Willing addicts, unwilling addicts, and acting of one's own free will

Philosophia (United States)

Volumn 33, Issue 1-4, 2005, Pages 237-262

  Taylor, James Stacey ^a  

^a The College of New Jersey   (United States)

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EID: 84897479645     PISSN: 00483893     EISSN: 15749274     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02652654     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Harry, G. Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, in Harry G. Frankfurt, ed., The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1988): 11-25.
2. Harry G. Frankfurt, The Faintest Passion, in Harry G. Frankfurt, NecessiO, Volition and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 16-22. Frankfurt has since revised his account of what it is for a person to identify with his effective first-order desires. On this revised view a person identifies with his effective first order desire if he volitionally endorses it, and is satisfied with this endorsement, where this satisfaction consists of his having no interest in making changes in his motivational set. However, these revisions do not alter the subjective basis of Frankfurt's account of identification (i.e., whether or not a person will identify with a first order desire depends on how he regards that desire), and it is this that is the focus of this paper.
3. Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will," 16-24. The important point about the unwilling addict is that he does not want to be moved by his first-order desire to take the drug to which he is addicted. It is, however, an open question as to whether or not the unwilling addict wants to have the desire to which he is addicted. See Frankfurt's discussion of the physician who wants to have the desire to take the drug, but does not want it to be effective in action, in Freedom of the Will, 14-15.
4. Mark Leon, The Willing Addict: Actor or (Helpless) Bystander? Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel 28 (2001), 437-443. Ishtiyaque Haji has also argued to this conclusion as part of a more general argument that he offers concerning the relationship between responsibility and control.
5. Moral Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals and Perplexities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter 13.
6. Frankfurt's first attempt to correct this misunderstanding of his view is in his "Reply to Michael Bratman," in Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, eds., The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry, Frankfurt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 87.
7. These metaphors for what it is for a person to identify (or to fail to identify) with her desires are from Frankfurt, Identification and Externality, 58-59, 61. Frankfurt, "Autonomy, Necessity and Love," reprinted in Necessity. Volition and Love, 132-133.
8. Leon does not outline what Frankfurt takes to be involved in a person acting freely and of his own free will. Nevertheless, I believe that his argument against Frankfurt is stronger once it is understood what Frankfurt had in mind when he wrote of what is required for a person to act freely and of his own free will. Moreover, providing this as background to Leon's argument reinforces the point, addressed further in note 9, that neither his argument nor mine (below) rest on showing that neither the willing nor the unwilling addicts can do anything other than take the drugs to which they are addicted. Instead, his argument (and mine) are based on showing that when the unwilling addict is passive with respect to his effective first-order desire to take the drug to which he is addicted, so too is the willing addict, and so when the unwilling addict does not act freely and of his own free will neither does the willing addict. Thus, these addicts cannot be distinguished with respect to their acting freely and of their own free will on the grounds that whereas the latter endorses his effective first-order desire the latter does not.
9. Leon, "The Willing Addict," 437.
10. I must note that whereas for Frankfurt it is indeed not necessary that a person be able to do other than he did for him to act freely and of his own free will, it is necessary for a person to be able to do other than he did for him to possess freedom of the will. (Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will, 24-25.) Since neither the willing nor the unwilling addict can do anything other than take the drug to which they are addicted neither of them possess freedom of the will. To reiterate (in part) note 7, since both Leon's and (below) my arguments in this paper are directed at Frankfurt's claim that the willing addict can be distinguished from the unwilling addict with respect to whether he acts freely and of his own free will they do not turn on the issue of whether either of these addicts could do anything other than take the drugs to which they are addicted.
