Free will – philosophical explanations

This is part 3 in the series of articles about the classic problem of free will. Part 1 argued that free will is valuable because it is the treasure that everybody wants to take away, especially people from the PR, advertising and marketing worlds. Part 2 looked at aspects of the hard problem. In part 3 we will have at look at the philosophical explanations of two American philosophers, Robert Nozick (1938-2002) and Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023).

Harry Frankfurt was a philosopher at Princeton University, Robert Nozick a philosopher at Harvard University. Nozick’s doctoral advisor Carl Gustav Hempel was a German philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. because his wife was of Jewish ancestry. Like Daniel Dennett and Gilbert Ryle he tackled the big, fundamental questions using ordinary language philosophy, for example in his book “Philosophical Explanations” from 1981. It has a chapter about “Free Will” which Daniel liked. Let us have a look at it.

Nozick argues that in each moment we try to detect the best possible action in the current situation, given the hierarchy of desires, principles, and intentions which reflect our personality and our character. He says “we always do what we most prefer” and calls this “tracking bestness” [1], which means to detect the best choice of action giving a system of values. What we perceive as good and bad depends of course on our emotions, but also on the social and moral systems that have shaped us, i.e. by our character.

The character of a person is defined by a hierarchy of desires, directives, principles, and intentions which reflect the personality and the character of this very person. An altruistic and pious person for instance will value moral laws higher than a selfish and vicious person. What you care about – this could be beauty for an artist, honesty for a scientist, accurateness for a perfectionist, or fairness for an altruist – is essentially your self, encoded in a hierarchy of volitions. The self is a complex structure that channels causal chains in a way that reflects the person’s identity. Nozick says “Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality” [2].

Free will according to Nozick is possible because there is a connection between the agent’s self and the action. The key is here the process of reflecting, endorsing, and identifying the desires and principles which guiding the own actions. By agreeing with the higher-order directives and principles that control the causal chain of action an agent can identify itself with the source of the acts. Nozick calls this “acts in equilibrium”. If an agent does not endorse the hierarchy it can refuse to act. Nozick describes this situation as “acts in disequilibrium”.

Harry Frankfurt calls such a refusal to act a second-order volition against that first-order desire [3]. He argues we do not just have desires, but care about which desires move us. What makes us persons is that we do not just have desires, but we are able to care about which desires move us. He calls it a second-order volition, and describes a second-order volition as a desire that a certain desire be one’s will. He regards nonhuman animals and very young children without second-order volitions as agents which follow their instincts and desires blindly (either without being aware of them or without questioning them), and calls them “wantons”.

For Nozick, freedom of the will is basically the freedom to choose what kind of persons we want to become and which way we want to go in our life. We can shape our own character and form our personality gradually through our actions and choices, and this self-forming capacity for conscious self-formation is what makes us morally responsible and eventually free. The more our personality grows in a certain direction, the more it shapes our actions in this way.

This makes only sense if we can choose what persons we want to be. At least in principle it is possible, because we can certainly more or less influence who we become, but of course it can be difficult in practice to change the own character for all the reasons mentioned in part 2 and because self-control is not an easy problem [4]. Nozick calls the process of choosing a person we want to be “self-choosing”. He says “the fullest autonomy is had only by a being whose essence is self-choosing”.

Robert Kane calls the essential parts of this process “self-forming actions” in his book “The Significance of Free Will” [5]. “Self-forming actions” (SFA) help to form the character of the agent and help to set new directives or intentions. Kane writes “SFAs must be ‘will-setting'” [5]. Both Nozick and Kane agree that even if our actions are determined by our character, these actions can be free to a certain extent if we are able to shape and form our own character. These “self-made selves” (in the words of Daniel Dennett [6]) explain how we can be moved by “causal chains of events” and yet have the freedom of choice.

Nozick says what matters is how the self stands in relation to the causal chains that control our action. When the agent reflects, endorses, and identifies with the desires and principles guiding the action, and it “acts in equilibrium”, then there is a close connection between the self and the action.

Harry Frankfurt says this equilibrium is reached when your first-order desires align with your second-order volitions – i.e. when you want what you want to want – and then we are authentically and wholeheartedly ourself. He argues what we care about is important: we have free will because we care about our will. Frankfurt says “A person’s free will is free only if he is free to have the will he wants” [3]. Nozick would agree.

[1] Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick, Harvard Univ. Press, 1981
[2] The Nature of Rationality, Robert Nozick, Princeton Univ. Press, 1993
[3] The importance of what we care about: philosophical essays, Harry G. Frankfurt, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998
[4] Surrounding Self-Control, Alfred R. Mele (Ed), Oxford Univ. Press, 2020
[5] The Significance of Free Will, Robert Kane, Oxford Univ. Press, 1999
[6] Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room – The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, The MIT Press, 1984

( The Unsplash photo of a trail is from user Erin O’Brien, the Lightbulb picture is from Pixaybay user qimono )