In this essay, I shall argue that Frankfurt’s account of free will is unsuccessful. I shall begin by outlining Frankfurt’s account of free will before highlighting an objection and showing that despite it’s attractions Frankfurt’s account of free will is ultimately unsuccessful.
In his paper Freedom of the will and the concept of a person Frankfurt lays out his account of free will, in doing so he draws several distinctions which I shall now explain before outlining his account. To begin with Frankfurt distinguishes between first order and second order desires. First order desires are desires of the form ‘I want to x’ and second order desires are of the form ‘I want to want to x’. Thus, second order desires are desires concerning first order desires. This is unobjectionable, I may, for instance, have a first order desire for chocolate but I may also have a second order desire to not want to want chocolate because it’s bad for my health. However, these distinctions alone are not enough to understand free will and Frankfurt makes a further distinction between standard second order desires and a subset of second order desires that he calls second order volitions. When an agent has a second order volition they have a second order desire except they want their first order desire to be effective, that is, to move them to action. Frankfurt then uses these distinctions to define free will as follows, an agent is free if he acts on the desires he wants to be effective – if he is free to have the will he wants to have. To illustrate this Frankfurt asks us to consider the case of the unwilling addict and the case of the wanton. The unwilling addict is an addict who has a first order desire to take a drug but a second order volition to ref...
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...flective capacity is constrained by external forces then they are not free. So, Frankfurt’s account of free will is unsatisfactory because it misses out something important – an agent’s reflective ability.
In conclusion, Frankfurt’s account of free will is, despite it’s initial attractions, ultimately unsuccessful. I have argued that when we consider the case of a brainwashed agent we see that Frankfurt’s account is missing something important – a consideration of the agent’s reflective capacity. There is, therefore, more to free will than Frankfurt’s account suggests and it is, consequently, unsuccessful.
Works Cited
Double, R., (1991). The non-reality of free will. New York: Oxford University Press.
Frankfurt, H.G., (2003). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. In G. Watson, ed. Free Will, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, pp.322-336.
...ow moral responsibility. One needs to will other alternate possibilities, knowing that there is no moral responsibility for them, to show that the original will has moral responsibility. It is like placing a white stone on a pile of black stones to emphasize the fact that that one stone is a white stone. This shows the need for alternate possibilities and strengthens Frankfurt’s argument.
In respect to the arguments of Ayer and Holbach, the dilemma of determinism and its compatibility with that of free will are found to be in question. Holbach makes a strong case for hard determinism in his System of Nature, in which he defines determinism to be a doctrine that everything and most importantly human actions are caused, and it follows that we are not free and therefore haven’t any moral responsibility in regard to our actions. For Ayer, a compatibilist believing that free will is compatible with determinism, it is the reconciliation and dissolution of the problem of determinism and moral responsibility with free willing that is argued. Ayer believes that this problem can be dissolved by the clarification of language usage and the clarification of what freedom is in relationship to those things that oppose freedom or restrain it. In either case, what is at stake is the free will of an agent, and whether or not that agent is morally responsible. What is to be seen from a discussion of these arguments is the applicability and validity of these two philosophies to situations where one must make a choice, and whether or not that person is acting freely and is thus responsible given his current situation. In this vein, the case of Socrates’ imprisonment and whether or not he acted freely in respect to his decision to leave or stay in prison can be evaluated by the discussion of the arguments presented in respect to the nature of free will in its reconciliation with determinism in the compatibilist vein and its absence in the causality of hard determinism.
Frankfurtean compatibilism provides a more refined model than Humean compatibilism. Humean compatibilism has denied the deterministic notion of freedom-the ability to have chosen otherwise. Hume then provides a new definition of freedom, as “a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will” (“Of Liberty and Necessity”, 23). In Hume’s view, as long as we act according to our desires and belief, we are exercising freedom of will and freedom of action. Frankfurt adds a further distinction within our desires, and concludes that our will is free if and only if we act on a first-order desire determined by our second-order desire. An agent’s will, defined by Frankfurt, is “the notion of an effective desire-one that moves (or will or would move) a ...
He states, “A person may well be morally responsible for what he has done even though he could not have done otherwise”. Frankfurt defends the idea that one must be morally responsible in some sense rather than just blaming the past, in a rather pessimistic manner. He also suggests that you are not responsible if you could not have avoided the situation and decision that you made. In Harris’s case, Frankfurt would say that Harris could be held responsible for his actions even though there is a possibility that Harris could not have acted otherwise. In P.F. Strawson’s essay “Freedom and Resentment”, he states, “This is that the notions of moral guilt, of blame, of moral responsibility are inherently confused and that we can see this to be so if we consider the consequences either of the truth of determinism or of its falsity” (72). Whether or not you one has the ability to control their actions, they still have the freedom to express feelings and emotions subsequent to their determined actions. We experience consequences in regards to our actions and most would even say morally
In this essay, Walter T. Stace writes about how the existence of free will is not a real problem, that a lot of people may not believe in free will because they do not have the correct definition of it, but if they
The aim of this essay is to prove the reliability of and why Libertarianism is the most coherent of the three views, which refers to the idea of human free will being true, that one is not determined, and therefore, they are morally responsible. In response to the quote on the essay, I am disagreeing with Wolf. This essay will be further strengthened with the help of such authors as C.A. Campell, R. Taylor and R.M. Chisholm. They present similar arguments, which essentially demonstrate that one could have done otherwise and one is the sole author of the volition. I will present the three most common arguments in support of Libertarianism, present an objection against Libertarianism and attempt to rebut it as well as reject one main argument from the other views. As a result, this essay will prove that one is held morally responsibly for any act that was performed or chosen by them, which qualify as a human act.
Hume presents his argument with three phases; the first proves the Principle of Determinism, he then goes on to prove Human Freedom also exists, coming to the conclusion the two are compatible. The foundation of his...
The issue of free will has been a contentious one for a long time now between philosophers. Many have debated over the issue and ended up taking different stances. In this essay paper, I will argue the viewpoints of two great individuals in the field of philosophy; Pereboom and J. Coates whereby it is understood that they took completely different positions regarding this combative matter. An inquiry into the works of the two will enable us to answer these two imperative questions: Does denial of unregulated factors hinder the value and meaning of life? Also, is their need to defend free will rationally?
James, W. (2009, May 8). The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Will to Believe, by William James. Retrieved from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26659/pg26659.txt
agent do what it pleased; the soft determinists simply ignore the question of whether the agent was in control of the sources that caused the actions. Holmstrom’s theory was that “just because some causes of desires and beliefs, such as brainwashing, make actions resulting from them unfree, it does not follow that any cause of desires and beliefs has the same implications for the freedom of actions resulting from them.” (Abel, 321)
In Roderick Chisholm’s essay Human Freedom and the Self he makes the reader aware of an interesting paradox which is not normally associated with the theory of free will. Chisholm outlines the metaphysical problem of human freedom as the fact that we claim human beings to be the responsible agents in their lives yet this directly opposes both the deterministic (that every action was caused by a previous action) and the indeterministic (that every act is not caused by anything in particular) view of human action. To hold the theory that humans are the responsible agents in regards to their actions is to discredit hundreds of years of philosophical intuition and insight.
Kane, Robert. "Free Will: Ancient Dispute, New Themes." Feinberg, Joel and Russ Safer-Landau. Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013. 425-437. Print.
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