Styles of addiction?

We looked briefly at five questions as listed in the previous post. 

Is the Cyclops a 'wanton'?

The first asked what kind of person is most directly implied in Bentham's version of Utilitarianism. We looked at this question in the light of Harry Frankfurt's model of the will as a sort of amalgam - perhaps only an imperfect amalgam - of what he called first-order and second-order desires. We agreed that someone who simply pursued his desires and aimed at satisfying them would be not a lot different from the barely-human creature that Frankfurt calls a 'wanton'. Such a person would lack those shaping doubts and aspirations that edit the push and directions of our lives. He or she would lack any sense of being in charge or accepting responsibility for one's life and the person one wishes ideally to become. 'Wantons' do not exist, of course, except perhaps in folk tales of djinn or of monsters like the Cyclops that sought to delay Odysseus' return to Ithaca.

When you want something, you really want it.

The second question asked us how we might imagine a person of this simple utilitarian kind progressing? How might he or she change to become a person in that fuller sense of someone who cares about the sort of person he is and wishes to become. How in other words are we to imagine that in Frankfurt's terms a wanton might start to create second-order volitions. This was a much more difficult question. Schooling and other varieties of heavy-handed persuasion were suggested but it seemed doubtful if anything that might count as a second-order desire could be taught directly. You might make life miserable for a child so that he learns to conform to the pattern of expected behaviour, but that would teach pretence and conformism and not anything that was genuinely the child's own volition. It may not be possible to teach such things as honesty or reliability directly  - what would a Grade C in Truthfulness mean, for example, though it might be enough to get into politics or financial services -  but we might and surely we do in fact inspire children to care about such things through a combination of praise, expectations, stories of heroism or other patterns of ideal people. Children and young people learn such patterns of behaviour not by formal teaching but through exhortation and something more akin to contagion. A civilisation without heroes of one kind or another is a civilisation at the end of its days and a society that insists too robustly on the imitation of the approved patterns is probably on its way to becoming a tyranny.

Bentham's moral theory does nothing to explain how people might change to become 'better people' or people who are more their own people. Utilitarianism offers a picture of human behaviour as the serial satisfaction of desires. 'Morality' and 'values' and the like are introduced like a deus ex machina in the shape of an assertion of a universal concern for the good of others. How do we get from being a wanton to being a wanton with a bolted on concern for everyone's well-being? The two do not go together without a lot more explanation that Bentham does not give us. Mill's attempt to solve this overcome this embarrassing impasse was to insist that the desires that matter are those of the educated minority, but this too leads into a logical dead-end canyon. Why should I accept the views of my betters as being better than my own?

The third question was even more wildly speculative. If we assume that we can identify paths of upward moral development, are they all going to end up in the same heaven? Are all the people who become 'good guys' going to be significantly like one another? There was a resounding 'don't know' here, even a 'probably not'. yet surely we ought to be able to say something more about it than this?

Robert Crawley, earl of Grantham

The fourth question brought us into the TV schedules and Downton Abbey. Lord Robert Grantham seems such a admirable fellow, someone who is honest, prudent and concerned for those who work his land or serve his dinner - indeed more for the latter than the former, in the scriptwriter's vision of times gone-bye. the question for us is, does such a person represent the ideal pattern of human behaviour? Is ethics and morality all about being the sort of person who fits well into his role in society and who shows by his thoughts and actions that he is genuinely concerned for others? For a Christian of the medieval or earlier variety this might not seem to be quite enough, but for a post-Christian era it might well seem to be an admirable pattern in a world dominated by shallow politicians and traders 'roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse'. 

The fifth question must be left to our later reading and discussion, but clearly there is some connection with what we have been talking about and Kierkegaard's very broad conception of the 'aesthetic life'. His characterization of this aesthetic life, however, is various and detailed, as I hope we will see.

Good, inexpensive editions..

Kierkegaard, born 1813, who died aged 42

The following paperback editions of Kierkegaard’s books include almost all of those that are considered to be most significant. If you feel called to read more solidly – in greater depth – these are the ones to get hold of:

     1) A Literary Review (Penguin Classics) [Paperback] Søren Kierkegaard (Author), Alastair     Hannay, (Introduction, Translator)

     2) Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (Penguin Classics) [Abridged] [Paperback]

   Søren Kierkegaard (Author), Alastair Hannay (Introduction, Translator)

     3) Papers and Journals: A Selection (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

    Søren Kierkegaard (Author), Alastair Hannay  (introduction & translation).

