NOTE-545: Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person

Contribution

The paper replaces the then-standard concept of a person (a bearer of both mental and physical predicates) with one defined by the structure of the will, and uses that structure to define freedom of the will as distinct from freedom of action. It then separates freedom of the will from moral responsibility: acting “of one’s own free will” requires acting from the will one wants, not having a will that is free. This gives a compatibilist account of responsibility that needs no alternatives.

Key insight

The question whether a will is free is the question whether it is the will the person wants. A person is someone to whom that question can matter, because he has preferences about which of his desires moves him. That makes freedom of the will a relation among the person’s own attitudes, and so indifferent to determinism and to how the attitudes arose.

Assumptions

• “Want” is used broadly (§I): desires may be unconscious, mistaken, ambivalent or unfelt (pp. 7–8). Only one restriction is imposed, on strength: the will is the desire that moves “all the way to action” (p. 8).
• Second-order volitions entail the first-order desire in standard cases (p. 10); n. 4 flags non-standard cases (wanting one’s will to be whatever B’s is) and does not pursue them.
• The person/wanton line is partly stipulative. Creatures with second-order desires but no volitions “differ significantly from brute animals” and the usage withholding “person” from them “is thus somewhat arbitrary” (n. 5).
• No condition on the content or basis of a second-order volition. It need not be moral and may be “capricious and irresponsible”; “There is no essential restriction on the kind of basis, if any, upon which they are formed” (n. 6).
• Persons are rational, since only reason makes one “capable of becoming critically aware of his own will” (pp. 11–12), but the essence of being a person “lies not in reason but in will” (p. 11).

Key results

• §I Orders of desire and the will (pp. 6–10). First-order desires are “simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another”; second-order desires are to have or not have certain desires (p. 7). “An agent’s will, then, is identical with one or more of his first-order desires”, namely “an effective desire—one that moves (or will or would move) a person all the way to action”; the will is not what one intends, since a settled intention can lose to a stronger desire (p. 8). The physician who wants to feel a craving for the drug, but not to act on it, “stands at the margin of preciosity”: his second-order desire is not about his will (p. 9). Wanting a desire “to be his will” entails having that desire (p. 10).
• §II Persons and wantons (pp. 10–14). “Second-order volitions” are second-order desires that a desire be one’s will, 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). “I shall use the term ‘wanton’ to refer to agents who have first-order desires but who are not persons because … they have no second-order volitions” (p. 11). “The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will” (p. 11). A wanton may deliberate about means; “he does not care which of his inclinations is the strongest” (p. 11).
  • The unwilling addict wants the desire to refrain, not the craving, to be his will, and is “helplessly violated by his own desires” (p. 12).
  • The wanton addict has the same first-order conflict and no preference about which desire wins; “he has no identity apart from his first-order desires” (p. 13).
  • Identification. “The unwilling addict identifies himself … through the formation of a second-order volition, with one rather than with the other … He makes one of them more truly his own and, in so doing, he withdraws himself from the other.” This is what lets him say “that the force moving him to take the drug is a force other than his own” (p. 13). “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” (p. 14).
• §III Freedom of the will (pp. 14–17). Persons are the beings “for whom the freedom of its will may be a problem” (p. 14). Freedom to do what one wants is neither sufficient (animals have it) nor necessary (someone unknowingly deprived of it keeps a free will) for freedom of the will (pp. 14–15). By analogy with free action, a person enjoys freedom of the will when he is “free to want what he wants to want … 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”, and one who lacks it feels it in “the discrepancy between his will and his second-order volitions, or in his awareness that their coincidence is not his own doing but only a happy chance” (p. 15).
  • Second-order conflict. An unresolved conflict among second-order desires, if severe enough “that it prevents him from identifying himself in a sufficiently decisive way”, “destroys him as a person”, leaving him “a helpless bystander to the forces that move him” (p. 16).
  • Higher orders and their end. “There is no theoretical limit” to the series; refusing to stop would be “humanization run wild” (p. 16). “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.” The person who “without reservation or conflict” wants to be moved by the desire to work “can properly insist” that the third-order question “does not arise”; the commitment means “he has decided that no further question about his second-order volition, at any higher order, remains to be asked” (p. 16).
  • Spontaneity. Conformity of will to volition “may be far more thoughtless and spontaneous”; “The enjoyment of freedom comes easily to some. Others must struggle to achieve it” (p. 17).
• §IV Why it matters, and responsibility (pp. 17–20).
  • Having both freedoms is “all the freedom it is possible to desire or to conceive” (p. 17). Chisholm’s agent-causal account fails both adequacy conditions: it gives no reason to deny the freedom to a rabbit, and no reason to want it (p. 18).
  • “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). A free will “could have been otherwise”, in the sense that the person could have constituted it otherwise, but that “has no bearing on the theory of moral responsibility” (p. 19).
  • Responsibility requires acting “freely, or … of his own free will”: having done what he wanted, because he wanted it, moved by a will that “was his will because it was the will he wanted”. Then “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” (p. 19; n. 9 cites the 1969 paper).
  • The willing addict, “altogether delighted with his condition”, has an unfree will, since the desire “will be effective regardless”, but takes the drug “freely and of his own free will”. His desire is overdetermined: effective because of the addiction and “because he wants it to be”. “His will is outside his control, but, by his second-order desire … he has made this will his own”, and “he may be morally responsible for taking the drug” (pp. 19–20).
  • Determinism and history. The conception “appears to be neutral with regard to the problem of determinism”: it may be causally determined, or a matter of chance, that a person has a free will (p. 20). Another agent may also be responsible for one’s having it. Note 10: if the willing addict “has been made an addict by the deliberate and calculated work of another”, it “may be that both the addict and this other person are fully responsible” (p. 20).

