Some helpful advice for this person would have to be, “Don’t deny it was you who took such an action, just be cautious of your wills changing so suddenly due to your environment.”
So now that we seem to have established that there needs to be an ‘unquestioned will’ to do what we do willfully(though Frankfurt doesn’t seem to touch on that much) and so that we do not run(think) in an endless spiral, the next question arises. How do we go about fulfilling this will? It seems that we need to want to want to do so. Frankfurt has another good example of a student who “wants to want to concentrate on his work”. He than concludes that some people ‘are just better at this’ than others(which I do not entirely believe).
(Frankfurt, 214) “The enjoyment of freedom comes easily to some. Others must struggle to achieve it.” If Frankfurt is not talking about people who already have established psychological ‘unquestioned wills’ than this is the most negative view of humanity I can imagine. We should at least assume that because we are all of the same species, we all have the capability to have an ‘easy to come by’ freedom lest we have a psychological disorder of some kind.
So how do these wills surface? They seem to vary from person to person and come about for various reasons. I would argue that they mostly come about because of the environment we were in both during the action taking place as well as our remembrance of all outcomes of our actions before it. We seem to choose the most pleasurable outcomes and justify our current actions on wether or not we will have a similar(either similar, better or less hurtful) experience. Of course it would be helpful to have a handful of scientific studies of this, but all one needs to do is look around at everyday people to come up with such a conclusion. Being somewhat of an empiricist, I cannot see a greater influence to our willful actions than the environment we have lived in, including our remembrance of how it had effected our wills in the past and the possibility of how it may effect our wills in the future.
Another important notion Frankfurt makes is when he makes the statement(215, 1st P.) “each of us is a prime mover unmoved.” This I believe is a great way to look at free will, as well as the hindering of our free will when we believe our actions are not of our own. Wether it is an addiction to a drug that causes us to believe this, or an addiction to the fear of God that hinders our free will or for any other reason. We can be conceived as ‘less of a person’ if we do not have an open mind to be able to fulfill(and initially see it) our true desire(s), especially the previously mentioned unquestioned desires(or more likely, if not only these unquestioned desires). The case of the ‘willing addict’ seems to go against this but I believe that the case is incorrectly dealt with by Frankfurt.
In the ‘willing addict’ case a man wants to do something that initially goes against his will, but eventually his first order desire(to take a drug) is overpowering and becomes his prime desire. He says that the man makes this desire to take the drug, his will. Do we make anything our will? Would we not have to ‘will’ it to be our will? To tackle this question we should refer to how our wills come about. Previously it was established that it may be our environment that gives us many of our wills and we simple pick them according to what we believe is the best action that will satisfy our most basic need at the time(or if we are looking to an immediate moment, we chose a different more initially satisfying desire and so forth).
If the drug addict ‘makes something’ his will, if it is possible for a first order desire to overtake a second order desire, this ability of desires must be applied to every decision we make. Even if the man sought help at a clinic and made ‘freedom from the drug’s addiction’ his new desire, can we not say that ‘survival’ overtook his will just as the ‘wanting to take the drug’ did? Proving again that in order for us to act on any desire there must be a point when we stop questioning wether or not it ‘should’ be done. If we do not base our actions and other wills(secondary, tertiary etc.) on an unquestionable basis than we either do not realize our more long term and satisfying desires, or we do not have enough knowledge to establish what that ‘most important’ will is or may be.
In Frankfurt’s last paragraph he makes the claim,
(Frankfurt, 216) “It seems by chance that a person is free to have the will he wants.”
Saying anything is performed ‘by chance’ seems to deny that our actions are willful at all, but luckily he than sustains his argument by saying that a ‘state of affairs’ may also be the cause of our freedom of will. His last statement could not be said more intelligently in response to the ‘state of affairs’ claim.
(Frankfurt, 216) “If it is indeed conceivable for the relevant states of affairs to come about in some third way...(meaning a combination of states of affairs and how they are effected hand in hand with our free will.), than a person should in that third way come to enjoy the freedom of the will.”
With that I will the end of this paper, in order to pass this class, in order to get a degree, in order to get a job, in order to be able to feed and shelter myself, in order to survive. Personally I enjoy surviving and would not deny that it is ‘in my interest of having long term personal enjoyment’ to do so. So here ‘long term, quality personal enjoyment(and may be a coffee...)’ I suppose is my unquestioned will as of this moment. It is logically possible to go on questioning such a will, but I won’t because I realize that I only have so much time here as a conscious being and I have to decide on something eventually lest I waste all of the time I have.