4) The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification and     Awakening by Anti-Climacus (Classics), 

   Søren Kierkegaard (Author),  Alistair Hannay (introduction & translation).

5) Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes De Silentio (Classics) 

         Søren Kierkegaard (Author), Alastair Hannay (introduction & translation).

6) Kierkegaard's Writings, XII: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical        Fragments, Howard & Edna Hong (translators).

7) Works of Love [Paperback] Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Howard & Edna Hong, introduction by George Pattison.

8) Spiritual Writings: A New Translation and Selection (Harperperennial Modern Thought) [Paperback] Søren Kierkegaard (Author), George Pattison, (translation & introduction).

Most of these can be obtained very cheaply. The most philosophical is Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which he had intended to be his last word. The last two works listed are some of his ‘upbuilding’ writings, which are powerful stuff though perhaps less so for those who reject Christianity outright. He writes in his own person and voice without the indirection of the pseudonymous works. Of the others, Either/Or, The Sickness unto Death & Fear & Trembling are his most notable works. Either/Or is abridged, though only slightly. You might not notice this!

Frankfurt’s Addicts

Frankfurt’s picture of what it is to be a person is a picture of tensions and instability. This unsteadiness that lies at the heart of human nature is traced to having two different kinds of desires where one checks or qualifies in some way the other.

Frankfurt puts it like this: Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, we may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires or motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call “first order desires” or “desires of the first order”, which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires.

Like those molten mashes of rock that cooling at different rates and pressures produce very different compounds and crystals, so people – we might guess – turn out to have several differing but relatively stable states. Something of this sort is illustrated by Frankfurt’s broad-brush pictures of three different kinds of addicts.

Frankfurt’s analysis turns upon the concept of our ‘effective will’.  To identify an agent’s will is to identify the desire or desires that would push him towards or all the way to action. Our second-order desires, if they are really desires of the kind we take them to be – what Frankfurt calls ‘volitions’ - , will act upon and in some sense modify our first-order desires.  This creates the possibility for three types of addict in his illustrative bestiary:

A simulation of Brownian motion

1   (1) The ‘wanton’: The wanton’s first-order desires for drugs or money to obtain drugs and the like rule the roost in his life. He may have second-order desires of many seemingly advanced and desirable kinds. He might want to be a philosopher – a common desire among drug-addicts – or to be seen as an upstanding CEO in the world of banking, but unless these desires are volitions that he wants to make part of his will he is in effect simply driven through life by his first-order desires. These may push him in many different directions so that his life is like one of those particles of pollen that are knocked this way or that across the surface of water by the random action of fast-moving atoms or molecules. Frankfurt characterizes this extreme instance like this:  I shall use the term ‘wanton’ to refer to agents who have first-order desires but who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of the second-order, they have no second-order volitions. Frankfurt’s wanton is a logical extreme, though one might call to mind images of clapped out rock stars who have had far too much of what they wanted. The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will. He does not care about the sort of person he is or might become.

An unwilling addict?

     (2) The unwilling addict: Let us now imagine a second addict, someone whose physiological addiction is identical with that of our imaginary wanton. What might make this second addict different from the wanton is his second-order volitions which make him an unhappy and unwilling addict. This second addict struggles against his addiction, but these desires are too powerful for him to withstand, and invariably, in the end, they overcome him. He is an unwilling addict, helplessly violated by his own desires. This is a human person, but one divided against himself. If there is to be any progress in his life it would seem that this could only be by achieving some degree of integration between his first and second-order volitions. He has to be able to make his second-order preferences actual in his life, but finds that he cannot do so. Frankfurt’s argument is that such a person cannot be described as having ‘freedom of the will’. It is not that this unwilling addict is not able to do what he wants, but rather that his will is not free. It is this that leads him to say puzzling things to the effect that the force that makes him take drugs is not his own. He does not have the will he wants, whereas the wanton simply doesn’t care which of his first-order desires is driving him.

Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider, played as hero

3   (3) The willing addict: Let us consider a third kind of addict. Suppose that his addiction (says Frankfurt) has the same physiological basis and the same irresistible thrust as the addictions of the unwilling and wanton addicts, but that he is altogether delighted with his condition. He is a willing addict, who would not have things any other way. If the grip of his addiction should somehow weaken, he would do whatever he could to reinstate it; if his desire for the drug should begin to fade, he would take steps to renew its intensity. Is this willing addict’s will free? No, it isn’t, for his desire to take the drug will be effective regardless of whether or not he wants this desire to constitute his will. But when he tales the drug, he takes it freely and of his own free will. How are we to regard this person? How is he, for example, different from someone who is driven by an overwhelming sexual desire of whatever kind? Or from someone whose life is driven by a desire to see himself as a Master of the Universe? Someone, say, like Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street and his many real life golems?

