Abstract
This essay defends leeway-libertarian source-conditions for autonomous cares against arguments by Harry Frankfurt that our decisions would be arbitrary and our will too empty to be autonomous unless we each discover personal limits to what we can care about that derive from our volitionally necessary cares for some ideals, persons, goals or projects. While this argument is related to the general "luck problem" for libertarians, Frankfurt’s contentions depend on more specific psychological claims that some kinds of leeway-liberty are autonomy-undermining. I respond that liberty concerning one's most basic cares or identity-defining commitments appears problematic to Frankfurt because he lacks an adequate conception of how cares are formed. His conclusions can be avoided if (a) values and norms can be apprehended by agents and rationally guide the setting of new final ends, or the formation of new cares (b) without already motivating the agent by connection to natural desires or standing commitments (as Humean versions of reasons-internalism require). Put positively, as Kant and Kierkegaard held, human beings form “selves” or practical identities by way of “projective motivation” – a volitional process, distinct from instant decision, in which we generate new motivation in response to apparently justifying considerations. While rational commitment to some norms may be inherent in the constitutive conditions of personhood, this must not be conflated with volitional commitment to the same norms. The possibility of this model shows that Frankfurt's arguments for volitionally necessities fail; the projective account also offers a better way of explaining the volitional identification involved in cares, and the factors involved in the accessibility of options to an agent's capacity for choice.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See the useful summary of objections to early hierarchical theories of identification in James S. Taylor (2005b).
- 3.
- 4.
Most contemporary analytic authors have instead called them “causal” or “historical” or “procedural” conditions, but these terms have ambiguities that can lead to confusion. For example, “procedural” is also used as the opposite of “substantive” to indicate that no particular content in the agent’s values or motives is required for autonomous agency. A “historical” theory sometimes means an actual-sequence model requiring nothing beyond actual capacities or dispositions to respond differently when circumstances change, as opposed to powers to bring about alternative sequences of events. And the label “causal” is sometimes used for theories that do not require decisions as a special kind of agency to play any crucial role in the origin of autonomous intentions. By contrast, the term “source” has no such connotations; thus calling something a theory of “sources” for autonomy does not connote particular positions on these contested questions.
- 5.
The term “aseity” comes from Anselm, but it means the same thing as what Aquinas would call a “primary cause” or “first mover” or (in Kant’s terms) initiating a new causal chain. In the past, it was often assumed (e.g. by Aristotle, Anselm, and Kant) that the only way to exhibit aseity was to have leeway-liberty. Yet recent analytic work on free will has pressed the point that these ideas are at least conceptually distinct (see Hunt and Pereboom).
- 6.
See Davenport (2006).
- 7.
- 8.
See Susan Wolf on “deep responsibility”: Wolf (1990), ch. 2, 42–44. Frankfurt also recognizes identification and caring as active processes through which we become responsible for our own character; see Frankfurt (1987) (reprinted in Frankfurt 1988). “Inner character” on my account is largely constituted by one’s higher-order volitions, or the cares of which they are components; it is distinct from various traits, behavioral dispositions, emotional tendencies and other observable features of one’s personality with which one may not identify at all. The first two chapters of my future book on autonomy will defend in detail the idea that personal autonomy should be interpreted as the freedom-condition of deep responsibility for self (character, or practical identity).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
For example, Marilyn Friedman understands the thesis this way when she rejects the claim that one cannot autonomously will to give up one’s autonomy. See Friedman (2003).
- 12.
This problem was evident in Christine Korsgaard’s deduction of the moral law in The Sources of Normativity (1996, 105) and it remains unsolved in Korsgaard’s Self-Constitution (2009), 31–32; in my view, Korsgaard conflates a being-bound-by-norms that is constitutive of agency with following these norms (at least to a considerable extent) or acquiring moral worth on a contrastive scale. Thus immoral action remains only a simulacrum of real action on her new account. But these problems of moral theory are not my present focus.
- 13.
