Can an addict be held morally responsible for taking drugs? Perhaps not, since this addict could not have done otherwise due to his compulsion. In other words, we conclude that this addict is a victim of his desires and does not have a free will. Therefore, it makes intuitive sense to say that he cannot be held morally responsible for his actions. This claim is known as the principle of alternative possibilities, which states that a person can only be held morally responsible for what he has done if he could have done otherwise. The addict, a victim of his desires, lacks a free will and so could not have done otherwise. Even if he tried, his will would have been overwhelmed by his desire to take the drugs. Frankfurt, however, makes the claim that an addict can be held morally responsible even though he may lack a free will. He rejects the claim made by the principle of alternate possibilities and insists that freedom of will is not a sufficient precondition for moral responsibility; that moral responsibility can be applied to a person who does not have a free will1.This may seem puzzling at first but like all philosophical theses it is important for us to define Frankfurt's notion of freedom before we can understand his claim about moral responsibility. In this paper I shall do just that. I shall start by explaining what Frankfurt means when he refers to freedom of the will. Then I shall I argue that this concept of free will, which is contingent upon certain assumptions made by him, is an insufficient definition of freedom because it does not explain where desires of the second-order come from second-order, a concept I shall clarify later in the paper. My goal in the paper is to complicate Frankfurt's argument of second-order volition, a concept I shall clarify in due course, by citing that these second-order volitions may not necessarily be external to the person, a condition which Frankfurt considers necessary for doing something of your own free will.
For Frankfurt, the question of whether or not free will is important to a person is essential in his understanding of free will. To answer this question Frankfurt distinguishes between two different kinds of agents2, the wanton and the person. He explains that "[persons] are not alone in having desires and motives, or in making choices" (p.7). Frankfurt refers to this capacity, the desire to do or to refrain from doing something, as desires of the first order3. The desire "to do or not to do one thing or another" (p. 7) is not specific to persons. Both wantons and persons are capable of want or desire4 to do one thing over another. Then why is it that Frankfurt describes an animal as a wanton and a human being as a person? Animals have the same first-order desires as humans do. They want to eat and sleep just like humans want to eat and sleep. Can only human beings qualify as persons and animals as wantons? If so, then why does Frankfurt refer to small children as wantons? First order desires do not help to distinguish between different kinds of agents. Both wantons and persons can form first order desires, deliberate as to which desire is the strongest and "make decisions based upon prior thought" (p. 6). Frankfurt does, however, state that an "essential difference between persons and [wantons] is to be found in the structure of a person's will" (p.6) In order to clarify what Frankfurt means when he refers to a person’s will, it is necessary to explain the concept of second-order desires. A person, unlike a wanton, according to Frankfurt, is able to form second-order desires5. These desires of the second-order are simply desires "to have or not to have a particular desire" of the first order. So, a person is said to have a second-order desire when he wants to want one thing or another. This means that a person is able to relate to his first order desires whereas creatures such as animals only have first order desires and do not relate to them. I, as a person, can have a first order desire to sleep. However, my second-order desire may be that I do not want to want to sleep. Other creatures don't identify with their first order desires like a person does. Essentially, a person identifies with his first order desires and relates to them in one way or another. This capacity to relate to (or identify with) one's desires is a kind of self-reflexivity (an appraisal of one's first order desires). It is this particular capacity (to identify with one’s desires and to self-evaluate) that distinguishes a person from other creatures.
The wanton, however, is an agent who can be both human and nonhuman and has first order desires. Very young children are described by Frankfurt as being wantons because they certainly have first order desires and are capable of deliberating in order to determine which first-order desire will figure as their effective desire6. A wanton does not simply translate his first order desire into action indiscriminately. Quite on the contrary, the wanton does indeed have the capacity to evaluate which of his first order desires is the strongest and then acts accordingly. A very young child may have different and conflicting first order desires. For instance, he may want to eat or he may want to sleep. The child may even be able to deliberate and determine which of his first desires is the strongest. However, the child cannot relate to his first order desires like a person can since the child “is not concerned with the desirability of his desires in themselves” (p.11). This means that the child merely acts according to his strongest inclinations with indifference as to which inclination he relates to the most. Simply put, the child, like the wanton, “has no stake in how the conflict between desires works out”; he does not care either way about his will (prof. Moran notes).