     

      This is simply a schematic version of a theory that the author himself describes as a rough sketch, but it is enough for immediate purposes. It raises a number of questions that are relevant directly or obliquely to our reading of Kierkegaard. You might like to think, for example, about some of these: 

     (a) What kind of person is most directly implied by the simple theory of Utilitarianism? (I’m thinking of Bentham’s original version?)

     (b) How might we envisage a person progressing on this scheme? How might a person get himself to care about the sort of person he is and actively create new second-order volitions? 

    

     (c) Is there any natural line of development for a person pursuing such a moral career? What his will be like? Would it take him in specific directions? Would we all end up as the same sort of person?

     (d) Does a man (or a woman) have an ultimately stable identity if their character is that of someone who fits in well, even perfectly, with their social situation? We might think, for example, of Robert, Earl of Grantham and his wife, Cora, in the TV series, Downton Abbey. Here are two people who seem to be tailored for their lives as model aristocrats of a now bygone era. Are their identities stable or admirable?

  

     (e) How does this link up –if at all – with Kierkegaard’s scheme of three spheres or stages of life?

Straw men and live horses...

Giant straw men are still just straw men!

If you ask me ‘What are you?’ I would probably be a something of a loss, at least for a moment, while I assess the context and seriousness of your question. Maybe you are mocking me or criticizing or satirizing some aspect, trivial or central, of my behaviour. My response is likely to differ depending in large measure on the degree of self-knowledge I have. If I am a rogue trader who is covering up a massive fraud of my employer’s assets – like the ‘master fraudster, Kweku Adoboli, who misappropriated £1.4 billion of the Swiss bank’s assets – I am likely to think first of that circumstance rather than of anything other. If, again, to take another example, you were a border guard at the Turkish-Iraq border and are examining my passport, then I would have some clearer sense of your concern and I would struggle to reassure you that I was an innocent British traveller researching likely locations in the Kurdish mountains for a new James Bond film. True, you as a conscientious border guard might not be very convinced or willing to let me go without a good deal of further questioning. 

But if there is no obvious circumstance that as far as I can see you may be referring to - when as is normally the case it seems unlikely that you should have any access to my secret stores of guilt and transgression - then I might look a little quizzically at you, as if to ask what you might intend by asking such a vacuous question. If then you went on to explain that you wanted to ask if I were ‘a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics ... [were] equally applicable to a single individual of that type’ such as I myself might be taken to be, I - and also I think you - would be likely to laugh at this unprovoked absurdity. This of course was Strawson's way of putting the question as quoted at the beginning of Frankfurt's article. For may people this kind of tough, objective approach is what philosophy is all about. Frankfurt did not entirely agree with this and much more strongly Kierkegaard was totally opposed to this way of thinking, which he mocked as belonging to the world of assistant professors.

A graminivorous quadruped?

It may be true that I am such an entity, one that attracts two opposed kinds of predicates. It may also be true, as Harry Frankfurt points out, that there are logical difficulties with this description, but these difficulties are not the immediate or principal source of our discomfort. We would feel, more simply, that this supposed definition of our personhood – our humanity – had simply missed the point, like a broad-scale mesh that lets even the biggest fish through the net. It is knowledge that is irrelevant to the business of our lives as we live them from hour to hour and year to year. It has no more relevance than Bitzer’s definition of a horse: ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth’. Young Bitzer, faithful to the teaching of Mr Gradgrind, clearly knows all about horses, or does at least for the purposes of surviving in Gradgrind’s classroom.(Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854). This is another broad-scale mesh that fails to capture the life and liveliness of horses of the kind that Sissy Jupe knew in the colours of her father’s circus-tent. Poor Sissy had no chance when faced with this man who was like a cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts aimed at ‘the tender imaginations of childhood’.

Poor Casaubon, poor Dorothea, poor us!

