FRANKFURT, HARRY
(1929–)

Harry Frankfurt grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland. He received his PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1954, and he taught in the philosophy departments at Ohio State University; State University of New York, Binghamton; Rockefeller University; Yale University; and Princeton University.

Frankfurt has made original and important contributions to various fields in philosophy, including history of modern philosophy (primarily René Descartes), philosophical psychology, and moral philosophy. He has explored such issues as the relationship between moral responsibility and free will, the nature of the self, the role of necessitation or inevitability in both constraining and constituting persons, and central phenomena such as care, love, and truth. His work has exerted a significant influence on philosophers working in these areas, and some of his writings (especially on the role of love and truth in our lives) have been read by a wide audience. It is perhaps not surprising that Frankfurt's work has been appreciated beyond the walls of academia, as it is both penetrating and elegant.

In one of his most influential papers, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Frankfurt argued that moral responsibility does not require the sort of free will that entails alternative possibilities or genuine freedom to do otherwise. He offered a template for a kind of example that calls into question the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, (PAP), according to which moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities. The Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples (to PAP) have a distinctive structure that involves preemptive overdetermination, that is, the existence of a fail-safe device that plays no role in the causal sequence that issues in the relevant behavior, but which renders that behavior inevitable.

The examples can be seen to be extensions of an example presented by John Locke. Locke discussed a man who is transported into a room while asleep. When he awakens, the man considers whether to leave the room, but stays for his own reasons. Unbeknownst to him, the door was locked and thus he could not have successfully left the room. According to Locke, the man stayed in the room voluntarily although he could not have left the room.

Now it might be pointed out that although the man in Locke's example lacked a certain alternative possibility (the power to leave the room), he nevertheless had various important options available, including choosing to leave, trying to leave, turning the knob, and so forth. Frankfurt's distinctive contribution is the addition of a component to this sort of example which, as it were, brings the locked door into the agent's brain. That is, Frankfurt asks us to imagine someone who can secretly monitor an agent, even his brain activities; as things happen, no intervention by this kind of shadowy counterfactual intervener occurs. But if the agent were about to choose to do otherwise, this would trigger some process by which the intervener—say, a nefarious neurosurgeon —could ensure that the agent choose and behave as he actually does. Thus, Frankfurt has provided a more sophisticated version of Locke's example, one in which it is at least plausible to suppose that the agent in question chooses and acts freely and could legitimately be held morally responsible even though the agent literally could not have chosen otherwise and could not have done otherwise.

Frankfurt thus denied PAP. One who agrees with Frankfurt can thus contend that one of the main objections to compatibilism about causal determinism and moral responsibility can be blocked. That is, it is traditionally supposed that causal determinism threatens moral responsibility because it rules out the sort of free will that involves alternative possibilities; but if this sort of free will is not required for moral responsibility, then at least this sort of objection to compatibilism is rendered irrelevant. Of course, there may be other reasons to reject compatibilism. Frankfurt himself is officially agnostic about compatibilism, saying that we cannot be confident that causal determinism is compatible with being active, and thus we cannot be confident in the truth of the compatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility.

In another seminal paper, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," Frankfurt suggested that the distinctive feature of persons is a certain characteristic structure in their motivational states. We share preferences, beliefs, and so forth with mere animals. But we are unique in that we can step back from our preferences and form second-order preferences—preferences about our first-order preferences. Some of these second-order preferences are what Frankfurt called second-order volitions —the preference that a certain first-order preference lead one to act. According to Frankfurt it is not crucial what the basis for the second-order reflection is; it need not be moral deliberation, for example. On his view, persons are distinctive in that they have the capacity to form second-order volitions; thus, they are the sort of entities for which freedom of the will can be a problem.

For Frankfurt, it is important to distinguish such notions of freedom to choose otherwise and freedom to do otherwise, on the one hand, from notions such as choosing freely and acting freely, on the other. The former involve alternative possibilities whereas the latter do not. In "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," Frankfurt gives an account of acting freely in terms of the hierarchical account of the structure of human motivation. When one acts freely, one acts on the preference one really wants to have as one's will (roughly, the actually motivating preference). In Frankfurt's terminology when one acts freely, one identifies with one's will, that is, one identifies with the first-order desire that actually motivates one to act. In contrast, one does not act freely when one does not identify with one's will—one acts (say, smokes another cigarette or eats another piece of chocolate cake) despite identifying with other first-order desires). Frankfurt suggests, additionally, that identification consists in forming the relevant second-order volition; he suggests that one identifies with a first-order desire insofar as one forms a second-order preference to be motivated by that first-order desire. So, acting freely consists in a kind of mesh or harmony in the hierarchical structure of one's mental economy. Of course, the existence of this synchronization of levels is entirely compatible with the agent's lacking alternative possibilities.

In further work Frankfurt has refined the analysis of the crucial notion of identification in light of various problems. Additionally, whereas the early papers were primarily addressed to issues pertaining to freedom, determinism, and moral responsibility, the later papers exhibit an evolution toward questions about the true self. In "Identification and Wholeheartedness," Frankfurt concedes that mere formation of the relevant second-order volition is not sufficient for identification, and he provides a more refined analysis, including the important notion of decisive commitment or decision. In a later paper, "The Faintest Passion," Frankfurt adds the component of satisfaction to the analysis of identification. The notion of identification is important both to the account of acting freely and the true self, and it is interesting to ask whether the same notion can play the required roles in both accounts.

Not only is a certain sort of inevitability (lack of alternative possibilities) compatible with moral responsibility, Frankfurt contends that certain volitional necessities —things we simply cannot bring ourselves to will—help to constitute the boundaries of our true selves. In a series of papers Frankfurt explores the way in which our selves are formed through the process of caring, identification, and volitional constraints. In "The Importance of What We Care About," Frankfurt identifies caring as a distinctive kind of motivation importantly different from morality. He denies that all-things-considered rationality needs to coincide with the deliverances of morality. In later work Frankfurt has built on his work on caring to give a nuanced account of the nature of love. For Frankfurt, love is central to the foundations of morality as well as to the formation of our selves.

Central themes in Frankfurt's work are as follows: the compatibility of moral responsibility, caring, and love with certain sorts of necessity or inevitability and the contention that morality, normativity, or rationality should not be built into our analyses of human motivation at the very foundational level. For Frankfurt, caring and love are more central or, perhaps, more fundamental notions than rationality and morality.

See also Descartes, René; Determinism and Freedom; Ethics, History of; Locke, John; Love; Responsibility, Moral and Legal; Truth.

Bibliography

Buss, S., L. and Overton, eds. Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

works by frankfurt

"Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility." Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829–839.

Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

"Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person." Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 5–20.

"The Importance of What We Care About." Synthese 53 (1982): 257–272.

"Identification and Wholeheartedness." In Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, edited by F. Schoeman, 27–45. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

The Importance of What We Care About. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

"The Faintest Passion." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 66 (1992): 5–16.

Necessity, Volition, and Love. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

The Reasons of Love. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

John Martin Fischer (2005)