In one of his most celebrated texts "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", Harry Frankfurt distinguishes between first-order desires and second-order desires. He then thereby goes on to argue that what is essential to personhood is second-order desires (and the ability to make them our will) and that these second-order desires can be causally determined, without curtailing our freedom. Here, I want to concentrate on Frankfurt's notion of personhood without talking much about the problem of free will.
First order desires are desires in a straightforward and simple sense. Their objects are either some actions or the obtainment of some material thing like "I want to play football" or "I want to go to the movies." - in Frankfurt's words, "simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another." (p. 442)
Second order desires are desires whose objects are other desires -i.e. to want to want something. Frankfurt here gives the example of a physician engaged in psychotherapy with narcotics. The physician "believes that his ability to help his patients would be enhanced if he understood better what it is like for them to desire for the drug."(p. 443) The physician in question wants to feel what it is like to have a desire for a drug:
And insofar as he now wants only to want to take it, and not to take it, there is nothing in what he now wants that would be satisfied by the drug itself. He may now have in fact an altogether univocal desire not to take the drug; and he may prudently arrange to make it impossible for him to satisfy the desire he would have if his desire to want the drug should in time be satisfied. (p. 442)
As Frankfurt explains, "someone has a desire of the second order either when he wants to simply to have a certain desire or when he wants a certain desire to be his will." The latter case is not only a second-order desire but also a second-order volition. It is not exactly clear (or maybe not clear to me for reasons that will become apparent later) how a certain desire forms a will. Frankfurt's clarificatory example is that of an unwilling drug addict. Imagine an unwilling addict that due to power of his desires can not but succumb to temptation to take the drugs. According to Frankfurt, there are two first order desires: the addict's desire to take it and his desire not to take it. And a second order volition: the addict's desire that his desire not to take it becomes his effective desire, i.e. his will.
Frankfurt defines freedom and personhood according to the ability to form second order volitions As he writes, "when a person acts, the desires by which he is moved is either the will he wants or a will he wants to be without." Roughly, from this, Frankfurt argues, I think but am not too sure, that even though someone's second order volitions may be causally determined this does not curtail the freedom necessary for moral responsibility.
It seems conceivable, then it might be causally determined that a person enjoys a free will. There is no more than an innocuous appearance in the proposition that it is determined, ineluctably and by forces beyond their control, that certain people have free wills and that others do not."
This is a fascinating idea but I am not entirely sure it is correct. Maybe, it is moving us in the right direction but very lacking in details.
Consider my Macintosh. My Macintosh "wants" to boot up(start) using my hard drive or using my DVD drive or using my connection to a network. However, it has also a "second order volition". Namely, it "wants" "the desire" to boot up using my hard drive to be the effective desire. And when I turn on my Macintosh, it turns out that yes, it does in fact boot up using my hard drive. We conclude that my Macintosh is a person - an absurdity hard to swallow.
I intend this example as a counter-example to Frankfurt's theory of personhood but maybe I am missing something.
The first and obvious reply is that my Macintosh does not have the desires that personhood requires. In other words, we deny that my Macintosh "wants" to boot up. However, if we define personhood in terms of desires, and desires in terms of personhood, then we are caught up in an ineluctable circle. What Harry Frankfurt (or those that are attracted by this theory) needs to also show is what sort of impulses or inclinations form or do not form desires.
Another, more conceding reply would be to concede that personhood admits degrees and my Macintosh has "personhood" although its "personhood" is not as much as mine or any other person's. What then needs to be fleshed out in such an account is what kind of things increase someone's personhood, what deducts from it and why my Macintosh is less of a person than I am. (After all, we get along so well.)
