A Philosopher’s Structure of Desires and Freedom of Will
Reconsidering the obvious with this attempt to structure confusing, interfering desires.
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We all have desires. And goals, urges, cravings, wishes, self-imposed guidelines.
It might be as subtle as mindlessly making a sip of a glass of water, or as strong as eating when your hungry or making out with your partner when you’re horny. Sometimes, desires interfere with each other, and it can be confusing and frustrating to decide what to do.
There’s one philosopher who wanted to put this dilemma in order. Harry G. Frankfurt (born 1929) invents the terms first-order desires and second-order desires, and depending on that, distinguishing between a person and a wanton, and also between freedom of will and freedom of action.
With thought experiments, like the struggle of an unwilling drug addict, he explains his theory quite well in his article “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.”
Would you describe yourself as a person? Perhaps you thought “person” is just the single form of people or one individual who belongs to the human species. The philosopher we’ll be talking about today disagrees: He would only attribute the term “person” to you if you are capable of deciding what you want to do, to put it crudely.
His definition of a “person”
A person is not in a biological sense the single form of people, but a philosophical qualified term for humans, as they are different from (other) animals in the ability of self-determination. The structure of the will is what differentiates persons from other creatures, according to Frankfurt.
We as humans are not alone in our motives and desires; But how we structure them is different, he argues.
Only a person can form “second-order desires”
While he admits that animals can want and choose things to do (what he calls first-order desires), we can also “want what we want”. We are capable to want to have a specific desire (what he names second-order desires).
Humans are capable of wanting different things than what they are actually wanting. No other animal than man seems to self-reflect on their wishes and desires, and it “is manifested in the formation of second-order desires”.
He says that a statement like “A wants X” expresses a first-order desire, while A is a person and X is an action, and it says remarkably little:
“Such a statement may be consistent, for example, with each of the following statements: (a) the prospect of doing X elicits no sensation or introspectible emotional response in A; (b) A is unaware that he wants to X; © A believes that he does not want to X; (d) A wants to refrain from X-ing; (e) A wants to Y and believes that it is impossible for him both to Y and to X; (f) A does not “really” want to X; (g) A would rather die than X; and so on.”
Crucial for being a person, however, is his definition of will.
Frankfurt allocates to “will” a special meaning: The will is an effective desire. A desire which ultimately leads into an action. The will of a person describes one or multiple desires, which cause the action.
Will “is the notion of an effective desire — one that moves (or will or would move) a person all the way to action.”
So if one says: ”I want that X-ing is my will” it means that exactly this desire — to X — becomes effective, causes the action.
And the capacity to feel and think this sentence is specifically attributed to persons, according to Frankfurt. He presents a new term for it:
“Second-order volition” or just “volition”
It means, wanting that one desire becomes the will. In other words, having a second-order desire that wishes that a first-order desire becomes effective, the cause for the action.
The agent who is capable of having second-order desires but can’t have second-order volitions, wouldn’t be a person in his eyes. For this creature, he uses the term: ‘Wanton’, which means a being who is compulsive and libidinal.
“The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will.”
A wanton has desires, which move him to act in specific ways, whether or not he wants them to move him or if he would want to be moved by other desires. Frankfurt states that this class of “wantons” contains very young children and all nonhuman animals. However, it may also include some adult humans as well.
The example of two types of drug addicts
The first one is a drug addict unwillingly. He hates his addiction. Although he has the desire to take drugs, he has also another desire to not take drugs. These are two conflicting first-order desires.
But he classifies them: He would rather stop taking drugs, and this is his second-order desire. So he wants that the desire to stop being addicted becomes his effective desire, his will. This wish can also be described as the second-order volition.
But the drug addict is incapable to stop taking drugs because the desire to take them is so strong. But as this person would rather stop taking them, but is incapable to perform that, the person feels a deep frustration and deprived of their free will.
The second type of drug addict is a wanton. He acts according to his first-order desires, “without his being concerned whether the desires that move him to act are desires by which he wants to be moved to act.” He is just incapable of being concerned about what he wants his will to be.
