One of the most influential of contemporary philosophers, Harry Frankfurt has made major contributions to the philosophy of action, moral psychology, and the study of Descartes. This collection of essays complements an earlier collection published by Cambridge, The Importance of What We Care About. Some of the essays develop lines of thought found in the earlier volume. They deal in general with foundational metaphysical and epistemological issues concerning Descartes, moral philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. Some bear upon topics in political philosophy (...) and religion. (shrink)

In Freedom Within Reason, Susan Wolf charts a course between incompatibilism, or the notion that freedom and responsibility require causal and metaphysical independence from the impersonal forces of nature, and compatibilism, or the notion that people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. Wolf argues that some of the forces which are beyond our control are friends to freedom rather than enemies of it, enabling us to see the world for what it is. (...) The freedom we want is not independence from the world, but independence from the forces that prevent us from choosing how to live in the light of a sufficient appreciation of the world. (shrink)

'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that modern (...) subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain the good. The modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as its critics contend, but has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life. He concludes that the modern identity, and its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, is far richer in moral sources that its detractors allow. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defence of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics. (shrink)

How can we motivate ourselves to do what we think we ought? How can we deliberate about personal values and priorities? Bennett Helm argues that standard philosophical answers to these questions presuppose a sharp distinction between cognition and conation that undermines an adequate understanding of values and their connection to motivation and deliberation. Rejecting this distinction, Helm argues that emotions are fundamental to any account of value and motivation, and he develops a detailed alternative theory both of emotions, desires and (...) evaluative judgements and of their rational interconnections. The result is an innovative theory of practical rationality and of how we can control not only what we do but also what we value and who we are as persons. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive, systematic theory of moral responsibility. The authors explore the conditions under which individuals are morally responsible for actions, omissions, consequences, and emotions. The leading idea in the book is that moral responsibility is based on 'guidance control'. This control has two components: the mechanism that issues in the relevant behavior must be the agent's own mechanism, and it must be appropriately responsive to reasons. The book develops an account of both components. The authors go on (...) to offer a sustained defense of the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism. (shrink)

While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most ...

Virtually any appraisal of a person’s welfare, integrity, or moral status, as well as the moral and political theories built on such appraisals, will rely crucially on the presumption that her preferences and values are in some important sense her own. In particular, the nature and value of political freedom is intimately connected with the presupposition that actions one is left free to do flow from desires and values that are truly an expression of the ‘self-government’ of the agent. However, (...) we all know that no person is self-made in the sense of being a fully formed and intact ‘will’ blossoming out of nowhere. Our values and preferences are explained by essential reference to a variety of influences that have come to bear on our development throughout our personal histories. What is needed, then, is to establish an account of self-determination or autonomy that would help determine just when and if the values and preferences we find ourselves with deserve the centrality that moral and political theories place on them. (shrink)

John Christman, in 'Autonomy and Personal History,' advances a novel genetic or historical account of individual autonomy.1 He formulates 'the conditions of the [i.e., his] new model of autonomy' as follows: (i) A person Pis autonomous relative to some desireD if it is the case that P did not resist the development of D when attending to this process of development, or P would not have resisted that development had P attended to the process; (ii) The lack of resistance to (...) the development of D did not take place (or would not have) under the influence of factors that inhibit self-reflection; and (iii) The self-reflection involved in condition (i) [sic] is (minimally) rational and involves no self-deception. (11) Although Christman makes a telling case for the relevance of personal history to personal autonomy, I shall argue that he has gone too far in that direction. (shrink)

Itself a pleasure to read, this book is full of inventive arguments and conveys Millgram's bold thesis with elegance and force.

Frankfurt argues that self-love is the purest and -- paradoxically, perhaps -- most disinterested form of love.

