Freedom
of the Will and Personal Values
December
2004
It is clear that autonomy is an
important component of personhood, and that our desires are tied to our
autonomy in an important way. Just how
they effect our autonomy is not so clear, and has been the focus of much
philosophical research. The
philosophical definition of personhood is necessary in the discussion of
autonomy and in understanding of moral responsibility.
Harry
Frankfurt’s famous paper “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”
makes two major assertions. The first is
that a person is defined as one who has a desire for one of her desires to
become effective—a kind of “second order desire” he calls a “second order
volition”. The second is that a person’s
will is free only when her volition matches what she actually does. Freedom of the will is the ability to choose
among one’s first order desires the one that moves one to action.
By his account, free will is
determined on an act-by-act basis. For
example, I may, of my own free will, take the trash out when I don’t want to
take the trash out. At the same time
that I do not want to take the trash out, I do
want to take the trash out (because I want the trash taken out and I’m the only
one around to do it). Of these two first
order desires, the one that I want to want is my will
if it becomes effective. If I do not
fulfill my volition and I don’t take the trash out, Frankfurt asserts that I
have not acted of my own free will (I didn’t fulfill the desire I desired to
fulfill), though I have still acted freely (I did what I wanted to do, on the
first order at least). His distinction
between freedom of action and freedom of the will is important to his argument.
Throughout this ordeal, I have been
a Frankfurtian person. Whether I’ve taken the trash out or not, I have
had a second order volition about my two conflicting desires. The ability to reflect on my desires is what
distinguishes me from an animal that may desire to do things but cannot lay its
desires out and pick among the ones that conflict. I wanted one of the two to be the one that
moves me. In a sense, I preferred one.
If
laziness won out and I did not take the trash out, I still had that volition to
do otherwise which, according to Frankfurt, is what personhood is all
about—though, I would be a person without
free will in regards to the disposal of my garbage. Had I not cared about which desire became
effective, then I would be a “wanton”.
As a wanton, my two desires still exist alongside each other, but I do
not have a preference as to which one I bring to fruition (the trash would
likely never get taken down, and I would not care even though it makes me
unhappy and I want it gone).
The idea of a wanton thus conceived
is problematic.
Returning
to the tale of the trash that has yet to be taken out, how could it be that I
do not want to take the trash out and want to take the trash out, but do not
care which desire moves me to action?
Given that I do care, giving into laziness will be upsetting to me
because I am still left with the trash.
However, if I do not care whether wanting to take the trash out or not
wanting to take the trash out moves me, then could I have really wanted them
both? If I do not care then it is hard
to conceive (though, in fairness to
Take
another example, from medicine. Suppose
a patient wants to have a life saving operation and does not want to have a
life saving operation because it is frightening. In fact, most people who face an operation
have the same conflicting desires. No
one wants to have surgery, though
most people do want to do what it takes to be healed. Her volition is that she wants the desire for
the operation to move her to get on the operating table. However, she is actually moved by her desire not to have the operation—it is just too scary
for her to do what she knows is best for her, what she wishes she could bring herself to do. Can a wanton be described using these same
circumstances? Can she want to have the
operation to save her life, and not
want to have the operation because it is scary, and still really not care about
which she will act on? The wanton,
conceived as a marble bouncing randomly through a maze of desires, seems more
like an automaton. Even
Imagining
a wanton is easier in the case of animals and children than it is in adults
towards their behavior about household chores, for example, or even
Drug
use leads to more, however, than a simple desire—drug addiction is a powerful
biochemical force. The drug addict’s
decision to use drugs and thereby sacrifice her autonomy is akin to the case of
the person faced with an armed robber.
The robber demands from her, “your money or your life.” She can respond in one of two ways: refuse and be killed, or surrender the money
and be left to live. She wants to both
deny the robber her money and remain unwounded.
It is not impossible that she makes the first choice, but the claim that
she is as free to choose that as she is to choose to save her life is
dubious.
Similarly,
when the drug addict feels the pangs of “hunger” for her substance, she still
has the ability to resist.
Substances can create physical cravings—desires to escape pain, chills,
anxiety, frustration, and other symptoms.
Not being able to resist the desires they create may be a matter of
weakness of the will, but her will is still capable of strengthening itself to
the point of deciding against using the drug.