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	What distinguishes persons is having second-order volitions, not having minds and bodies	conceptual proposal, partly stipulative (n. 5)	pp. 5–6, 10–11
C2	The will is the effective first-order desire, not the intended one	definition	p. 8
C3	Forming a second-order volition is identifying with one desire and withdrawing from another	assertion, illustrated by the addict	p. 13
C4	Freedom of the will is having the will one wants: conformity of will to second-order volitions	definition by analogy with freedom of action	pp. 14–15
C5	A decisive identification ends the series of higher orders non-arbitrarily	assertion, one example	p. 16
C6	The theory explains why we want freedom of will and why we deny it to animals, as Chisholm’s does not	informal argument	pp. 17–18
C7	Moral responsibility requires acting of one’s own free will, not having a free will, and not alternatives	informal argument; the willing addict	pp. 18–20
C8	The conception is neutral on determinism and on how the will came to be, including design by another agent	assertion	p. 20, n. 10

Concepts

• First-order / second-order desire. A desire to do or not do something / a desire to have or not have a desire (p. 7).
• Will. The effective desire, which moves one “all the way to action” (p. 8).
• Second-order volition. Wanting a desire to be one’s will (p. 10).
• Person. A being with second-order volitions, “for whom the freedom of its will may be a problem” (pp. 10, 14).
• Wanton. An agent with first-order desires and no second-order volitions, who “does not care about his will” (p. 11).
• Identification. Forming a second-order volition in favour of a desire, making it “more truly his own” (p. 13); decisive identification “resounds” through higher orders (p. 16).
• Freedom of action / freedom of the will. Doing what one wants / having the will one wants (p. 15).
• Acting of one’s own free will. Acting from the will one wants, whether or not one’s will is free (p. 19).