R. Jay Wallace argues in this book that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation, and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he (...) argues, is to be subject to these reactive emotions in one's dealings with that person. Developing this theme with unusual sophistication, he offers a new interpretation of the reactive emotions and traces their role in our practices of blame and moral sanction. With this account in place, Wallace advances a powerful and sustained argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behavior accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibility. Rigorously argued, eminently readable, this book touches on issues of broad concern to philosophers, legal theorists, political scientists, and anyone with an interest in the nature and limits of responsibility. (shrink)

Drawing on recent cognitive theories of the emotions, this article develops an account of critical reflection as requiring emotional flexibility and involving the ability to envisage alternative reasons for action. The focus on the role of emotions in critical reflection, and in agents' resistance to reflection, suggests the need to move beyond an introspective to a more social and relational conception of the process of reflection. It also casts new light on the intractable problem of explaining how oppressive socialisation impairs (...) the capacity for autonomy. (shrink)

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where (...) accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices. -/- At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one’s own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are. (shrink)

Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments offers an account of moral responsibility. It addresses the question: what are the forms of capacity or ability that render us morally accountable for the things we do? A traditional answer has it that the conditions of moral responsibility include freedom of the will, where this in turn involves the availability of robust alternative possibilities. I reject this answer, arguing that the conditions of moral responsibility do not include any condition of alternative possibilities. In the (...) terms that have become familiar, the book thus defends a compatibilist account of moral responsibility. (shrink)

How can any of my actions genuinely be my own? How can they be more than just intentional performances, with whatever investment of my will that involves, but also belong to me in the special way that makes me autonomous in performing them? How, in other words, can any of my actions be my own in such a way that they arise from or manifest my capacities for self-governance? -/- The literature on autonomous agency employs a number of metaphors to (...) characterize the difference between merely intentional action and action that is, in the fullest sense, the agent's own. Harry Frankfurt's metaphors are among the most vivid and compelling. A person who acts autonomously genuinely “participates” in the operation of her will, as opposed to being “estranged” from herself or being “a helpless or passive bystander to the forces that move” her. Agents who act intentionally but without autonomy do not do what they “really want” to do; their effective volitions are “external to” or “outside” them. The pervasive notion in this literature that persons who are autonomous in acting act upon wills that are fully their own or that really belong to them suggests an initial answer to the questions with which the chapter opened. I am autonomous in acting just when I take ownership of my actions, or at least have the unimpeded capability to take ownership of what I do and regularly exercise that capability. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of freedom typically fail to capture an important kind of freedom—freedom to change what one cares about—that is central to our understanding of what it is to be a person. This paper articulates this kind of freedom more clearly, distinguishing it from freedom of action and freedom of the will, and gives an account of how it is possible. Central to this account is an understanding of the role of emotions in determining what we value, thus motivating a (...) rethinking of the importance of emotions in the mental lives of persons. (shrink)

This paper presents a conception of the self partially in terms of a particular notion of preference. It develops a coherentist account of when one's preferences are "authorized", or sanctioned as one's own, and presents a coherence theory of autonomous action. The view presented solves certain problems with hierarchical accounts of freedom, such as Harry Frankfurt's.

Leading accounts of personal autonomy are content-neutral: they insist that there are no a priori constraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind of (...) person who acts at the command of others. I define myself as a slave and endorse those attitudes and preferences. My autonomy consists in being a slave.” ’ John Christman similarly claims that ‘any desire, no matter how evil, self-sacrificing, or slavish it might be’ could be autonomously formed. The same seems to apply to Harry Frankfurt's view, that actions are autonomous if they stem from second-order volitions that reflect what the agent cares about; it puts no constraints on the content of what a person might care about. All of these accounts hold that the mere content of a desire or value is never sufficient to rule out that it might be autonomously acted on by someone. (shrink)

This book has an ambitious aim—to make convincing the rejection of the hard and fast cognitive–conative divide currently so prevalent in philosophy of mind and moral psychology. Only such a rejection, Helm believes, can solve—or dissolve—the two major problems of practical reason. The ‘motivational problem’ is ‘a puzzle about the connection between our choosing something as the outcome of deliberation and our being motivated to pursue it’ (p. 1); the ‘deliberative problem’ concerns ‘how deliberation about value is possible’ (p. 11) (...) given that ‘our concept of value is pulled in seemingly opposed directions of objectivity and subjectivity’ (p. 200). Helm ‘suggests’ in chapter one, and argues with respect to particular attempts to solve these problems in later chapters, that acceptance of the cognitive-conative divide makes them quite intractable. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2001, given by Harry Frankfurt, an American philosopher.