However, for now I want to go back to desires and argue that Frankfurt's theory can not be salvaged untill a sufficient account of desires is laid out first.
it could not be true both that A wants the desire to X to move him into action and that he does not want to X. It is only if he does want to X that he can coherently want the desire to X not merely to be one of his desires, but more decisively to be his will.and here our troubles begin. Wait though, there is a footnote. When we go to footnote, we see this:
It is not so clear that the entailment relation described here holds in certain kinds of cases, which I think may fairly be regarded as nonstandard, where the essential difference between the standard and the nonstandard cases lies in the kind of description by which the first-order desire in question is identified. Thus, suppose that A admires B so fulsomely that, even though he does not know what B wants to do, he wants to be effectively moved by whatever desire effectively move B; without knowing what B's will is, in other words, A wants his own wil to be the same. It certainly does not follow that A already has, among his desires, a desire like the one that constitutes B's will. I shall not pursue here the question of whether there are genuine counterexamples to the claim made in the text or of how, if there are, that claim should be altered.Oh but you shall pursue these questions, Mr. Frankfurt... You shall for reasons that I am going to discuss now.
Suppose that a teenager, let's call him Henry, wants to listen to a certain kind of music -death metal- because his friends listen to that sort of music. Henry in fact listens to death metal in order to increase the commonalities between himself and his friends. However, Henry hates death metal and were it not for his friends' listening, he would not listen to it all. Moreover, Henry wants to want to listen to such music (he wants to like death metal) because he doesn't want to feel like a "phony" amongst his friends.
Now I don't think that Henry has a first order desire to listen to death metal. He indubitably has a first order desire not to listen to death metal and a second order desire, a desire to want to listen to death metal. It just seems awfully counterintuitive to suggest that Henry has a first order desire to listen to death metal.
Let us go back to the Frankfurt's example of the unwilling addict. I can see how the addict has a first order desire to take the drug but the rest of "the desire map" is all murky to me. Does the unwilling addict have a first order desire not to take the drug and a second order volition that this desire is the effective one (his will) or only a second order desire that his first order desire to take the drug diminishes or remains inactive?
Remember second order desires are desires about other desires. So I can't quite see why it can't also be that I have less of a certain desire is a second order desire. And remember second order volitions are desires about the effectiveness of first order desires. However, I can't see how I can't have a second order volition that one of my desires remains ineffective.
Anyway, if we were to draw out the desire "map" (Harry Frankfurt's and my suggested alternative), the differences will become more apparent.
First of all let me point out that I postulate one less desire than Frankfurt's list. And in virtue of Occam's Razor, this gives me a natural advantage over his map. However, I think there are obviously other advantages to my account that his does not enjoy. (But we shall see that even this is not enough to salvage the account.)
I think one question that Harry Frankfurt never really answers but one that is quite common in discussions pertaining to morality is that of how one motivates one to do certain acts.
Frankfurt without making it quite explicit assumes that one must want to do something in order to do it. However, where does that leave us for actions one does with a sense of duty? Must we have first-order desires for actions that we do with a sense of duty? I tend to think not.
The ambiguity in Frankfurt's account is an equivocation between what we may term rational desires (if these are desires at all) and irrational desires. By rational desires, I mean the acts we want to commit out of prudence or rational reasoning. (It is not entirely clear to me that these can be termed as desires.) Irrational desires are those that are caused by our animal nature - such as the desire to eat, the desire to sleep. (I think I am borrowing the terminology from Aristotle but I am not quite sure.) When I first read Frankfurt's paper, I thought all rational "desires" were second order. And all first order desires were irrational desires. I had trouble reading the paper due to this (mis)conception, to be honest with you. My chief reason for thinking so was cases like those of death-metalophobic teenager Henry.
So suppose someone does community service out of a sense of duty. Does this mean that this person wants to do community service?Well, yes according to Frankfurt's theory of desires. If he "wants" to do it, then it is hard to imagine how this is "duty" at all.
Well, maybe not so fast though. For Bertrand Russell said in his nobel lecture:
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths. (Source:Nobelprize.org)
Remembering this bit from Russell while reading Frankfurt's paper, my initial inclination was that all "desires to be moral" would be second order. Consider the case of the person helping the charity out of a sense of duty. She wants to be dutiful but she doesn't have a first-order desire for helping the charity. So is her desire to be dutiful second-order or first-order? I don't think it makes sense to regard her desire to be dutiful in terms of first and second order desires.
If this ambiguity or tension between first order and second order desires can not be resolved, I am afraid no matter how interesting Frankfurt's are on the subject I am just going to remain unconvinced.