Thus far I have distinguished between two different kinds of agents:
1. The wanton: A creature which has conflicting first-order desires but no second-order desires;
2. The person: An agent who has both first-order desires and second-order desires relating to those first-order desires.
I have delineated the major differences between a person and a wanton but I have not yet explained how the understanding of these differences relates to concept of free will. According to Frankfurt, only an agent with second-order volition is capable of having free will. Second-order volitions are simply described as an agent’s second-order desire for a particular desire to be his will (p.10). It may appear to be a complicated idea at first but it turns out that second-order volition is simply described as the desire that moves a person to the desires by which he wants to be moved to act. So, I, as a person, can have a desire to sleep. This, according to Frankfurt would be my first-order desire. If, however, I do not want to want to sleep, my not wanting to sleep is described as my second -order desire. My second-order volition in this particular case would be to make my desire of not wanting to sleep into an effective first order desire, that is, one that moves me all the way to action (p.8). Wantons, however, have only first-order desires but no second order volitions. For Frankfurt, this distinction is essential in his understanding of the concept of free will.“Freedom of will, then, is freedom ‘to will what [one] wants to will, or to have the will one wants’. Freedom of will is exercised ‘in securing the conformity of [one’s] will to [one’s] second order volitions” (Watson, 147). A wanton cannot have a free will since he lacks second order volition. “So, having second-order volitions is a condition for having either a will that is free or a will that is unfree. ‘It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable of enjoying and of lacking freedom of will’” (prof. Moran notes). The wanton does not care about which of his first-order desires succeeds in becoming his effective desire. Therefore, he doesn’t care about having a free will. If he did, then he would’ve had some stake in the conflict of his first order desires. Thus, we can definitively conclude that for an agent to have a free will, he must be a person and not a wanton.
For Frankfurt, having a free will is different from doing something of your own free will. This fundamental difference is necessary in order to understand his claim about moral responsibility. According to Frankfurt, a person may lack a free will, that is, the freedom to have the will that he wants and still be held morally responsible for what he does. Addiction and compulsion are cases in which the addict lacks a free will. However, even though an addict may not have the will that he wants, he may still be doing the drugs of his own free will. In the latter case, according to Frankfurt, the addict is held morally responsible for his actions. To explain this, he distinguishes between two different kinds of persons who are compelled by their addictions: the unwilling and the willing addict. The unwilling addict has conflicting first order desires just like the willing addict. He’s being compelled by his physiological condition to want to take the drug. What makes him an unwilling addict, and thus distinguishes him from the willing addict, is his second order desire, that is, his desire not want to want to take drugs. He resists his first order desires and tries to refrain from taking drugs. In this particular case, the unwilling addict is said to have a second-order volition—he wants his second-order desire not to take the drug to be his will. To put it simply, the unwilling addict wants his desire to refrain from taking the drug to be his effective desire. However, even though “he tries everything that he thinks might enable him to overcome his desires for the drug…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” (p. 12). Thus, the unwilling addict does not have a free will, since he will ultimately take the drug due to his physiological condition which compels and over whelms his second-order volition. The important thing to note here is that the unwilling addict does not identify with his first-order effective desire to take the drug. He does not endorse this inclination and tries to resist it. In failing to make his second-order desire of not wanting to want to take the drugs, the addict displays a lack of free will. However, in taking the drugs he is not doing something of his own free will. Instead, his compulsion is overwhelms his will to resist taking the drugs. Hence, the unwilling addict is not morally responsible for what he has done, according to Frankfurt, since he could not have done otherwise. The principle of alternate possibilities holds for the unwilling addict. Then what exactly is the difference between an unwilling addict and a willing addict? Why is it that Frankfurt holds the willing addict morally responsible for taking the narcotics and excuses the unwilling addict for performing the same action?
The key distinction between a willing addict and an unwilling addict is in their respective will. Both the willing addict and the unwilling addict are described as persons since they not only have firs-order desires to take the drug but relate to their first-order desire in a specific way. The unwilling addict, as I have already described, does not identify with his first-order desire to take the drug. On the contrary, he tries to resist the temptation but inevitably fails. The willing addict, however, is described by Frankfurt as identifying with his first-order desire. “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” (p.19). The willing addict is therefore identifies with his first order desire. He not only wants to take the drug, he wants to want to take the drug. His second-order volition is to make his desire to take the drug into an effective desire. He is perfectly satisfied with his addiction and would indeed reinforce it, were its effects to mitigate in any way. Therefore, “when he takes the drug, he takes it freely and of his own free will…by his second-order desire that his desire for the drug be effective, he has made this will his own” (p. 20). It is important to note that the willing addict is similar to the unwilling addict in one crucial sense: his will is not free either. The unwilling addict is a victim to his first-order desire. He lacks a free will because he is unable to align his first order effective desire to his second-order volition. He is unable to make his second-order volition of not wanting to take the drug, into his first-order effective desire because his addiction to the drug is too strong for him and overwhelms his will. It is in this discrepancy that the unwilling addict feels a lack for his free will. If he were, however, able to satisfy his second-order desire, it would be a cause of great enjoyment for the unwilling addict.