He may have conflicting first-order desires just as the first type of drug addict. But unlike the first type, he doesn’t prefer one desire over the other to be his will. Therefore, he doesn’t suffer from his addiction, as the first type does.
Theoretically, the second type is just as incapable of refraining the drug as the first one, but the wanton addict doesn’t (or can’t) care which of the desires wins out:
“He has no stake in the conflict between them and so, unlike the unwilling addict, he can neither win nor lose the struggle in which he is engaged. When a person acts, the desire by which he is moved is either the will he wants or the will he wants to be without. When a wanton acts, it is neither.”
We already scratched the surface on Frankfurt’s understanding of the freedom of will with the drug addict example, but let’s have a closer look.
Freedom of will vs. Freedom of action
The excuse of “I’m not responsible for this action because I couldn’t choose something else” doesn’t work anymore. At least in terms of Frankfurt.
First of all: What is both of them? Or isn’t it the same thing?
To put it easy, most would agree with the definition of freedom of action as to be free to do what one wants to do. And freedom of will would then mean to be free to choose what one wants or what its will is.
Often these two capabilities are viewed as they are specifically human. Only humans are free to want what they want and to do what they want to do.
As Frankfurt has a clear notion of how our desires are structured, he explains to us why we regard only humans as living beings which can have freedom of will.
Remember that Frankfurt says that only because a person can have volitions (=to determine which desire is going to be action-effective). Because of that, they can actually experience the joy (or lack) of freedom of will.
The traditional understanding of “freedom”
Frankfurt believes that, as philosophical tradition suggests, freedom consists generally of acting how one chooses to act.
But the philosopher clearly differentiates between freedom of will and freedom of action.
If a person is deprived of their freedom to act, they are still free to have the desires they want — i.e., having the volition that another desire becomes the will if the original will is impossible to put into action (because of the lack of freedom to act).
Frankfurt even claims that the person who has lost their freedom to act is still as free as before.
The reason is that the person can still have desires and want different things as if their freedom of action wasn’t affected.
The analogy between freedom of will and freedom of action
A person makes use of their freedom of will if their volition and their will are on the same terms.
On the other hand, if they don’t coincide and the concerning person is aware of that, the person feels the lack of something.
E.g., if I decide my will to drink coffee is a will I don’t actually want to have, say, my volition is to not have this desire, but I still can’t stop drinking coffee, I feel lost. Like I have no control over what I am actually doing and what I really want to do. I feel like I don’t have freedom of will.
Through this example I wanted to clarify why then, on the contrary, the living beings which are not persons (the wantons, incapable of having volitions), have no freedom of will: They don’t want a specific desire to be their will, nor can want that their will is different from the one it is.
Therefore, they can’t become frustrated by a sometimes lacking freedom of will. So to say, they miss out on their freedom.
But… it is more complicated than that
The above was just a general outline, and Frankfurt himself admits that humans are way more complicated than that:
Often we are in conflict with ourselves, not being sure what desire we should but upfront to determine our action so that we can’t form a volition.
If this condition lasts and the person is unable to identify sufficiently with one of their first-order desires, it leads to the disruption of the person. The person is then either unable to do or decide anything, or the will acts without the person.
In both cases, the person ends up being the “helpless observer of the forces that drive them.”
In our example of drinking coffee or not, Frankfurt’s analysis may manifest in a situation where I end up being frustrated and feeling helplessly because I can’t decide to either drink that coffee because I want to be more awake and productive or for abstaining the coffee because of a resolution I made earlier out of health concerns or ecological concerns or whatever.
The chain could go on that one the one hand I want to be more productive to get something done and not feeling bad about myself. Or I would criticize myself because I never stick to my resolutions and would — also — feel bad about myself.
Frankfurt goes on and declares a person is satisfied if they have a free will. And the person who is just a passive, helpless observer, who feels alienated from their desires, remains unsatisfied.