Practicality requires an ends to each deed that was said to be practical. I believe it would suit all of us to question everything... but not to never act on questionable wills. Why? Because their all questionable and we don’t live forever! Find the ‘unquestioned will’ that we (would necessarily have to) believe to be the ‘best’ one for whatever reasons and act on it while we are still able to. Do this while keeping in the back of your mind that no belief is set in stone. So long as we do not effect the unquestioned wills of others(lest they effect ours and so forth...) and so long as we can decide on what will to ‘believe’ in, we can use our questioning ability to further that which we do not wish to question. Leading to personal satisfaction.
Harry G. Frankfurt believes that people are more than just a specific species with a genetic code that determines what it is to be a person. Rather he believes that a complex system of wills and desires is the differentiating cause. He shows that there are complex psychological differences that make up what it is to be a person, and that some human beings may not actually be people, as well as non human beings being possible persons. The differentiating principles that he speaks of are of ‘wills’ and are called first and second order desires. Only a person can participate in second order desires. Though he makes a point that this is a suspiciously human characteristic. This second order is more complex than it seems and he goes into great detail with many examples that most of the time prove helpful to his theory.
He than attempts to make a distinction between a ‘will’ and a ‘desire’, but I believe they might be one and the same. A desire is used to describe a short term will in many circumstances and may end up forming a hierarchy of questioned wills that account for other wills. To make a more practical hierarchy of what wills we choose, I also propose that there needs to be one or more ‘unquestioned’ wills at the base of such a system. Otherwise we may question ourselves for ever(which isn’t very practical). I believe that there are certain observations one can make about the use of his principles in his own examples, and see that some explanations need to be addressed when applying his principles to them. This as well as the problems that may arise amidst other hypothetical examples of the use of ‘wills’ pertaining to such wills that are no longer questioned by the individual.
He begins by discussing how previous views make the mistake of treating the word ‘person’ as a species. This is very important for if we do not distinguish philosophical terms from those used sometimes haphazardly in science and every day life we cannot conclude an argument on philosophical terms(or really any terms). He says, “What interests us most in the human condition would not interest us less if it were also a feature of the condition of other creatures as well.” So therefor our most discerning attributes are not species specific. This means that it is possible for some animals besides the human being to be persons, as well as the strong possibility that some individuals in the human race are not ‘persons’.
Human beings are undoubtably not alone in making decisions. So what makes us different than our pets? There must be different kinds of decisions, or at least different kinds of motives behind our decisions. Frankfurt specifically distinguishes two different kinds of motives or desires. The ‘first order’ desires are those that both persons and non persons may use. An example would be a dog wanting to eat out of a food bowl. This desire for the food is not challenged by the dog itself and so the decision is acted on immediately. If this were a second order desire the dog might have been reading a magazine and seen other skinnier dogs getting all the good looking dogs to mate with her, forcing our dog to question her eating habits. This questioning of a desire is a second order desire. It can also be classified as ‘self reflection’ and Frankfurt says that only man has this capability. It may be argued that it has been discovered that certain other animals have this capability as well, but the more important issues at hand would be just as applicable(and have the same problems) to any animal if it truly did have such capabilities as self reflection.
This ordering of desires sounds well and good until you apply the following example to it. In this example there is a man playing guitar on his porch. When asked why he made the decision to play he responds with, “Because I enjoy it.” We then question him further as to why he wants to enjoy it. He responds something along the lines of, “Because I need happiness in my life”. Why? “Just because I like happiness! Why should I have to question that? It makes me sad when I do.”
In this example I believe Jimi Hendrix was correct(metaphorically speaking) in saying he couldn’t ‘live’ without guitar, but what implications does this have on the ordering of desires? It shows that any true desire can be brought back to one of many initial desire that the desirer does not will to question. The fact that not everyone makes sure all of their actions stem back to a desire worth no longer questioning is a matter of wether or not the person wants to continue questioning such a matter. Or possibly even a matter of when the person gets ‘sick’ of questioning and may feel as if there is no will that is unquestionable(and they very well may be as we will see). The strength or clarity of that unquestioned desire and the extent of their wisdom that will help them determine what desire they no longer wish to question both stem from and adds to a person being ‘who they are’, psychologically speaking.