In other words, drugs do not hijack a person and act for her. In the face of pains from withdrawal, or even
simple discomfort, she is just not as free to resist as she is to give
in. One thing about which
For
the addict and the robbery victim, bringing one of their two desires to action
is profoundly difficult and the other is quite easy. In these cases, where fulfilling one of two
desires will result in immense pain, or death,
What we commonly think of as desires are
desires of the first order. The personal
difficulty we face when our first order desires conflict can be resolved when
we reflect on our higher order desires—when we consider what we “really want”.
By
autonomy, he means the self-governance associated with freedom of the
will. Still, in this sense of
“self-governance”,
Aristotle
might cite habituation as the basis for one’s values, but in addition to
upbringing and habit, values differ from desires in that they assess what is
important to oneself. Gary Watson argues
in “Free Agency” that our values emerge from self-reflection, and it is when
our values govern our acting on our desires that we are free.
Bratman considers Watson’s claim that
the average person’s actual deliberation is about what do to, not which desire
is motivating her, to be an important point.
Bratman and Watson are correct: most people,
no matter how sophisticated, do not stop to consider the hierarchy of desire,
but rather rely on “background structures” that are complex, personal, and not
immediately apparent to the individual upon whom they are working.
Wanting
to have a desire and wanting to have a first order desire be effective
distinguishes desires from volitions of the second order. The example of the doctor who wants to know
what it is like to experience drugs has a second order desire independent of
his second order volition. The doctor
wants to want to experience drugs, but he does not want his desire to
experience drugs to make the real experience of drugs happen. He wants to know what it is like to be one of
his patients, but he does not want to be afflicted with their condition. In this case, it seems that his desire to
empathize with them is not a desire for drugs at all. If he really
wanted to have the desire for drugs, then he could call up his volition and get
hooked. Perhaps the hypothetical doctor
has patient-related values—he values having empathy for them and he values his
life free from the kind of conflict and suffering for which they see him.
If
we insert values into
Returning
to the problem of regress, if I desire to take my drug of choice, but I also
desire not to take it, Frankfurt contends that deferring to my higher order
desire not to desire the drug makes
me a person. Imagine that I can line my
first order desires up, and then try to match a higher order desire to the
correct one. But what if I have two
higher order desires that conflict? It is possible that I want to take the drug
and I do not want to take the drug, and
I want to want to take the drug and
want not to want to take the
drug. This situation can be
reconsidered in terms of values. Now,
when my desires are laid out on the table, I reflect upon what is important to
me. The pleasure of using drugs may be
important to me, as well as a future in which I am no longer dependent upon the
drug, a future in which I live a better (and freer) life. The latter of these choices is what I value
most; the former is just what will gratify me for the moment.
Here, the hierarchy of desire still exists,
but the inner debate about what I truly value, exists on only one
level. I may not live up to my own
values, and thereby injure my own autonomy, but I will have acted freely in
either case.
Of
course, people are often “torn” by their values, and their values are often
matters of desire. I may value spending
time with my family and value the important project I’ve been working on. At any moment I can do only one or the other,
and picking between them may not be as easy as deciding what I really want
to do. When we consult our values and
reach an internal resolution, we may find that something important to us has
been lost in order to preserve or promote something else of equally legitimate
importance.
What
we desire, when we desire anything at all, is an outcome. If I desire to eat ice cream, for example, I
am looking forward to the outcome of satisfying my taste buds. I do not want the outcome, however, of the
calories affecting my health. This is
where my values conflict. Is it the satisfaction
or the avoidance of a few extra calories that is most important to me?
The
outcomes we desire that are most important to us are more complicated than
simple tastes and vanity. When I want my
garbage taken out, I want the outcome of a sanitary, garbage-free place in
which to live. When I face the operation,
I value the outcome of my health being restored. When I am tormented by my conflicting desires
to use drugs and not to use drugs, I value the outcome of being a free,
autonomous person who is not ruled by the chemistry of suffering. It is the outcome that fits with our values
that we desire on the first order of the hierarchy, and when we move ourselves
in accordance with our values we are moving freely and of our own free will.
Watson,
Bratman, Michael, “Autonomy and Hierarchy”, in
Autonomy, Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D.
Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2003
Taylor, James Stacey, “Autonomy,
Duress, and Coercion”, in Autonomy, , Ellen
Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., Cambridge University
Press, 2003
Shamindra,