Knowledge of this kind is dead. It has no relevance to the embedded warp of our lives. Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is this kind of horror story writ large. His great work, The Key to All Mythologies, turns out to be as desiccated and divorced from life as the man himself. The pursuit of knowledge, of dead academic accumulation, takes his life into the desert. Instead of living his life, he chose to do something else instead.  His young wife, Dorothea Brooke, also comes to see the foolishness of trying to find fulfilment by sharing in her husband’s intellectual work rather than in trying to live a life that is more truly her own. But her knowledge is something very different because it is the slow realization that something is very wrong.  It is a realization that will save her even if it brings adverse judgement and social exclusion. 

We see something broadly similar in the picture of the final days of Ivan Illych in Tolstoy’s short story. Ivan’s seemingly trivial fall from a ladder when putting up new curtains brings increasing pain and makes him reflect on the semi-automatic life he had lived devoted to work as an escape from a loveless marriage. The true character of this life becomes apparent in the shadow of his approaching death. He comes to see his old life as artificial, lacking the sympathy and compassion that he now sees as the character of authentic existence. Dorothea and Ivan come to see how they should live and this for them is knowledge of a very different kind. This new kind of knowledge is knowledge about how to live and not the sort of detached theoretical knowledge that you can put into your pocket or mug up for examinations. It is knowledge that shapes the present hour as we come to it, not knowledge that you can put directly into a textbook.

Yasnaya Polyana or 'Bright Glade,' where Tolstoy wrote and was buried.

I hadn’t intended to make this excursion but it has some relevance to our story. Harry Frankfurt’s account of what we should understand by the concept of a person is still an objective account but it is much closer to the pulse of human life than Strawson’s definition which arguably can never tell us anything that might help us to live and love our lives. This makes Frankfurt’s account much more interesting and much more relevant to our reading of Kierkegaard for Kierkegaard looks at a life and examines every aspect of it in dramatic and novelistic ways. Frankfurt looks only at the human will as something that points toward everything that is ‘important and problematical in our lives’. The pictures of the three addicts that he gives us may be seen as a summary of much of what he has to say. That is what I will try to present in a few paragraphs in the next post.

Concluding: The Concept of a Person

Harry Frankfurt, best known for 'On Bullshit' and 'Truth'

IV

«My theory concerning the freedom of the will accounts easily for our disinclination to allow this freedom to be enjoyed by ay members of any species inferior to our own. It also satisfies another condition that must be met by any such theory, by making it apparent why the freedom of the will should be regarded as desirable.The enjoyment of a free will means the satisfaction of certain desires – desires of the second or of higher orders – whereas its absence means their frustration. The satisfactions at stake are those which accrue to a person of whom it may be said that his will is his own. The corresponding frustrations are those suffered by a person of whom it may be said that he is estranged from himself, or that he finds himself hapless or a passive bystander to the forces that move him.

«A person who is free to do what he wants to do may yet not be in a position to have the will he wants. Suppose, however, that he enjoys both freedom of action and freedom of the will. Then he is not only free to do what he wants to do; he is also free to want what he wants to want. It seems to me that he has in that case, all the freedom it is possible to desire or to conceive. There are other good things in life, and he may not possess some of them. But there is nothing in the way of freedom that he lacks.

«It is far from clear that certain other theories of the freedom of the will meet these elementary but essential conditions: that it be understandable why we desire this freedom and why we refuse to ascribe it to animals. Consider, for example, Roderick Chrisholm’s quaint version of the doctrine that human freedom entails an absence of causal determination.[i] Whenever a person performs a free action, according to Chrisholm, it’s a miracle. The motion of a person’s hand, when the person moves it, is the outcome of a series of physical causes; but some event in this series, “and presumably one of those that took place within the brain, was caused by the agent and not by any other events” (18). A free agent has, therefore, “a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved” (23).

«This account fails to provide any basis for doubting that animals of subhuman species enjoy the freedom it defines. Chrisholm says nothing that makes it seem less likely that a rabbit performs a miracle when it moves its leg than that a man does so when he moves his hand. But why, in any case should anyone care whether he can interrupt the natural order of causes in the way Chrisholm describes? Chrisholm offers no reason for believing that there is a discernible difference between the experience of a man who miraculously initiates a series of causes when he moves his hand and a man who moves his hand without any such breach of the normal causal sequence. There appears to be no concrete basis for preferring to be involved in the one state of affairs rather than in the other.[ii]

«It is generally supposed that, in addition to satisfying the two conditions I have mentioned, a satisfactory theory of the freedom of the will necessarily provides an analysis of one of the conditions of moral responsibility. The most common recent approach to the problem of understanding the freedom of the will has been, indeed, to enquire what is entailed by the assumption that someone is morally responsible for what he has done. In my view, however, the relation between moral responsibility and the freedom of the will has been very widely misunderstood. It is not true that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if his will was free when he did it. He may be morally responsible for having done it even though his will was not free at all.