This construal may make it harder to argue for the constitutivist thesis, but it avoids the fatal error of ruling out autonomous immoral action and autonomous rejection of morality. Note that Kant, Locke, and Rousseau all regard implicit commitments to the inviolable value of our own freedom as the reason why liberty is “inalienable” and slavery cannot be chosen autonomously. Their claim is that slavery cannot rationally be chosen, and therefore such a choice cannot express the agent’s rightful authority – not that it is psychologically impossible to choose it. An analogous idea in the realm of collective autonomy holds that it is rationally impossible for a democratic people to choose its own destruction or to choose to enslave persons: a people or legislature representing them violates the moral presuppositions of its own authority to legislate in these choices. But again this is not psychologically impossible; legislatures have passed such laws, even if critics are justified as regarding them as null and void of authority because they are self-undermining ab initio.
- 14.
See Davenport (2002).
- 15.
See the Introduction to this volume. The conference from which several papers in this volume derive offered this thesis and its denial as two basic positions held today, whereas my approach seeks to show that a third way is possible.
- 16.
This literature began with Harry Frankfurt (1969), reprinted in Frankfurt (1988). In later versions of such arguments by John Fischer, David Hunt, Derk Pereboom, Michael McKenna and others, actual-sequence overdetermination cases are also introduced as counterexamples to PAP-type principles.
- 17.
See van Inwagen (1986), 16 and 126ff, esp. 147.
- 18.
- 19.
See R.J. Wallace (2006), ch.7, esp. 157 and 163.
- 20.
Michael Sandel (1982, 1998), 62. Compare this passage: in the face of too many demands and desires, I am unable to “mark out the limits or the boundaries of my self, incapable of saying where my identity ends and the world of attributes, aims, and desires begins. I am disempowered in the sense of lacking any clear grip on who, in particular, I am” (57).
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
Frankfurt (2004), 16.
- 26.
Frankfurt (1982), in Frankfurt (1988), 84; my italics. Thus it seems likely that Frankfurt developed the concept of care to avoid the regress objection to second-order volitions by explaining their inherent (nonderivative or non-conferred) authority. Yet unfortunately Frankfurt did not go on to explain volitional identification in terms of caring. He closely associates these concepts, for example in saying that caring about “what we are” is synonymous with our forming higher-order volitions, or avoiding wantonness (1987, 163). But he keeps these concepts distinct because caring establishes dynamic integration over time while identification establishes structural or time-slice integration among motives of different orders. His later satisfaction-analysis of identification (Frankfurt 1992) prevents him from considering that perhaps synchronic integration requires diachronic (historical/developmental) integration, and leads him to say that “identification does not entail caring,” (Frankfurt 2002a, in Buss and Overton 2002, 161), though he affirms the converse, and reaffirmed in an April 2011 conversation with me that he accepts that caring involves volitional identification.
- 27.
Frankfurt (1994), reprinted in Frankfurt (1999), 129 and 137. Compare this to Frankfurt’s claim that by ordering our first-order motives and rejecting some outright, we “create a self out of the raw materials of inner life” (1987, 170). Here “raw materials” corresponds to “elementary psychic data” in the 1994 essay.
- 28.
Frankfurt (1994), 137. This is one of several places in which Frankfurt simply rejects one of the two main “source problems” noted at the start of my essay; he is not concerned that higher-order volitions could result from manipulation. In Frankfurt (1975), he insists that even direct implantation of higher-order volitions cannot undermine their inherent authority for the agent (see Frankfurt 1988, 54), and he has stuck to this highly counterintuitive view.
- 29.
Frankfurt (1982), 86.
- 30.
Ibid, 87
- 31.
Gary Watson (2002), in Buss and Overton (2002), 133.
- 32.
Ibid, 142.
- 33.
This distinction is my own attempt to explain differences that puzzle Watson, which he (incorrectly in my view) tries to explain by dividing identification and caring, and allowing conflicting cares but not conflicting identifications to coexist (see Watson 2002, 146–48). He does so on the basis of Frankfurt’s analysis of identification in terms of satisfaction in “The Faintest Passion” (see Watson (2002), 159 n.58). The trouble with this is that Frankfurt has argued persuasively that in cases of “volitional ambiguity,” agents can have conflicting identifications that are thus not wholehearted, but not wanton either: See Frankfurt (1987), 165. As Watson notes, this is incompatible with the satisfaction-analysis, but I think it is the latter that should be rejected.
