Summary Of Free Will And The Concept Of A Person By Harry Frankfurt

In “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, Harry Frankfurt puts forth his belief that free will is dictated by the alignment of our first and second order desires. While Susan Wolf agrees that desires are necessary components of free will, she argues in “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” that an individual must also be sane to possess free will. After thorough reading and thoughtful reasoning, I have ratiocinated that Frankfurt’s argument on free will aligns with logic more precisely than Wolf’s.

In his piece about free will, Frankfurt explicates his understanding of the origins of human free will. He argues that we are free as long as our first order volitions (actions) and second order desires coincide. He describes first order desires as “simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another” (Frankfurt 441). He believes that all sentient beings experience this. Second order desires is the desire to want to have a particular desire. The second order desire is what gives humans, as opposed to other

In fact, it seemed that her entire argument focused on the conditions needed to be a responsible agent, rather than a free-willed agent. She critiques arguments based on the deep-self view of free will for not setting conditions that requires an individual to be responsible, but the arguments were not about responsibility, they were about free will. In the example she used, she stated that JoJo is not held responsible for his actions, but he is still free to do what he wants. Not being held responsible has nothing to do with being free to make your own choices. Even individual who suffer from psychosis are free to do as they please within the realm of their distorted perception (granted that during their psychotic episode they do not perceive that they are being forcibly or violently