Connections

• The 1969 paper (LIT-694). Cited in n. 9. Its exempting condition, acting “only because he could not have done otherwise” and not from “what he really wanted”, is given content here: the willing addict acts from the will he wants.
• The Tanner Lectures (LIT-293, NOTE-264). The late statement keeps C4 (“we will freely when what we want is what we want to want”, p. 177) and adds that there be no conflict at any higher order. It keeps the free-will/free-action distinction and the compatibilist conclusion, and drops the wanton and the second-order vocabulary. NOTE-264 counted the second-order desire/volition distinction, the effective-desire will, the three addicts and the wanton as absent from the lectures; they are all here.
• The surveys (LIT-291, LIT-296, LIT-297, LIT-294). Their reports are accurate on the apparatus. Two corrections. First, NOTE-270 asks whether the decisive-commitment answer is already in 1971, as Dryden and Velleman say and supplement §A of LIT-291 implies it is not: it is, p. 16. Second, LIT-291’s “passive bystanders to their wills” (1971, p. 89, in the 2004–2015 revisions) is not the paper’s definition of the wanton, which is “does not care about his will” (p. 11); “helpless bystander” is said of the unwilling addict and of the person destroyed by second-order conflict (pp. 16–17), and “passive bystander” of someone “estranged from himself” (p. 17) and of a will “forced upon him” (p. 19).
• Velleman (LIT-295, NOTE-265). His reconstruction quotes this paper accurately (IWWCA 18, 21 = pp. 13, 16 here). His case against decisive commitment is argued from a 1976 footnote; p. 16 here states it with the “without reservation or conflict” condition that LIT-575, by the IEP’s report, develops.
• Robb (LIT-294). Robb’s willing addict, “responsible … even if he couldn’t do otherwise (Frankfurt 1971)”, is accurate (pp. 19–20).
• Wolf (LIT-690), unread. By Talbert’s report (LIT-691) Wolf lists this paper among “deep self views”. C8 and n. 6 are what her objection needs: the view sets no condition on what the second-order volition is based on, or how it arose.

Bearing on the record

• THEORY-120 is the hierarchical account filed from this reading and LIT-293.
• THEORY-029 (the regress). It holds the 1971 account second-hand through LIT-291 and should now cite this paper. The paper states the series of higher orders and its decisive termination itself (p. 16), so the regress is not only Watson’s framing: Frankfurt saw the series and claimed a non-arbitrary stopping point in the same paper. Whether p. 16 answers the regress is THEORY-029’s question; “without reservation or conflict” is a condition on the agent’s own stance, so it looks like the dilemma’s second horn.
• THEORY-040 (manipulation). Note 10 is first-hand evidence for its first branch. Frankfurt already accepts in 1971 that an addict made so by another’s design may be fully responsible. THEORY-040 cites only the 2002 quotation, second-hand.
• THEORY-054 (SDT). The paper’s identification is all-or-nothing and sets no condition on the basis of the volition (n. 6); SDT grades by integration.
• THEORY-122 (Wolf). Its premise that “identification with one’s own motives” is content-neutral is confirmed (n. 6).
• No ML-practice content; nothing belongs in the Anthology. AI writing that invokes “second-order desires” as a criterion of agency is not engaged.

Limitations

• Identification is asserted, not analysed. The paper says forming a second-order volition makes a desire “more truly his own” (p. 13) and gives no argument why the higher-order attitude speaks for the person. This is the gap the regress objection presses.
• Decisiveness is undefined. “Decisively” and “without reservation or conflict” (p. 16) are illustrated by one example, and nothing says what makes a commitment decisive rather than merely unopposed.
• The empirical claims are asserted: that no animal but man can form second-order desires (p. 7), and that very young children are wantons (p. 11).
• Responsibility is treated in two pages (pp. 18–20), and its relation to the 1969 paper is a footnote.
• The history question is raised and set aside. Note 10 accepts the designed addict as fully responsible without arguing that he is.

Open questions

• What makes a commitment “decisive”? LIT-575 is reported to answer this (“no reason to continue deliberating”), and is unread.
• Is the designed addict of n. 10 responsible? Fischer and Ravizza, Mele and Pereboom say no (as LIT-291 reports); the paper asserts it.
• Does freedom of the will, as defined here, need the “could have been otherwise” of p. 19, and if so, is the account of free will (as opposed to responsibility) neutral on determinism, as p. 20 says?