- 34.
See Frankfurt (1988b), 187–88, and Frankfurt 1994, 138. Yet Frankfurt’s case of the unfortunate mother who tries but cannot give up her beloved child for the child’s own good is an instance of volitional necessity of the first, opposable kind: see Frankfurt (1982), 90; (1993), 111; and (2002), 163–65. My distinction between weaker and stronger volitional necessities is related to Velleman’s distinction between limits to chooseable options that result from motives with which the agent identifies corrigibly (since he “could potentially withhold his reflective endorsement from this constraint”) and limits that result from identifications which are themselves not voluntarily changeable by the agent (see Velleman 2002, 94). However, I think the regress Velleman sees looming in this idea reflects conceptual confusion about what gives identifications their authority.
- 35.
This is a particular application of what I’ve called the “Principle of Robust Alternatives with Tracing:” see Davenport (2006), 79. Again, I use the phrase elements of agency as shorthand for active psychic states or processes such as deliberating with a view to forming intentions, making decisions, having intentions, acting on intentions or trying to act on them, voluntarily omitting to act, having dispositions formed through repeated decisions, higher-order willing, and “caring” in Frankfurt’s sense.
- 36.
- 37.
Watson (2002), 139 and 141.
- 38.
- 39.
This could happen in at least three ways: (A) They could directly intend something in order to oppose their current care; (B) they could intend something, such as a line of questioning or experiment, that they know risks jeopardizing their current care; or (C) they could intend something they reasonably expect, as an unintended side-effect, to undermine their current care. Note that strong volitional necessity was distinguished by its incompatibility with (A) and (B); my interpretation does not make it incompatible with (C).
- 40.
Frankfurt (1994), 138.
- 41.
The concept of “ground projects” that an agent would be willing to die for comes from Bernard Williams (1976), (reprinted in Williams 1981, esp. 11–13) but it is similar to the concept of volitionally necessary cares. The concepts are not quite identical for two reasons: first, one VN-care might have a lower priority than another that we must stay alive to serve; second, Williams seems to allow that we could change our ground projects, though he does not explain how.
- 42.
Frankfurt (1994, 132). Compare Lewis Hinchman on the tensions between Kantian autonomy as based on the universal human motives distinctive of personhood and contemporary “romantic-individualist” conceptions of autonomy as based on whatever is essential and distinctive of the single agent: see Hinchman (1996), 501–03.
- 43.
Compare John Rawls (1971), 40. Note the parallel between Sandel’s critique of Rawls’s conception of autonomy and Frankfurt’s critique of Kant’s conception.
- 44.
On this point, see David J. Velleman (2002), 93.
- 45.
Frankfurt (1994), 141. Frankfurt also claims, controversially, that moral norms will only count as autonomous motives for us if we care about being moral.
- 46.
Ibid, 138
- 47.
Ibid. Compare p.135: “the lover cannot help being selflessly devoted to his beloved. In this respect, he is not [negatively] free. On the contrary, he is in the very nature of the case captivated by his beloved and by his love. The will of the lover is rigorously constrained.” In both these passages, Frankfurt seems to equate “love” either with all VN-caring or with a subset of VN-cares such as those with individual persons as their objects. However, it is then puzzling that Frankfurt says care-love is compatible with volitional ambiguity or conflicting cares (138). Unless “loves” are not all VN, this must be a mistake, since a VN-care seems to require that the higher-order volitions involved in it are wholehearted. I might fail to live up to my love for a friend because of the motive-force of alienated desires (e.g. my envy); but if my caring for her is volitionally necessary for me, then surely I cannot have a higher-order volition opposed to my friendly emotions and desires (or a care in which it is embedded, eg. caring about my complete independence). For that would make action contrary to my friend’s welfare quite “thinkable for me;” I could even act autonomously on my opposing care. Frankfurt says that I can “negligently or willfully or akratically fail to do” what my love commands (p.141); but on his account, it is hard to see how I can “willfully” act contrary to a volitionally necessary care.
- 48.
This is the most charitable interpretation I can find, since Frankfurt does not seem to claim that it is volitionally necessary for some potential “persons” to remain wanton; thus he can only mean that if we develop cares, they will have a certain character.