 «A person’s will is free only if he is free to have the will he wants. This means that, with regard to any of his first-order desires, he is free either to make that desire his will or to make some other first-order desire his will instead. Whatever his will, then, the will of the person whose will is free could have been otherwise; he could have done otherwise than to constitute his will as he did. It is a vexed question just how “he could have done otherwise” is to be understood in context such as this one. But although this question is important to the theory of freedom, it has no bearing on the theory of moral responsibility. For the assumption that a person is morally responsible for what he has done does not entail that the person was in a position to have whatever will he wanted.

«This assumption does entail that the person did what he did freely, or that he did it of his own free will. It is a mistake, however, to believe that someone acts freely only when he is free to do whatever he wants or that he acts of his own free will only if his will is free. Suppose that a person has done what he wanted to do, that he did it because he wanted to do it, and that the will be which he was moved when he did was his will because it was the will he wanted. Then he did it freely and of his own free will. Even supposing that he could have done otherwise, he would not have done otherwise; and even supposing that he could have had a different will, he would not have wanted his will to differ from what it was. Moreover, since the will that moved when he acted was his will because he wanted it to be, he cannot claim that his will was forced upon him or that he was a passive bystander to its constitution. Under these conditions, it is quite irrelevant to the evaluation of his moral responsibility to inquire whether the alternatives that he opted against were actually available to him.[iii]

«In illustration, consider a third kind of addict. Suppose that his addiction has the same physiological basis and the same irresistible thrust as the addictions of the unwilling and wanton addicts, but that he is altogether delighted with his condition. He is a willing addict, who would not have things any other way. If the grip of his addiction should somehow weaken, he would do whatever he could to reinstate it; if his desire for the drug should begin to fade, he would take steps to renew its intensity.

«The willing addict’s will is not free, for his desire to take the drug will be effective regardless of whether or not he wants this desire to constitute his will. But when he takes the drug, he takes it freely and of his own free will. I am inclined to understand his situation as involving the overdetermination of his first-order desire to take the drug. This desire is his effective desire because he is physiologically addicted. But it is his effective desire also because he wants it to be. His will is outside his control, but, by his second-order desire that his desire for the drug should be effective, he has made his will his own. Given that it is therefore not only because of his addiction that his desire for the drug is effective, he may be morally responsible for taking the drug.

«My conception of the freedom of the will appears to be neutral with regard to the problem of determinism. It seems conceivable that it should be causally determined that a person is free to want what he wants to want. If this is conceivable, then it might be causally determined that a person enjoys a free will. There is no more than an innocuous appearance of paradox in the proposition that it is determined, ineluctably and by forces beyond their control, that certain people have free wills and that others do not. There is no incoherence in the proposition that some agency other than a person’s own is responsible (even morally responsible) for the fact that he enjoys or fails to enjoy freedom of the will. It is possible that a person should be morally responsible for what he does of his own free will and that some other person should also be morally responsible for his having done it.[iv]

«On the other hand, it seems conceivable that it should come about chance by chance that a person is free to have the will he wants. If this is conceivable, then it might be a matter of chance that certain people enjoy freedom of the will and that certain others do not. Perhaps it is also conceivable, as a number of philosophers believe, for states of affairs to come about in a way other than by chance or as the outcome of a sequence of natural causes. If indeed it is conceivable for the relevant states of affairs to come about in some third way, then it is also possible that a person should in that third way come to enjoy the freedom of the will. »

---

[i] “Freedom and Action”, in K. Lehrer (ed.), Freedom and Determinism (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 11-44.

[ii] I am no suggesting that the alleged difference between the two states of affairs is unverifiable. On the contrary, physiologists might well be able to show that Chrisholm’s conditions for a free action are not satisfied, by establishing that there is no relevant brain event for which a sufficient physical cause cannot be found.

[iii]For another discussion of the considerations that cast doubt on the principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise, see my “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.”

[iv] There is a difference between being fully responsible and being solely responsible. Suppose that the willing addict has been made an addict by the deliberate and calculated work of another. Then it may be that both the addict and this other person are fully responsible for the addict’s taking the drug, while neither of them is solely responsible for it. That there is a distinction between full moral responsibility and sole moral responsibility is apparent in the following example. A certain light can be turned on and off by flicking either of two switches and each of these switches is simultaneously flicked to the “on” position by a different person, neither of whom is aware of the other. Either person is solely responsible for the light’s going on, nor do they share responsibility in the sense that each is partially responsible; rather each is fully responsible.

