Free Will And The Concept Of A Person Summary

vHarry Frankfurt’s work “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” discusses the attributes of free will through the concept of first and second order desires. He explains that a first-order desire is a desire to perform an action, and a second-order desire is the desire to perform another desire. When someone wants their secondary desire to become their will and take the place of their first-order desire it is called a second-order volition. Frankfurt’s work centers on how second-order volitions are evidence of free will because free will is only achieved when a person is able to choose which desire to act upon. Frankfurt argues that each second-order volition is an expression of free will and without them a person is left with only
A human is able to desire another desire because he compares the positive and negative outcomes of both using his conscious thought process. In Frankfurt’s “unwilling drug addict example”, the man recognizes that he should quit drugs besides their instant gratification because he sees their long term detrimental effects on his life. Animals do not possess the thought process to weigh each desire individually and determine their long term effects. Instead of having no preference over their desires, as Frankfurt’s theory suggests, animals and small children weigh each desire for the amount of instant gratification it will provide. They do not have free will because they only possess the intelligence to know what they want most instead of what is the most beneficial. One example would be a baby given the option of eating candy or broccoli for dinner. The baby would choose the candy because it tastes better, and he is unable to understand that the broccoli is the healthier and will not give him a stomach ache. Even though the baby cannot evaluate the benefit of desires in the long term, he still chooses the candy because he desires the sweet taste more than the taste of broccoli. The baby’s only restriction of possessing free will is its inability to determine the most rewarding desire overall in its life. This contradicts Frankfurt’s theory that wantons cannot desire one option more than
Desires are only based upon what a person wants most, but they do not always truly embody what is most important. Even if a person’s second-order volition desire is based upon good intentions it could be detrimental when decided upon as a first-order desire because it is based on want. In Gary Watson’s “Free Agency” he writes that “‘what one most wants’ may mean either ‘the object of the strongest desire’ or ‘what one most values.’ The problem of free action arises because what one desires may not be what one values”(209). Desires do not lead to what is truly beneficial to a person’s life because they do not accurately evaluate what is valuable in their life. In order for a second-order volition to be the most rewarding, a person’s desires have to be founded upon their values. The values of a man have been formed around a lifetime of experience and are based upon more then what they want. Higher order questions become easily solvable when the desires are formed upon what a person truly values. While people can have many desires, they only truly value certain aspects of their lives, and the desire that is the most important to ones values should be their first-order