The willing addict, by contrast does not have a free will, like the unwilling addict, but he is taking the drug of his own free will. This may seem confusing at first but the conclusion is quite simple. An addict, by definition, lacks a free will because he is overcome by his desire to take the drug. Whether this addict be an unwilling addict or a willing addict, his first-order effective desire, which Frankfurt refers to as the person’s will, is always to consume the drugs. Therefore, both the unwilling and the willing addict are not free to have the will that they want to have. The unwilling addict, in particular, notices this discrepancy and feels the lack of not being free “to want what he wants to want” (p.15). The willing addict, however, does not feel the lack of free will since his second-order volition aligns perfectly with his first-order effective desire. Since the willing addict wants to want to take the drug, it is a happy coincidence that he is able to do just that, since his first-order effective desire will always be to consume the drug. Thus, a willing addict may not have a free will just like an unwilling addict, but he doesn’t care either way. His second-order volition endorses his first order effective desire and so he is satisfied, according to Frankfurt, since he has the will that he wants to have. He may lack authority over his will but he endorses the will that he has. The willing addict would not have done otherwise since he endorses his addiction and is satisfied by it. This, according to Frankfurt, is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. The willing addict provides an example of a person who would not have performed in any other way even if he were given the choice to do so. Since he endorses his will and would not have done otherwise, the willing addict refutes the claim of the principle of alternate possibilities. Thus, Frankfurt proves that a person may be held morally responsible even that person lacks a free will and could not have done otherwise.
Now that we know that freedom of will is something desirable for a person, we can continue onto the holistic definition of freedom, that is, all the freedom that a person could possibly want. According to Frankfurt, freedom of will and freedom of action are essentially two independent concepts. Both conditions are primarily independent since "someone could act freely without freedom of the will, and he could have freedom of the will without the ability to act freely" (Prof. Moran Notes on Frankfurt, p. 1). It is when a person assures that his will conforms to his second-order volition that a person is said to have freedom of will. Similarly, we can think of a prisoner in a jail cell to lack freedom of action but this does not mean he lacks freedom of will. This is because he may no longer be free to do what he wants to do but he can still have a will that he wants to have. No one can stop him from that. For Frankfurt, freedom entails both freedom of action and freedom of will.
Till now, I have distinguished between a person and a wanton, I have defined first and second-order desires and explained Frankfurt's concept of second-order volition. Furthermore, I have also clarified these concepts by citing Frankfurt's example of the willing addict and the unwilling addict. By distinguishing between these two different kinds of addicts, I have illustrated three things:
1. Freedom of will, that is, freedom to have the will that one wants to have, is different from doing something of your own free will.
2. A person may be held morally responsible for what he does given that he does what he does of his own free will.
3. Freedom of will is something desirable but not necessary for moral responsibility.
After having illustrated these points, I went onto explain Frankfurt’s definition of freedom. For Frankfurt, both freedom of action and freedom to have the will that one wants to have are necessary preconditions for freedom, one does not presuppose the other. Having clarified all these concepts, I shall now go onto cite a criticism and further complicate Frankfurt’s discussion of moral responsibility. If we look at the case of the willing addict, it is not really clear as to where this willing addict gets his second-order desires from. The question is not how the willing addict develops his second-order desires, but rather why this willing addict has the second-order desires he has. Could it be that the willing addict’s first-order effective desires of wanting to take the drug are somehow affecting his second-order desires of wanting to want to take the drugs? Frankfurt doesn’t really explain where the willing addict receives his second-order desires from. If they are indeed determined by his first-order desires, then the question of externality doesn’t apply any longer. The unwilling addict resists his first-order desires. This resistance characterizes his second-order volition and is essentially an external trait which defines the unwilling addict’s unwillingness. In the case of the willing addict, however, externality is simply presumed. If, however, the willing addict’s first-order effective desires did indeed determine his second-order volition, then the willing addict may not necessarily be held morally responsible for what he does, even though he is acting of his own free will. I shall refer to the latter case as the determined-willing addict: his second-order desire being determined by his first-order effective desire. The determined-willing addict’s second-order volition is influenced by his own addiction and this compulsion determines his endorsement of his addiction. In this case, the determined-willing addict’s second-order desires are not external to him; rather they are derived by his first-order effective desire. So, using Frankfurt’s argument, the determined-willing addict is not acting of his own free will even though he endorses his first-order desire to take the drug. The principle of alternate possibilities holds since the determined-willing addict could have done otherwise, even though, according to Frankfurt, endorsement of the addict’s first-order desires would mean that he couldn’t have done otherwise. The addict thinks he identifies with his first-order desires, but because his first-order effective desires determine his second-order volition, he is not doing what he does of his own free will.
The purpose of this paper was to clarify Frankfurt’s claim that a person may be held morally responsible for what he does even though he lacks a free will. To explain this concept, I distinguished between a person and a wanton, citing that the fundamental difference between the two is that the wanton cannot have a free will since he has no second-order volitions. I linked this idea of free will to the case of addiction and concluded that having a free will is very different from doing something of your own free will. Only the latter case, according to Frankfurt, is necessary for moral responsibility. Finally, I understand an important complication to his argument by citing that even though the willing addict, a person who’s second-order volition endorses his first-order effective desire, may be held morally responsible for taking drugs, he may not be doing something of his own free will since his second-order desires are determined by his first-order effective desires. Thus, the case of the determined-willing addict provides an unresolved complication to Frankfurt’s argument of moral responsibility since it is unclear whether the willing addict’s second-order desires are indeed external to him or not.
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Works Cited
Frankfurt, Harry (1969). “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 66, 829-39.
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