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LIT-293: I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right

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Properties6
StatusActive — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-264); worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand.
Version2
Tagsagency, self, ethics, metaphysics, individuation, self-governance, free-will
ExtendsLIT-692 — Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-264 — I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-029 — A higher-order attitude cannot make a motive the agent's own by its order alone: any attitude specified without presupposing the agent's participation can itself be disowned, and any specified to include it presupposes what it was meant to explain, THEORY-1118 — McKenna and Coates argue, with Dryden and with Buss and Westlund, that a condition on free agency stated only in the agent's present psychological structure is met by an agent whose structure a manipulator installed, so a mesh account must count that agent free or add a historical condition; Frankfurt, read first-hand, takes the first option, THEORY-120 — A motive is the agent's own, and she acts of her own free will, when she identifies with it, and that is all the freedom moral responsibility requires: identification is the conformity of the effective desire to a decisive higher-order volition (1971), and later wholehearted acceptance with no conflict at any higher order

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Frankfurt (2004), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Stanford University, 14–16 April 2004; printed in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 25 (2005), pp. 167–202 (the volume number and year are from file metadata, not printed on the pages); landing page https://tannerlectures.org/lectures/i-taking-ourselves-seriously-ii-getting-it-right/; also published as Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right, ed. Debra Satz (Stanford University Press, 2006), which was not read — https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/frankfurt_2005.pdf

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-09-29 at the owner’s request, as one of the texts assembled to represent Harry Frankfurt’s account of higher-order volitions, whose 1971 statement is paywalled. published: is the first appearance (ADR-002).

It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-264 is the close reading of 2026-09-29, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand.

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