This may explain why it appears that a man sitting on a couch eating doritoes has less will to live than a man stuck under a boulder in the wilderness. The desire is forced out of the man in the woods, for his ‘unquestioned desire’(to survive in this case) is threatened and he might feel a moment of clarity. As if he had not ‘seen’ this ever so important desire so clearly as he does now. All he would need now is the wisdom to be able to carry out his newly ‘dusted off’ desire. Such as the wisdom of knowing enough about physics to be able to make a lever out of a stick to pry the rock off his legs etc. It could have been the very same man who was sitting on the couch, but when put in such a situation that threatened so many of his subordinate desires, it seems that his more basic desire, to survive, outweighs his desire to eat doritoes on the couch.
Is survival the most basic unquestionable desire that we have? No, it is just in many circumstances the more favorable one which would allow us to be able to carry out all of our other ‘second, third and fourth and so on...’ desires if we have both the clarity and wisdom for it.
Another example of an un questioned(and strong) desire is that of a religious man. When this man is asked why he was playing guitar on his porch he may respond, “To sing the joy of God!” Of course one might suppose that if this man was in the forest under a boulder, it is highly possible that he would call out to God and later say he derived his desire to live from his more basic(even more basic than ‘survival’) desire to please God. This may be how certain religious zealots have such strong will power and initiative as well as enthusiasm, as well as their capability to fly planes into buildings(their ‘will to God’, outweighed their ‘will to live’). This would also explain why the validity of religion can be such a ‘touchy’ subject to those who believe in it. Their religion becomes their most basic unquestioned desire and to take that away would make their lives seem utterly meaningless, lest they found another desire that was equally as strong(search for knowledge, love etc.).
There is one more very commonly used unquestionable desire(though there are possibly infinite) that is worth mentioning. This is one of the notion of ‘love’. If a man risks his life to save another, his basic desire in such a circumstance is most likely ‘to save the lives of his loved ones’. Though this may also be seen as the unquestioned desire of ‘survival of the human race’, it’s more likely is a projection of a ‘survival’ desire of the individual on those he cares for. In this situation I see no reason for not calling this rational first order desire, ‘love’. Though in the end, the question of why the man did what he did is more a physiological question rather than a philosophical one.
Frankfurt would probably not have totally disagreed with ‘unquestionable desires’. I believe he may have supported this idea. He says many times that having the freedom to do what we want to do is not enough to show our free will. He explains that it is possible for someone to want something even if he or she is denied of it, differentiating free will from free action. Along with this he says that to have true free will, one must ‘be free to will what one wills.’ Here is where I would add: If one must be free to will what one wills, than there must be an unquestioned will that your basing your wills to will on. Of course he attempts to answer this or at least confirm it in a way, on the end of the same page,
(Frankfurt 213) “There is no theoretical limit to the length of the series of desires of higher and higher orders...refusing to identify himself with any of the desires until he forms a desire of the next higher order... leads toward the destruction of a person.”
To clarify this quote one needs to understand that by ‘destruction of a person’, Frankfurt means the person would be stuck questioning his or her desires for eternity. To get a concrete, 100% and finite justification for a will must than be impossible. Leaving what ‘ought’ to be willed behind, it appears that even what ‘is’ willed has no finite explanation as to why it was willed. Does this mean that noone can be held fully accountable for their actions? On one hand yes, on the practical hand no.
On the ‘yes’ side of the answer we can see that there is no concrete and finite reason for anything to have been willed. It seems that whatever we will is only because of other wills we have. Is it even possible to will anything for no reason apparent to the one doing the willing? Let’s look at some examples and find out.
Example 1: Man ‘A’ claims to do action ‘X’ willfully. When asked why he did action X he responds, “For no particular reason”. Is X a willful action? When someone wills something, do they always have to have some ends of the action in mind? Such as eating a sandwich. Why? Because you were hungry. In the case of man A we can see that his justification for doing X was ‘for no particular reason’. The fact of the matter is that ‘for no particular reason’ is his ends to his will for the undertaking of X. Put more clearly: Even an action that is said to be ‘for no reason’ still has a reason behind it, the reason of ‘for no reason’. This reasoning may not be the most intelligent reason for an action, yet it is undeniably still a reason.
