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Hi, I have an essay due in about a week. It is on certain readings that we had to read for class and they are stated in the first attachment. You must have prior knowledge of these readings before accepting, so please read the first attachment. The essay asignment says 2-3 pages but I’m fine with just 2 pages. The essay should be on only ONE of the four readings. The readings are also attached. Thank you.
Due Monday Nov. 25th by 11:59pm! (Late papers receive a full letter grade deduction for each day!)
Essay Assignment PHIL 2101
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You are hereby notified that your instructor has access to all submissions in SafeAssign, including drafts, and may at his/her discretion submit drafts and papers for plagiarism testing through SafeAssign. Please refer to . |
All essays should be 2-3 double-spaced pages in a standard font (I prefer Times New Roman) in 12-point type with 1-inch margins. Please be sure to include your name. ALL PAPERS MUST BE SUBMITTED ELECTRONICALLY through Blackboard in PDF format by Monday Nov, 25th @ 11:59pm! Late papers will receive a full letter-grade deduction for
each day
they are late!
***Please remember to cite all sources. In Chicago 16th Style (either N, NB, or AD)***
Chicago — http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html
Failure to do so would be a violation of academic integrity and result in a failing grade on the paper and possible further disciplinary action by the college and/or university (see syllabus for more information on academic honesty).
It is not necessary to do any outside research in order to complete this assignment. However, it is not acceptable to simply record your own thoughts on the matter. Use the selections we have read to argue your points and guide the discussion.
Choose and write about
ONE
of the following topics:
1. Ryle – Descartes Myth: Descartes proposes that he is a “thinking thing” intimately co-mingled with a body. What problems does Ryle have with this picture? What is a category mistake, and why does Ryle think that Descartes, and those who follow him, make one with respect to minds and bodies? Do you agree with Ryle or Descartes?
2. Nagel – What is it like to be a bat?: Nagel argues that a reduction of the mental is impossible, at least presently. Why? How does mental life work under Nagel’s account? How is it connected to the brain and body? Does this seem plausible?
3. Ayer – Freedom and Necessity: What does Ayer think about determinism? How is determinism related to moral responsibility, for Ayer? How does Ayer characterize freedom? What does this mean for the relation of determinism to free will? Do you find this a satisfying theory?
4. Frankfurt – Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person: It has been argued that freedom of will is necessary for holding people morally responsible for their actions. Why might this be the case? What does Frankfurt think about this claim? What conditions does he think are necessary to hold someone morally responsible? Do you agree, or disagree?
Philosophical Review
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Author(s): Thomas Nagel
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 435-450
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
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WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
CONSCIOUSNESS is what makes the mind-body problem
really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions
of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong.
The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several
analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to
explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophys-
ical identification, or reduction.’ But the problems dealt with are
those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what
makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H20
problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the
lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem
or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.
Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern
science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples
of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to
brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for
explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for
what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different.
This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the
mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of
reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not
1 Examples are J. J. C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London,
i963); David K. Lewis, “An Argument for the Identity Theory,” Journal of
Philosophy, LXIII (i966), reprinted with addenda in David M. Rosenthal,
Materialism & the Mind-Body Problem (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., I971); Hilary
Putnam, “Psychological Predicates” in Capitan and Merrill, Art, Mind, &
Religion (Pittsburgh, i967), reprinted in Rosenthal, op. cit., as “The Nature of
Mental States”; D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London,
i968); D. C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London, I969). I have ex-
pressed earlier doubts in “Armstrong on the Mind,” Philosophical Review,
LXXIX (1970), 394-403; “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness,”
Synthese, 22 (I97I); and a review of Dennett, Journal of Philosophy, LXIX
(1972). See also Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity” in Davidson and
Harman, Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht, I972), esp. pp. 334-342;
and M. T. Thornton, “Ostensive Terms and Materialism,” The Monist, 56
(1972).
435
THOMAS NAGEL
help us to understand the relation between mind and body-
why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an expla-
nation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be.
Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much
less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. The most
important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phe-
nomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do
not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show
that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to
it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose,
but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual
future.
Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs
at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its
presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say
in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have
been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No
doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on
other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But
no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has
conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something
it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications
about the form of the experience; there may even (though I
doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism.
But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and
only if there is something that it is like to be that organism-
something it is like for the organism.
We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is
not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive
analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible
with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory
system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could
be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though
they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the
causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior-
2 Perhaps there could not actually be such robots. Perhaps anything complex
enough to behave like a person would have experiences. But that, if true, is a
fact which cannot be discovered merely by analyzing the concept of experience.
