Member-only story
Wholeheartedly Choosing and Pursuing Desire
On Harry G. Frankfurt’s ‘The Importance of What We Care About’
The philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt (b. 1929) collected 13 essays—12 reprints, one new—in The Importance of What We Care About (1988). ⬅️That’s my Bookshop affiliate link.
The essays are in chronological order with only a brief preface, which may inform us about Frankfurt’s personal evolution as a philosopher and writer, though readers must do our own work to piece together what it is we’re supposed to care about.
In the Preface, he says he’s focused on “metaphysics or…the philosophy of mind — for instance, how we are to conceptualize ourselves as persons, and what defines the identities we achieve.” He’ll be talking about free will, in the context of moral choices as well as other contexts.
The 13 Care-Abouts
They’re not necessarily 13 separate topics, but 13 essays written in different years.
“Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility” (1969)
Frankfurt’s position is: “A person may well be morally responsible for what he has done even though he could not have done otherwise.” More specifically, if a person freely decides to do something, and then someone comes along and makes them do the thing they’d already resolved to do, they’re still morally responsible for doing it. That’s because the threat or coercion doesn’t “explain why they did what they did.” They would have done it even had they not been threatened.
“Freedom of the will and the concept of a person” (1971)
Humans (and some non-human animals) merge mind and body, and lamentably there is no word for this kind of entity. Humans are unique because we have “second-order desires,” that is, we can want to want something. (Typically: We want to eat dessert, and we wish we wanted to eat something healthy.) A person can be “concerned with the desirability of his desires themselves”; it is “the question of what his will is to be.” Reason is a prerequisite to “becoming critically aware of his own will and of forming volitions of the second order,” and these second-order desires — driven by reason and…