Struggling to be free?

OSEZ ETRE QUI VOUS ESTES…OSEZ LA LIBERTE!

III

«There is a very close relationship between the capacity for forming second-order volitions and another capacity that is essential to persons - one that has often been considered a distinguishing mark of the human condition. It is only because a person has volitions of the second-order that he is capable both of enjoying and lacking freedom of the will. The concept of a person, then, is not only the concept of a type of entity that has both first-order desires and volitions of the second order. It can also be construed as the concept of a type of entity for whom the freedom of its will may be a problem. This concept excludes all wantons, both infrahuman and human, since they fail to satisfy an essential condition for the enjoyment of freedom of the will. And it excludes those suprahuman beings, if any, whose wills are necessarily free.

«Just what kind of freedom is the freedom of the will? This question calls for an investigation of the special area of human experience to which the concept of the freedom of the will, as distinct from the concepts of other sorts of freedom, is particularly germane. In dealing with it, my aim will be primarily to locate the problem with which a person is most immediately concerned when he is concerned with the freedom of the will.

«According to one familiar psychological tradition, being free is fundamentally a matter of doing what one wants to do. Now the notion of an agent who does what he wants to do is by no means an altogether clear one: both the doing and the wanting, and the appropriate relation between them as well, require elucidation. But although its focus needs to be sharpened and its formulation refined, I believe that this notion does capture at least part is implicit in the idea of an agent who acts freely. It misses entirely, however, the peculiar content of the quite different idea of an agent whose will is free.

«We do not suppose that animals enjoy freedom of the will, although we recognize that an animal may be free to run i whatever direction it wants. Thus, having the freedom to do what one wants to do is not a sufficient condition of having a free will. It is not a necessary condition either. For to deprive someone of his freedom of action is not necessarily to undermine the freedom of his will. When an agent is aware that there are certain things he is not free to do, this doubtless affects his desires and limits the range of choices he can make. But suppose that someone, without being aware of it, has i fact lost or been deprived of his freedom of action. Even though he is no longer free to do what he wants to do, his will may remain as free as it was before. Despite the fact that he is not free to translate his desires into actions or to act according to the determinations of his will, he may still form those desires and make those determinations as freely as if his freedom of action had not been impaired.

«When we ask whether a person’s will is free we are not asking whether he is in a position to translate his first-order desires into actions. That is the question of whether he is free to do as he pleases. The question of the freedom of his will does not concern the relation between what he does ad what he wants to do. Rather, it concerns his desires themselves. But what question about them is it?

«It seems to me both natural and useful to construe the question of whether a person’s will is free in close analogy to the question of whether an agent enjoys freedom of action. Now freedom of action is (roughly at least) the freedom to do what one wants to do. Analogously, then, the statement that a person enjoys freedom of the will means (also roughly) that he is free to want what he wants to want. More precisely, it means that he is free to will what he wants to will, or to have the will he wants. Just as the question about the freedom of an agent’s action has to do with whether it is the action he wants to perform, so the question about the freedom of his will has to do with whether it is the will he wants to have.

«It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions, then, that a person exercises freedom of the will. And it is in the discrepancy between his will and his second-order volitions, or i his awareness that their coincidence is not his own doing but only a happy chance that a person who does have this freedom feels its lack. The unwilling addict’s will is not free. This is shown by the fact that it is not the will he wants. It is also true, though in a different way, that the will of the wanton addict is not free. The wanton addict neither has the will he wants nor has a will that differs from the will he wants. Since he has no volitions of the second-order, the freedom of his will cannot be a problem for him. He lacks it, so to speak, by default.

«People are generally far more complicated than my sketchy account of the structure of a person’s will may suggest. There is as much opportunity for ambivalence, conflict and self-deception with regard to desires of the second order, for example, as there is with regard to first-order desires. If there is an unresolved conflict among someone’s second-order desires, then he is in danger of having no second-order volition; for unless this conflict is resolved, he has no preference concerning which of his first-order desires is to be his will. This condition, if it is so severe that it prevents him from identifying himself in a sufficiently decisive way with any of his conflicting first-order desires, destroys him as a person. For it either tends to paralyze his will and to keep him from acting at all, or it tends to remove him from his will so that his will operates without his participation. In both cases he becomes, like the unwilling addict though in a different way, a helpless bystander to the forces that move him.