Philosophers’ intuitions about what constitutes autonomy are largely driven by the exemplars or paradigms that we recognize. There are indefinitely many exemplars, inasmuch as there are relatively private personae that serve as autonomy exemplars such as our parents, third grade teacher, or, for the megalomaniac, oneself. But among Western philosophers there are doubtless some exemplars that are widely shared and broadly influential. Philosophical exemplars include Socrates, Aristotle’s magnanimous man, Kant’s noumenal self that is perfectly attuned to the moral law, Mill’s (...) anti-authoritarian non-conformist, Marx’s manin-society, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Sartre’s authentic youth who must decide whether to join the French resistance or stay at home for the sake of his mother. Exemplars from outside of philosophy include Antigone, Christ, Faust, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Winston Churchill, and even figures from popular culture such as the baseball player Ted Williams, the free spirited flower children of the 1960s, and practically any character that John Wayne ever played. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, _Practical Reflection_ develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the foundation (...) of morals. This new edition of _Practical Reflection_ contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. _ _ _ _. (shrink)

Essays discuss reason, self-control, self-definition, time, cause and effect, accidents, and responsibility, and explain why people want free will.

Metaphysicians, ethical theorists and philosophers of law squabble endlessly about what it is for a person to act — or perhaps even to ‘will’ — more or less freely. A vital issue in this controversy is how we should analyse two obvious but surprisingly problematical contrasts. The first antithesis is between things we do because we are forced, and deeds we perform because we want to — sometimes after having discovered preponderant reasons in their favour. The other polarity is more (...) general. In most situations, if I act on my desire, I act more freely than if I had not had the desire. But what if my attitude is the product of childhood conditioning — or later brainwashing, brain surgery, hypnosis, behaviour modification, alcoholisim, narcotics addiction, neurosis, psychosis or worse? Then isn't my autonomy diminished? What is it about these latter desires, or their origin, that differentiates them from their unthreatening congeners? (shrink)

This dissertation develops an approach to personal autonomy, understood as the capacity to lead one's life in a way that is one's own. Through a critical engagement with the work of Harry Frankfurt, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas, I argue that there are four intersubjective aspects of autonomy. ;First, since critical reflection on one's desires, commitments, values, etc. involves accessing them interpretively, it is subject to hermeneutic constraints of public intelligibility. To understand one's commitments as worthwhile thus requires the capacity (...) to employ shared meanings. ;Second, because critical reflection is open to error, the capacity to be self-guiding must include the reflexive capacity to correct one's critical reflection as well. If this is not to generate a regress, critical reflection must be understood as pointing beyond the confines of the reflecting agent. I argue for a nonfoundationalist, contextualist, discursive conception of the capacity for self-correction, in terms of intersubjective procedures of justification and the capacity to participate in them. ;Third, the reasons for being personally autonomous should be understood primarily in terms of the pragmatic presuppositions of social interaction. Specifically, it is partly constitutive of social cooperation that agents assume that others could, if called upon, give accounts for their actions. ;Fourth, being autonomous is inseparable from the "ongoingly accomplished" social recognition of one's ability to provide warrants for one's choices. Outside of any pragmatic social context, there is no metaphysical, transcontextual property in virtue of which agents are autonomous. ;I develop this view via discussions of Frankfurt, Taylor, and Habermas. I reconstruct Frankfurt's emerging view and criticize it for underestimating the importance of making sense of what one cares about. Though I defend Taylor's view that critical reflection involves self-interpretation that is transformative and yet subject to subject-transcending constraints, I criticize his ontological understanding of these constraints as conflicting with intuitions about authentic individuality. In my discussion of Habermas, I offer a pragmatic and contextualist reading of his theory of communicative action, which makes it plausible to view "ethical-existential" claims as admitting of discursive justification, thereby opening up space for the view sketched above. (shrink)

Among the numerous conceptions of autonomy, three are particularly important: Kant's notion of humans' being subject, and subject only, to moral laws they gave themselves, Frankfurt's idea of persons' willing and acting deriving from the essential character of their wills, and the popular conception of persons' being master over whether others do or do not certain things to them. Kant's moral conception of autonomy, it is argued, is untenable because the moral character of a law and its self-givenness are incompatible. (...) Frankfurt's idea suffers from the fact that we cannot give substance to talk of the essential character of one's will. The third conception is practically irrelevant: there is no principle requiring people to be master over what others do to them. Thus autonomy may have to be dropped from our self-conception. To some this will appear a grave loss. In fact it is not. (shrink)