LIT-692: Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person

Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, The Journal of Philosophy 68(1), 14 January 1971, pp. 5–20 — DOI-10.2307/2024717. Reprinted as chapter 2 of The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 11–25 (LIT-693), and in Watson (ed.), Free Will (Oxford, 1982), whose pagination the SEP uses.

Key takeaways

• Persons are defined by the structure of the will, not by mind and body. Against Strawson’s concept of a person (p. 5), “one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person’s will” (p. 6). Only humans appear able to form “second-order desires”, desires to have or not have desires, which manifest “reflective self-evaluation” (pp. 6–7).
• The apparatus (§§I–II). The will is not every first-order desire but “an effective desire—one that moves (or will or would move) a person all the way to action” (p. 8). A physician who wants to feel an addict’s craving without acting on it has a second-order desire that is not about his will (p. 9). Wanting a desire “to be his will” is a “second-order volition”, and “it is having second-order volitions, and not having second-order desires generally, that I regard as essential to being a person” (p. 10). A wanton has first-order desires and no second-order volitions; “The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will” (p. 11). Wantons include animals, very young children “and perhaps … some adult human beings”, and a wanton may reason well about means (p. 11).
• Identification. The unwilling addict “identifies himself, however, through the formation of a second-order volition, with one rather than with 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” (p. 13). Second-order volitions need not be moral, and “There is no essential restriction on the kind of basis, if any, upon which they are formed” (n. 6).
• Freedom of the will (§III). Freedom of action is “the freedom to do what one wants to do”; freedom of the will is, analogously, being free “to have the will he wants” (p. 15). “It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions, then, that a person exercises freedom of the will” (p. 15). Conflict among second-order desires can leave a person “a helpless bystander to the forces that move him” (p. 16). The series of higher orders can be ended “without cutting it off arbitrarily”: when a person identifies “decisively”, “without reservation or conflict”, the commitment “‘resounds’ throughout the potentially endless array of higher orders”, so that no further question “remains to be asked” (p. 16).
• Responsibility (§IV). “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” (p. 18). One acts “of his own free will” if the will that moved him “was his will because it was the will he wanted”, and then “it is quite irrelevant … to inquire whether the alternatives that he opted against were actually available to him” (p. 19, citing LIT-694 in n. 9). The willing addict’s will is not free, but he takes the drug “freely and of his own free will” and “may be morally responsible” (pp. 19–20). The conception is “neutral with regard to the problem of determinism” (p. 20), and an addict made so “by the deliberate and calculated work of another” may be “fully responsible” along with the other (n. 10).

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-04 at the owner’s request, to file Harry Frankfurt “to the best of your ability”. It is philosophy of the person and of free will, with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it.

Active from a full reading (NOTE-545). The record has built three theories on this paper while holding it only through McKenna and Coates (LIT-291), Buss and Westlund (LIT-296), Dryden (LIT-297) and Robb (LIT-294). The reading settles three of the disputes those readings left open:

• Decisive identification is in 1971. Supplement §A of LIT-291 says identification “previously rested solely” on a higher-order volition, with the first answer to the regress in 1987. Dryden (LIT-297) and Velleman (LIT-292) cite the 1971 paper for a decisive commitment that resounds up the hierarchy. The paper bears them out (p. 16).
• Freedom of the will and of action are distinguished (pp. 14–15), which no revision of LIT-291 states.
• The bullet on manipulation is bitten in 1971. LIT-291 quotes Frankfurt accepting a manipulated character in 2002. Note 10 already says that an addict made so by another’s “deliberate and calculated work” may be fully responsible. That is first-hand evidence for the first branch of THEORY-040’s forced choice.

Relations.

• extends LIT-694. The last section rests on the 1969 paper, cited in n. 9: responsibility does not require that “the alternatives that he opted against were actually available”. The willing addict is this paper’s version of an agent who could not have done otherwise and did what he “really wanted to do”, which is the 1969 paper’s exempting condition.
• extended_by LIT-293. Frankfurt’s Tanner Lectures, read in NOTE-264, restate this paper’s definition, “we will freely when what we want is what we want to want” (p. 177), and add to it that there be “no conflict … between this motive and any desire at any higher order” (p. 178), wholeheartedness. They also restate the free will/free action distinction and the compatibilist conclusion (p. 178). The lectures do not cite the paper, but their account of free will is this one, extended.
• corrected_by LIT-295. Velleman’s “What Happens When Someone Acts?” (read, NOTE-265) quotes this paper’s identification passage (IWWCA 18, p. 13 here) and argues that a second-order desire cannot be what makes the agent participate, since the agent can be alienated from it as from a first-order one; he reports that Watson made the point and Frankfurt conceded it (pp. 112–113). That shows this paper wrong on a claim it makes: that forming a second-order volition is how a person “makes one of them more truly his own”. Velleman also argues against decisive commitment, but from a 1976 footnote, not from p. 16 here. The record holds the general claim as THEORY-029, still Proposed.

Named in prose, no relation declared. Frankfurt’s “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (LIT-575) and “The Faintest Passion” (LIT-695) are his later answers to the regress; both are unread, and nothing lawful shows what they say beyond the surveys’ reports. Wolf’s “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” (LIT-690) names this paper among the “deep self views” it rejects, by Talbert’s report (LIT-691, §3.1.1). It is unread, so the criticism is held in THEORY-122, not here.

The theories it bears on. THEORY-120 is the hierarchical account filed from this paper and LIT-293. THEORY-029 (the regress) and THEORY-040 (manipulation) are the two structural objections. THEORY-054 (graded integration) is the self-determination-theory alternative.

Access: Crossref and OpenAlex record no open-access copy (oa_status closed). The read copy is the instructor-posted course file named in the history.