«Another complexity is that a person may have, especially if his second-order desires are in conflict, desires and volitions of a higher order than the second. There is no theoretical limit to the length of the series of desires of higher and higher orders,; nothing except common sense and, perhaps, a saving fatigue prevents an individual from obsessively refusing to identify himself with any of his desires until he forms a desire of the next higher order. The tendency to generate such a series of acts of forming desires, which would be a case of humanization run wild, also leads towards the destruction of a person.

«It is possible, however, to terminate such a series of acts without cutting it off arbitrarily. When a person identifies himself decisively with one of his first-order desires, this commitment ”resounds” throughout the potentially endless array of higher orders. Consider a person who, without reservation or conflict, wants to be motivated by a desire to concentrate on his work. The fact that his second-order volition to be moved by this desire is a decisive one means that there is no room for questions concerning the pertinence of desires or volitions of higher orders. Suppose the person is asked whether he wants to want to want to concentrate on his work. He can properly insist that this question concerning a third-order desire does not arise. It would be a mistake to claim that because he has not considered whether he wants the second-order volition that he has formed, he is indifferent to the question of whether it is with this volition or with some other that he wants his will to accord. The decisiveness of the commitment he has made means that he has decided that no further questions about his second-order volition, at any higher order, remains to be asked. It is relatively unimportant whether we explain this by saying that this commitment implicitly generates an endless series of confirming desires of higher orders, or by saying that the commitment is tantamount to a dissolution of the pointedness of all questions concerning higher order s of desires.

«Examples such as the one concerning the unwilling addict may suggest that volitions of the second order, or of higher orders, must be formed deliberately and that a person characteristically struggles to ensure that they are satisfied. But the conformity of a person’s will to his higher order volitions may be far more thoughtless and spontaneous than this. Some people are naturally moved by kindness when they want to be kind, and by nastiness when they want to be nasty, without any explicit forethought and without any need for energetic self-control. Others are moved by nastiness when they want to be kind and by kindness when they intend to be nasty, equally without forethought and without active resistance to these volitions of their higher-order desires. The enjoyment of freedom comes easily to some. Others must struggle to achieve it.»

Footnote: The picture is of a sculpture by Zenos Frudakis. It stands outside the GlaxoSmithKline Headquarters in Philadelphia. The artist's message is clear, though it is not clear what part drugs play in that freedom! 

When is a person not a person? 

II

«Someone has a desire of a second-order either when he wants simply to have a certain desire or when he wants a certain desire to be his will. In situations of the latter kind, I shall call his second-desires “ second-order volitions” or “ volitions of the second-order”. Now it is having second-order volitions, and not having second-order volitions, and not having second-order desires generally, that I regard as essential to being a person. It is logically possible, however unlikely, that there should be an agent with second-order desires but with no volitions of the second-order. Such a creature, in my view, would not be a person. I shall use the term “wanton” to refer to agents who have first-order desires but who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of the second-order, they have no second-order volitions.[i]

You can get this fridge magnet on e-Bay? But why?

«The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will. His desires move him to do certain things, without its being true of him either that he wants to be moved by those desires or that he prefers to be moved by other desires. The class of wantons includes all non-human animals and all very young children. Perhaps it also includes some adult human beings as well. In any case, adult humans may be more or less wanton; they may act wantonly, in response to first-order desires concerning which they have no volitions of the second-order, more or less frequently.

«The fact that a wanton has no second-order volitions does not mean that each of his first-order desires is translated heedlessly ad at once into action. He may have no opportunity to act in accordance with some of his desires. Moreover, the translation of his desires into action may be delayed or precluded either by conflicting desires of the first order or by the intervention of deliberation. For a wanton may possess and employ rational faculties of a high order. Nothing in the concept of a wanton implies that he cannot reason or that he cannot deliberate concerning what he wants to do. What distinguishes the rational wanton from other rational agents is that he is not concerned with the desirability of his desires themselves. He ignores the question of what his will is to be. Not only does he pursue whatever course of action he is most strongly inclined to pursue, but he does not care which of his inclinations is the strongest.

«Thus a rational creature, who reflects upon the suitability of his desires of one course of action or another, may nonetheless be a wanton. In maintaining that the essence of being a person lies not in reason but in will, I am far from suggesting that a creature without reason may be person. For it is only in virtue of his rational capacities that a person is capable of becoming critically aware of his own will and of forming volitions of the second order. The structure of a person’s will presupposes, accordingly, that he is a rational being.