- 49.
This is what I call the ‘Elimination Argument’ in Groundwork I 402.
- 50.
- 51.
Frankfurt (1971), 20–21. Notice that Frankfurt clearly denies that “freedom of the will” in his sense is necessary for moral responsibility for particular actions (which, on his view, only requires that we do not alienate the first-order desire(s) on which we are freely acting). By contrast, many scholars use “freedom of the will” to stand for what I call moral freedom, meaning whatever freedom or control is required for responsibility for decisions and actions.
- 52.
Frankfurt (1987), 163.
- 53.
Ibid, 168.
- 54.
Ibid, 170: “the desire is in the fullest sense his…”
- 55.
Frankfurt (1988b), 177.
- 56.
Ibid, pp.178–79. This argument borrows from Williams’s famous critique of utilitarianism, but it is also supported by Derek Parfit’s argument that strict consequentialism (C) can be self-effacing: see Parfit 1987.
- 57.
Ibid, 184
- 58.
Ibid, 187–88.
- 59.
Ibid, 188.
- 60.
There are problems particular to the Integrity Argument that I’m skipping over. For example, it seems that an agent might be wilfully wanton, even caring to remain spontaneous or not defined by cares for concrete human ends. If he found it unthinkable to abandon this project of aestheticism, could he not show integrity in his loyalty to it? The best answer to this objection would invoke objective measures of what it worth caring about and deny that the willful wanton’s project is worthwhile or meaningful, but this kind of answer is not open to Frankfurt.
- 61.
Frankfurt (1993), 108, following John Stuart Mill’s sense of ‘individuality.’
- 62.
Ibid, 109.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Ibid, 110.
- 65.
Ibid, p.115. Frankfurt’s use of the term “ideals” for nonconsequentialist values that agents take as inviolable probably comes from R.M. Hare’s similar use of the term in Hare (1963), ch.8.
- 66.
Notice that this requirement is weaker than the demand for a complete contrastive explanation of why option A was elected over B.
- 67.
On the nature of absolute volitional necessities, see Frankfurt (1993), 112.
- 68.
- 69.
Ibid, pp.76–77.
- 70.
- 71.
Frankfurt (1993), 110–11.
- 72.
See R. Jay Wallace’s extensive and insightful discussion in Wallace (2006), chs. 1 and 4. Also see my review essay on this book online at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
- 73.
See Davenport (2007), ch.14.
- 74.
Yet this existential model certainly does not require that all the significance of practical reasons, values, and norms in general is accessible to the agent independently of the state of her will or prior to her caring; quite a bit of what matters or makes different cares and life-goals worthwhile may become apparent (or fully clear) only once existential autonomy has already begun and the agent has projected some commitments. That does not entail that caring grounds these values; it may only mean that caring engagement increases epistemic access to certain values.
- 75.
- 76.
Charles Taylor (2007), ch.8, 299 and 303.
- 77.
Ibid, 621. For a similar diagnosis of a young person “disoriented” by loss of confidence in values that could ground choice, see Johnston (1994), 96.
- 78.
See Davenport (2013) (forthcoming).
- 79.
See Viktor Frankl’s account of self-transcending values that ground cares in Frankl (1963).
- 80.
Unfortunately Frankfurt’s subjectivist conception of the relation between caring and values probably makes it impossible for him to accept this version of his emptiness argument.
- 81.
Kinsey, dir. Bill Condon (20th Century Fox, 2004).
- 82.
- 83.
In other words, we no longer have well-behaved modal operators for categories 6–9.
- 84.
- 85.
For instance, the American military officers who “refused to carry out the procedures for launching nuclear missiles” when ordered to do so in what they believed was not a drill (Frankfurt 1988b, 182) may simply have found the prospect much more difficult than they thought, especially without certainty that America was under nuclear attack.
- 86.
Frankfurt (1988b), 182.
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Davenport, J.J. (2013). Norm-Guided Formation of Cares Without Volitional Necessity – A Response to Frankfurt. In: Kühler, M., Jelinek, N. (eds) Autonomy and the Self. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 118. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4789-0_3
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