436
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
for similar reasonsA I do not deny that conscious mental states
and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional.
characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts
their analysis. Any reductionist program has to to be based on an
analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something
out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the
defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that.
fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there
is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible
when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be
extended to include consciousness. Without some idea, therefore
of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot;
know what is required of a physicalist theory.
While an account of the physical basis of mind must explain
many things, this appears to be the most difficult. It is impossible
to exclude the phenomenological features of experience from a,
reduction in the same way that one excludes the phenomenal
features of an ordinary substance from a physical or chemical
reduction of it-namely, by explaining them as effects on the
minds of human observers.4 If physicalism is to be defended, the
phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical
account. But when we examine their subjective character it:
seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every
subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single
point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical
theory will abandon that point of view.
Let me first try to state the issue somewhat more fully than by
referring to the relation between the subjective and the objec,
tive, or between the pour-soi and the en-soi. This is far from easy.
Facts about what it is like to be an X are very peculiar, so peculiar
that some may be inclined to doubt their reality, or the signifi.
cance of claims about them. To illustrate the connection between
3 It is not equivalent to that about which we are incorrigible, both because
we are not incorrigible about experience and because experience is present in
animals lacking language and thought, who have no beliefs at all about their
experiences.
4Cf. Richard Rorty, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories,” The
Review of Metaphysics, XIX (i965), esp. 37-38.
437
THOMAS NAGEL
subjectivity and a point of view, and to make evident the impor-
tance of subjective features, it will help to explore the matter in
relation to an example that brings out clearly the divergence
between the two types of conception, subjective and objective.
I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all,
they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have
experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience.
I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one
travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed
their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more
closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present
a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours
that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it
certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the
benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some
time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to
encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have expe-
rience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now
we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise)
perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation,
detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own
rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are
designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent
echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make
precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and
texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar,
though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation
to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose
that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.
This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like
to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit
us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case,5
and if not, what alternative methods there may be for under-
standing the notion.
5 By “our own case” I do not mean just “my own case,” but rather the
mentalistic ideas that we apply unproblematically to ourselves and other
human beings.
438
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
Our own experience provides the basic material for our imag-
ination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try
to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables
one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s
mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the sur-
rounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound
signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by
one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not
very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave
as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know
what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I
am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those re-
sources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by
imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining
segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some
combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.
To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a
bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences
would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On
the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached
to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysio-
logical constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees
be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution
enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future
stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best
evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only
knew what they were like.
So if extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea
of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incomple-
table. We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what
it is like. For example, we may ascribe general types of experience
on the basis of the animal’s structure and behavior. Thus we
describe bat sonar as a form of three-dimensional forward per-
ception; we believe that bats feel some versions of pain, fear,
hunger, and lust, and that they have other, more familiar types
of perception besides sonar. But we believe that these experiences
also have in each case a specific subjective character, which it is
beyond our ability to conceive. And if there is conscious life else-
439
THOMAS NAGEL
where in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be de-
scribable even in the most general experiential terms available to
us.6 (The problem is not confined to exotic cases, however, for it
exists between one person and another. The subjective character
of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth is not
accessible to me, for example, nor presumably is mine to him.
This does not prevent us each from believing that the other’s
experience has such a subjective character.)
If anyone is inclined to deny that we can believe in the exis-
tence of facts like this whose exact nature we cannot possibly
conceive, he should reflect that in contemplating the bats we are
in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians7
would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was
like to be us. The structure of their own minds might make it
impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong
to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is like to
be us: that only certain general types of mental state could be
,ascribed to us (perhaps perception and appetite would be concepts
common to us both; perhaps not). We know they would be wrong
to draw such a skeptical conclusion because we know what it is like
to be us. And we know that while it includes an enormous amount
of variation and complexity, and while we do not possess the
vocabulary to describe it adequately, its subjective charater is
highly specific, and in some respects describable in terms that can
be understood only by creatures like us. The fact that we cannot
expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed descrip-
tion of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to
dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have
experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own. It
would be fine if someone were to develop concepts and a theory
that enabled us to think about those things; but such an under-
standing may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our
nature. And to deny the reality or logical significance of what
6 Therefore the analogical form of the English expression “what it is like”
is misleading. It does not mean “what (in our experience) it resembles,” but
rather “how it is for the subject himself.”
Any intelligent extraterrestrial beings totally different from us.
440
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cogni-
tive dissonance.