«The distinction between a person and a wanton may be illustrated by the difference between two narcotics addicts. Let us suppose that the physiological condition accounting for the addiction is the same in both men, and that both succumb inevitably to their periodic desires for the drug to which they are addicted. One of the addicts hates his addiction and always struggles desperately, although to no avail, against its thrust. He tries everything that he thinks might enable him to overcome his desires for the drug. But these desires are too powerful for him to withstand, and invariably, in the end, they conquer him. He is an unwilling addict, helplessly violated by his own desires.

A wanton doesn't care about the outcome of inner struggles

«The unwilling addict has conflicting first-order desires: he wants to take the drug, and he also wants to refrain from taking it. In addition to these first-order desires, however, he has a volition of the second order. He is not a neutral with regard to the conflict between his desire to take the drug and his desire to refrain from taking it. It is the latter desire, and not the former, that he wants to constitute his will; it is the latter desire rather than the former, that he wants to effective ad to provide the purpose that he will seek to realize in what he actually does.

«The other addict is a wanton. His actions reflect the economy of his first order desires, without hs being concerned whether the desires that move him to act are desires by which he wants to be moved or act. If he encounters problems in obtaining the drug or in administering it to himself, his responses to his urges to take it may involve deliberation. But it never occurs to him to consider whether he wants the relations among his desires to result in his having the will he has. The wanton addict may be an animal, and thus incapable of being concerned about his will. In any event, he is, in respect of his wanton lack of concern, no different from an animal.

«The second of these addicts may suffer a first-order conflict similar to the first-order conflict suffered by the first. Whether he is human or not, the wanton may (perhaps due to conditioning) both want to take the drug and want to refrain from taking it. Unlike the unwilling addict, however, he does not prefer that one of his conflicting desires should be paramount over the other; he does not prefer that one first-order desire rather than the other should constitute his will. It would be misleading to say that he is neutral as to the conflict between his desires, since this would suggest that he regards them as equally acceptable. Since he has no identity apart from his first-order desires, it is true neither that he prefers one to the other nor that he prefers not to take sides.

I«t makes a difference to the unwilling addict, who is a person, which of his conflicting desires wins out. Both desires are his, to be sure; and whether he finally takes the drug or finally succeeds in refraining from taking it, he acts to satisfy what is in a literal sense his own desire. In either case he does something he himself wants to do, and he does it not because of some external influence whose aim happens to coincide with his own but because of his desire to do it. The unwilling addict identifies himself, however, through the formation of a second-order volition, with one rather than the other of his conflicting first-order desires. He makes one of them more truly his own and, in so doing, he withdraws himself from the other. It is in virtue of this identification and withdrawal, accomplished through the formation of a second-order volition, that the unwilling addict may meaningfully make the analytically puzzling statements that the force moving him to take the drug is a force other than his own, and that it is not of his own free will but rather against his will that this force moves him to take it.

«The wanton addict cannot or does not care which of his conflicting first-order desires wins out. His lack of concern is not due to his inability to find a convincing basis for preference. It is due either to his lack of the capacity for reflection or to his mindless indifference to the enterprise of evaluating his own desires and motives.[ii] There is only one issue in the struggle to which his first-order conflict may lead: whether the one or the other of his conflicting desires is the stronger. Since he is moved by both desires, he will not be altogether satisfied by what he does no matter which of them is effective. But it makes no difference to him whether his craving or his aversion gets the upper hand.  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 a will he wants to be without. When a wanton acts, it is neither.»

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[i]Creatures with second-order desires but no second-order volitions differ significantly from brute animals, and, for some purposes, it would be desirable to regard them as persons. My usage, which withholds the designation “person” from them, is thus somewhat arbitrary. I adopt it largely because it facilitates the formulation of some of the points I wish to make. Hereafter, whenever I consider statements of the form “A wants to want X,” I shall have in mind statements identifying second-order volitions and not statements identifying second-order desires that are not second-order volitions.

[ii] In speaking of the evaluation of his own desires and motives as being characteristic of a person, I do not mean to suggest that a person’s second-order volitions necessarily manifest a moral stance on his part toward his first-order desires. It may not be from the point of view of morality that the person evaluates his first-order desires. Moreover a person may be capricious and irresponsible in forming his second-order volitions and give no serious consideration to what is at stake. Second-order volitions express evaluations only in the sense that they are preferences. There is no essential restriction on the kind of basis, if any, upon which they are formed.