Philosopher, 1929–2023

Harry Frankfurt

You can be fully responsible for something you could not have avoided doing. What makes an act yours is not that it was uncaused, but that you stand behind the desire that moved you.

The view

Frankfurt taught at Yale and Princeton, and late in life became unexpectedly famous for a short book, On Bullshit (2005). Among philosophers he is known for two papers that changed the free will debate. The first, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" (1969), attacked an assumption almost everyone had shared: that you are morally responsible for what you did only if you could have done otherwise. Philosophers call this the principle of alternate possibilities.

The second, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" (1971), offered a new account of what free will is. Animals and small children have desires. Persons also have desires about their desires: they can want not to want something. Frankfurt called the desires we want to be effective "second-order volitions". Your will is free, he said, when the desire that moves you is the one you want to move you.

The argument

A person may be morally responsible for what he has done even though he could not have done otherwise. After Frankfurt, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" (1969)

Imagine that Black wants Jones to do a certain thing, and has secretly fitted a device to his brain. If Jones shows any sign of deciding otherwise, the device will step in and make him do it. But Jones decides to do it on his own, for his own reasons, and the device never acts. Jones could not have done otherwise. Yet he seems just as responsible as he would have been without the device, because the device played no part in what actually happened. Try both versions below.

The 1971 paper explains what the device would take away if it did act. An unwilling addict hates his craving and wishes it would not move him; when he gives in, he acts against his own will. A willing addict is just as hooked, but endorses his desire. The two may be equally unable to stop, but only the unwilling addict is unfree in the sense that matters. A creature with no views at all about its own desires Frankfurt called a "wanton".

Where he meets Dennett

Very closely. Dennett reached the same verdict on alternate possibilities by his own road in "I Could Not Have Done Otherwise – So What?" (1984), with Luther in place of Jones. Both agree that the ability to have done otherwise is not what responsibility rests on. And both locate freedom in the structure of the agent: for Frankfurt, the fit between first-order desires and second-order volitions; for Dennett, the capacity to reflect on reasons and change course. Neither needs a gap in causation.

Where they part

Frankfurt's account is a snapshot. It asks how an agent's desires are arranged at the moment of action, not how they got that way, and critics soon pointed out that a manipulator could install the second-order volitions too. Dennett's view is historical and evolutionary. Freedom is built up over a life and over the history of a species, through learning and through being held to account by others, so it has more to say about how a self is made. He also put more weight on the social side, the club of responsible agents, where Frankfurt's analysis concerns the individual's will.

See every view compared →

Further reading

• Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, 1988): both classic papers.
• Daniel C. Dennett, "I Could Not Have Done Otherwise – So What?", Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984).
• Moral responsibility and the principle of alternative possibilities, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.