Impulse and self-reflection: Frankfurtian responsibility versus free will

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 3, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 325-341

  Greenspan, P S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

Action; Addiction; Desire; Frankfurt; Free will; Freedom; Moral responsibility; Self

Indexed keywords

EID: 0142071319     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1009867501644     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Cf. R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), esp. Chapter 6, for a concept of reflective (or sometimes, normative) self-control (or self-governance, competence, or the like), explained in terms of the agent's capacity for removed reflection on his desires in light of moral reasons.
2. Paul Russell, Freedom and Moral Sentiment (New York: Oxford, 1995), esp. pp. 91-93
3. cf. p. 180 for a Humean version of the same sort of account.
4. See Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 23-24
5. I shall use page-references in what follows to refer to this volume of Frankfurt's collected works.
6. See my "Free Will and the Genome Project," Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993), pp. 31-43
7. and my "Genes, Electrotransmitters, and Free Will," in David Wasserman and Robert Wachbroit (eds.), Genetics and Criminal Behavior: Methods, Meanings, and Morals (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
8. "Humean Sentimentalist Free Will" (tentative title; unpublished). An earlier approach to similar cases but without specifically genetic explanation appears in my "Unfreedom and Responsibility," pp. 63-80
9. in F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
10. I should note that I am reading Frankfurt as clarifying and defending essentially the same view throughout his collected papers. Some authors take him as changing his view significantly between his earlier and later papers; see esp.
11. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, "Introduction," in John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza (eds.), Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 25-26.
12. Cf. Frankfurt esp. pp. 14-15, where Frankfurt discusses a stronger case, in which the agent actually wants (rather than not caring about) the lower-level desire. In the case I have in mind, presumably Frankfurt would add some conflicting lower-level desires (the "wants" motivating a voluntary action) to those that prompt me to smoke.
13. Perhaps Frankfurt's view on this matter is misread as a result of confusion with Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), in which a view similar in overall structure is applied to some of the same sorts of cases.
14. Cf. Wallace, esp. Chapter 6, for what amounts to an argument that the reference to general capacities does not beg the question of the principle of alternate possibilities.
15. This is in contrast to Wallace, esp. Chapter 5, which apparently brackets all questions of freedom (though initially on the grounds that free will in a "strong" sense is contra- causal; see, e.g. pp. 2-16) and instead focuses directly in other terms on explaining excuses from moral responsibility.
16. Let me thank Richard Hanley for directing my attention to this distinction.
17. See esp. Wallace, pp. 52-53.
18. Cf. David DeGrazia, "Autonomous Action and Autonomy-Subverting Psychiatric Conditions," The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 19 (1994), pp. 279-297, which more closely follows the account defended by Dworkin (see fn. 6 above).
19. Cf. Wallace, Chapter 6, for what seems to be a weaker view. Simply having the general capacity would distinguish me from Rambo as a "responsible agent," but here what is in question is responsibility for a particular act.
20. See my argument in "Behavior Control and Freedom of Action," Philosophical Review 87 (1978), pp. 225-240
21. reprinted in J. M. Fischer (ed.), Moral Responsibility (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 191-204. Note that Frankfurt's psychological sense of "duress" is not the sense in the law, where what distinguishes duress from coercion is just whether the threat in question is imposed by another agent.
22. Cf. the recent film, "Leaving Las Vegas.
23. Wright Neely offers an account ofdegrees offreedom in terms ofpriority ofdesire in "Freedom and Desire," Philosophical Review 83 (1974), pp. 32-54, esp. pp. 48ff.
24. However, Neely's account is unsatisfying for my purposes, since like Frankfurt's it is framed in terms of desire. It appeals, I think implausibly, to irresistible desires to make sense of the cases that concern me (see p. 46; cf. the treatment ofpsychopaths in these terms on p. 47). Neely also takes his notion of freedom not to be the one that is relevant to moral responsibility (p. 50).
25. I should note that "anticipates," as I mean it, covers anticipation in feeling, of a sort that seems to mark off motivationally unfreeing addictions - those that involve an uncomfortable craving or other perceived need for the item in question - from those that are merely physiological.
26. On standard desire/belief accounts, an evaluative belief would indeed be classified as a desire. It is not ruled defective for failing to fit the world; the world is supposed to fit it. But presumably these norms of "fit" are set by the agent. There is another level of self- assessment here, which might be made out as a basic evaluative stance toward the elements of one's will. But in what sense is self-critical thinking on this level other than intellectual?