Example 2: A man ‘B’ takes action ‘Y’. When asked why he responds with, “I didn’t mean to do Y”. In this case assuming that man B is not lying, one can pose the question of wether or not B actually willed Y to happen, and if Y was not a willful action, did B ever actually take action Y? Again we can see the problem with stating an action was taken by a particular person and yet that person did not will the action.
This brings up another point about wills and actions. If it is true that a willful action requires the will of a person to will the action before it is taken, than why is it that we as supposably free willed individuals sometimes regret our past actions? Were we not the ones who willed such actions? The apparent answer to such a question lies in yet another question. Who is this man A or man B? It looks like if B was regretful that he did action Y, it couldn’t have been B that performed the action Y. Apparently it must hold that B was not ‘himself’ at the moment of doing Y. Does this make Y an unwilled action? No, I don’t believe it does and here is why:
Y is still a willed action wether B was himself at the moment of the action taking place or not. We may not be able to blame the man B that regrets taking action Y, but we certainly can blame the B that took action Y. Now the question lies in the fact that if the present B is to not be held responsible for taking action Y, and B is constantly from moment to moment changing(as we all are), than how can we say we should be held accountable for any of our actions for every moment a changed person is present?
Here is where continuity comes into play. Sure it may be true that we are different from moment to moment, but the part of this statement that is so often overlooked is that something must be continuous for this something to be changing. Such as the famous example of a boat persisting as the same boat throughout a voyage if all of it’s planks are to be replaced one by one every mile or so. For all practical purposes I believe we must make the assumption that ‘the boat is the same boat’. It may be a changed boat, but what boat is this changed boat but the boat that participated in the changing? It must be the boat that set off, just the same. So long as there is continuity between it’s planks throughout time and they were not all replaced at once.
If we apply this to personhood we can see that even when we took an action in the past, repented and truly regret doing this action, it was still us that took the action. A problem arises when asked if this person should not only admit it was himself that took the action, but be punished for it as well. For if and when it is applied to actual legal cases there seems to be no room for ‘forgiveness’ and makes a correctional facility seem like a ‘holding facility’. The only reason for a sentence to be handed out would be to deter others from doing this action. Of course this is all assuming it was an unlawful action that was taken.
Getting back to first and second (and ad infinitum) desires we can establish that it is true that if we were to question every higher order desire we have we would not be able to do anything but question those desires. This I believe is along similar lines as Descartes’s famous ‘Evil Genius’ scenario. For if we did honestly question everything, and base all our reasoning on simply empirical evidence we would necessarily end up realizing the only thing we can’t question is that we’re questioning.
How do we cope with this issue of practicality than? It looks like there must be at least one unquestioned desire in order for us to take any willful action. One or more desires that we can deem ‘not worth questioning’ for this moment or one of the next. Ones that appeared in the previous examples especially(Survival, God, ‘Love’). An important part to understand about these ‘basic desires’ is that they can and do sometimes fluctuate from one to the other.
A typical ‘bad decision’ will be used in the following example. Here we see a man finishing off a few more beers than he had previously desired. He might at first say to himself, “I will only drink three beers at the party tonight”. The man making the willful action of drinking only three beers is undeniably the same person throughout the night. The problem arises an hour later when the person decides he no longer cares how much he drinks(due to the three he had drank for they blurred his long term desires and heightened the shorter ones). The ‘unquestioned will’ of the person changed after he drank the three beers. It is the same person, it is his will that changed! So the next day when he wakes up with a hangover, it’s himself that should be blamed for taking the willful action of drinking too many beers.
Here I would like to add that there is a difference between the two desires represented in the previous example. The first desire was one that looked into the future. One that made the man realize he would regret his willful action the next mourning. The second desire came about only to satisfy a momentary will. Some helpful advice for this person would have to be, “Don’t deny it was you who took such an action, just be cautious of your wills changing so suddenly due to your environment.”
So now that we seem to have established that there needs to be an ‘unquestioned will’ to do what we do willfully(though Frankfurt doesn’t seem to touch on that much) and so that we do not run(think) in an endless spiral, the next question arises. How do we go about fulfilling this will? It seems that we need to want to want to do so. Frankfurt has another good example of a student who “wants to want to concentrate on his work”. He than concludes that some people ‘are just better at this’ than others(which I do not entirely believe).
(Frankfurt, 214) “The enjoyment of freedom comes easily to some. Others must struggle to achieve it.” If Frankfurt is not talking about people who already have established psychological ‘unquestioned wills’ than this is the most negative view of humanity I can imagine. We should at least assume that because we are all of the same species, we all have the capability to have an ‘easy to come by’ freedom lest we have a psychological disorder of some kind.