11. This is not, however, true for Frankfurt's original Frankfurt-style example that is developed in "'Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," in Frankfurt, ed. The Importance of What We Care About, 7, for the original version of this example is vulnerable to the arguments that both Leon and Haji offered against the claim that the willing addict acts freely and of his own free will, as well as to the arguments against this claim that are developed here. This is because in Frankfurt's original example Frankfurt holds that A brings it about that B could not have done otherwise by A's introduction into B ofan irresistible inner compulsion to perform the act A wants, but that B for reasons of his own, decides to perform and does perform the very action that[A]wants him to perform. Since this is so, in Frankfurt's original example B is in the same situation as the willing addict--and so insofar as the willing addict does not act freely and of his own free will, nor does B in Franld'urt's original example. (It should be noted that even though this is so, it is a separate question as to whether or not B could still be held morally responsible for his doing P, for it might not be the case that is doing P freely and of his own free is necessary for him to be responsible for his doing P.) Unlike in Frankfurt's original Frankfurt-style example in this description of the case B does act freely and of his own free will when he performs P, for he is not subject to an irresistible inner compulsion that has been introduced into him by A, but, instead, A will intervene in B's actions if B's intent to perform P wavers.
12. Such Frankfurt-style examples are typically used to support the claim that a person can be morally responsible for an action P even though he could not have done other than P, rather than to support the (different) claim that neither freedom of action nor freedom of will require that a person be able to do other than he did. The Frankfurt-style example given here has thus been modified to accommodate this shift in its use--a shift in use that Frankfurt would accept, since his account of what it is for a person to act freely and of her own free will is, like his account of what it is for a person to be morally responsible, explicitly compatibilist. See Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will," 25.
13. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29-30.
14. Leon, "The Willing Addict," 439-440. Italics added.
15. Ibid., 440.
16. For further discussion of differing types of control that agents might possess over their actions and the relationships that these types of control have to discussions of free will and moral responsibility see Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, 30-41.
17. Although Leon does not explicitly distinguish between these two types of irresistible desires, he does implicitly recognize that they both exist. Thus, while his argument focuses on the 'strong form of irresistible desire, he also implicitly accepts that there might be a type of irresistible desire such that the agent's willing of the action that is its object accounts--at least in part--for its occurrence. (The Willing Addict, 440.) And such an irresistible desire would be a weak irresistible desire. j8 Such a strongly irresistible desire has also been termed a 'defeating desire by Haji (Moral Appraisability, 209), and the sort of desire that turns its possessor into a blind robot when he moved to act on it by Jeffrey Reiman, Drug Addiction, Liberal Virtue, and Moral Responsibility, in Steven Luper-Foy and Curtis Brown, eds., Drugs, Morality and the Law (New York: Garland Press, 1994), 42.
18. Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will," 24.
19. Although an addictive desire cannot be both a strong addictive desire and a weak addictive desire for the same person, it is plausible that both of these types of addictive desires actually exist.
20. He might, for example, have himself psychologically conditioned so that he has a powerful aversion to satisfying his weakly addictive desire, or else he might (like Ulysses when approaching the sirens), take steps to ensure that he is physically unable to satisfy this desire, perhaps by committing himself to a drug rehabilitation clinic.
21. Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will," 16+24-25.
22. Harry G. Frankfurt, "Reply to Gary Watson," in Buss and Overton, eds., The Contours of Agency, 160.
23. Ibid., 160.
24. John Christman, "Introduction," in John Christman, ed., The Inner Citadel: Essays on individual autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8-11.
25. Frankfurt, "The Faintest Passion," 104-105.
26. Frankfurt, "Reply to Michael E. Bratman," 89. Emphasis added.
27. Frankfurt, "Reply to Michael E. Bratman," 88
28. "Reply to Gary Watson," 160.
29. For Frankfurt's earlier rejection of such ahistorical approach to analyzing identification, see Harry G. Frankfurt, "Identification and Wholeheartedness," in Frankfurt, ed., The hnportance of What We Care About, 171, n. 13.
30. Frankfurt, "Reply to Michael Bratman," 87, 90 n. 1.
31. Elenore Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," in Buss and Overton, eds., The Contours of Agency, 47-48.
32. Ibid., 47.
33. Leon, "The Willing Addict,"
34. Haji, Moral Appraisability,
35. Sarah Buss, "Autonomy Reconsidered," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1994), 95-121.
36. I thank Mark Leon and Jonathan Malino for their exceptionally helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and Harry Frankfurt for further clarifying his most recent view of identification for me.