So how do these wills surface? They seem to vary from person to person and come about for various reasons. I would argue that they mostly come about because of the environment we were in both during the action taking place as well as our remembrance of all outcomes of our actions before it. We seem to choose the most pleasurable outcomes and justify our current actions on wether or not we will have a similar(either similar, better or less hurtful) experience. Of course it would be helpful to have a handful of scientific studies of this, but all one needs to do is look around at everyday people to come up with such a conclusion. Being somewhat of an empiricist, I cannot see a greater influence to our willful actions than the environment we have lived in, including our remembrance of how it had effected our wills in the past and the possibility of how it may effect our wills in the future.
Another important notion Frankfurt makes is when he makes the statement(215, 1st P.) “each of us is a prime mover unmoved.” This I believe is a great way to look at free will, as well as the hindering of our free will when we believe our actions are not of our own. Wether it is an addiction to a drug that causes us to believe this, or an addiction to the fear of God that hinders our free will or for any other reason. We can be conceived as ‘less of a person’ if we do not have an open mind to be able to fulfill(and initially see it) our true desire(s), especially the previously mentioned unquestioned desires(or more likely, if not only these unquestioned desires). The case of the ‘willing addict’ seems to go against this but I believe that the case is incorrectly dealt with by Frankfurt.
In the ‘willing addict’ case a man wants to do something that initially goes against his will, but eventually his first order desire(to take a drug) is overpowering and becomes his prime desire. He says that the man makes this desire to take the drug, his will. Do we make anything our will? Would we not have to ‘will’ it to be our will? To tackle this question we should refer to how our wills come about. Previously it was established that it may be our environment that gives us many of our wills and we simple pick them according to what we believe is the best action that will satisfy our most basic need at the time(or if we are looking to an immediate moment, we chose a different more initially satisfying desire and so forth).
If the drug addict ‘makes something’ his will, if it is possible for a first order desire to overtake a second order desire, this ability of desires must be applied to every decision we make. Even if the man sought help at a clinic and made ‘freedom from the drug’s addiction’ his new desire, can we not say that ‘survival’ overtook his will just as the ‘wanting to take the drug’ did? Proving again that in order for us to act on any desire there must be a point when we stop questioning wether or not it ‘should’ be done. If we do not base our actions and other wills(secondary, tertiary etc.) on an unquestionable basis than we either do not realize our more long term and satisfying desires, or we do not have enough knowledge to establish what that ‘most important’ will is or may be.
In Frankfurt’s last paragraph he makes the claim,
(Frankfurt, 216) “It seems by chance that a person is free to have the will he wants.”
Saying anything is performed ‘by chance’ seems to deny that our actions are willful at all, but luckily he than sustains his argument by saying that a ‘state of affairs’ may also be the cause of our freedom of will. His last statement could not be said more intelligently in response to the ‘state of affairs’ claim.
(Frankfurt, 216) “If it is indeed conceivable for the relevant states of affairs to come about in some third way...(meaning a combination of states of affairs and how they are effected hand in hand with our free will.), than a person should in that third way come to enjoy the freedom of the will.”
With that I will the end of this paper, in order to pass this class, in order to get a degree, in order to get a job, in order to be able to feed and shelter myself, in order to survive. Personally I enjoy surviving and would not deny that it is ‘in my interest of having long term personal enjoyment’ to do so. So here ‘long term, quality personal enjoyment(and may be a coffee...)’ I suppose is my unquestioned will as of this moment. It is logically possible to go on questioning such a will, but I won’t because I realize that I only have so much time here as a conscious being and I have to decide on something eventually lest I waste all of the time I have.
Practicality requires an ends to each deed that was said to be practical. I believe it would suit all of us to question everything... but not to never act on questionable wills. Why? Because their all questionable and we don’t live forever! Find the ‘unquestioned will’ that we (would necessarily have to) believe to be the ‘best’ one for whatever reasons and act on it while we are still able to. Do this while keeping in the back of your mind that no belief is set in stone. So long as we do not effect the unquestioned wills of others(lest they effect ours and so forth...) and so long as we can decide on what will to ‘believe’ in, we can use our questioning ability to further that which we do not wish to question. Leading to personal satisfaction.
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