This brings us to the edge of a topic that requires much more
discussion than I can give it here: namely, the relation between
facts on the one hand and conceptual schemes or systems of repre-
sentation on the other. My realism about the subjective domain
in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the
reach of human concepts. Certainly it is possible for a human
being to believe that there are facts which humans never will
possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend. Indeed,
it would be foolish to doubt this, given the finiteness of humanity’s
expectations. After all, there would have been transfinite numbers
even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before
Cantor discovered them. But one might also believe that there are
facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by
human beings, even if the species lasted forever-simply because
our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the
requisite type. This impossibility might even be observed by
other beings, but it is not clear that the existence of such beings,
or the possibility of their existence, is a precondition of the
significance of the hypothesis that there are humanly inaccessible
facts. (After all, the nature of beings with access to humanly
inaccessible facts is presumably itself a humanly inaccessible
fact.) Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us,
therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist
in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We
can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without
being able to state or comprehend them.
I shall not pursue this subject, however. Its bearing on the
topic before us (namely, the mind-body problem) is that it enables
us to make a general observation about the subjective character
of experience. Whatever may be the status of facts about what
it is like to be a human being, or a bat, or a Martian, these appear
to be facts that embody a particular point of view.
I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience
to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessi-
ble only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often
possible to take up a point of view other than one’s own, so the
44I
THOMAS NAGEL
comprehension of such facts is not limited to one’s own case.
There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly
objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality
of the other’s experience is. They are subjective, however, in the
sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible
only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription
to be able to adopt his point of view-to understand the ascrip-
tion in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The
more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less
success one can expect with this enterprise. In our own case we
occupy the relevant point of view, but we will have as much
difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we
approach it from another point of view as we would if we tried
to understand the experience of another species without taking
up its point of view.8
This bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts
of experience-facts about what it is like for the experiencing
organism-are accessible only from one point of view, then it is
a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed
in the physical operation of that organism. The latter is a domain
of objective facts par excellence-the kind that can be observed and
understood from many points of view and by individuals with
differing perceptual systems. There are no comparable imaginative
obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge about bat neurophysiol-
ogy by human scientists, and intelligent bats or Martians might
learn more about the human brain than we ever will.
8 It may be easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with the
aid of the imagination. For example, blind people are able to detect objects
near them by a form of sonar, using vocal clicks or taps of a cane. Perhaps if
one knew what that was like, one could by extension imagine roughly what it
was like to possess the much more refined sonar of a bat. The distance between
oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum.
Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only
partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser
degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is
remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is
like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is
rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat (and a fortiori
to know what it is like to be a bat) one must take up the bat’s point of view.
If one can take it up roughly, or partially, then one’s conception will also be
rough or partial. Or so it seems in our present state of understanding.
442
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
This is not by itself an argument against reduction. A Martian
scientist with no understanding of visual perception could under-
stand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena,
though he would never be able to understand the human con-
cepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud, or the place these things
occupy in our phenomenal world. The objective nature of the
things picked out by these concepts could be apprehended by
him because, although the concepts themselves are connected
with a particular point of view and a particular visual phenome-
nology, the things apprehended from that point of view are not:
they are observable from the point of view but external to it;
hence they can be comprehended from other points of view also,
either by the same organisms or by others. Lightning has an
objective character that is not exhausted by its visual appearance,
and this can be investigated by a Martian without vision. To be
precise, it has a more objective character than is revealed in its
visual appearance. In speaking of the move from subjective to
objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about
the existence of an end point, the completely objective intrinsic
nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to
reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direc-
tion in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding
a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as
one can from a strictly human viewpoint.9
In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection
with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult
to understand what could be meant by the objective character of
an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which
its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it
was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?
But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective
character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from
I The problem I am going to raise can therefore be posed even if the distinc-
tion between more subjective and more objective descriptions or viewpoints
can itself be made only within a larger human point of view. I do not accept
this kind of conceptual relativism, but it need not be refuted to make the point
that psychophysical reduction cannot be accommodated by the subjective-to-
objective model familiar from other cases.
443
THOMAS NAGEL
many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that
a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical
processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe
physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a
different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human
physiologist observe them from another point of view?1o
We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psycho-
physical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a
move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accu-
rate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by
reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points
of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in
terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of
its more general effects and of properties detectable by means
other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically
human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is
possible to follow this path because although the concepts and
ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially
applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual appa-
ratus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves-
toward which we have the phenomenal point of view. Therefore
we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about
the same things.
Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit the pattern.
The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no
sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more
objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning
the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another
that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it
appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human
experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point
of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings
that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective
character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one
10 The problem is not just that when I look at the “Mona Lisa,” my visual
experience has a certain quality, no trace of which is to be found by someone
looking into my brain. For even if he did observe there a tiny image of the
“Mona Lisa,” he would have no reason to identify it with the experience.
444
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity -that is, less
attachment to a specific viewpoint-does not take us nearer to
the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away
from it.
In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of
experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction;
for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in
air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up
another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we
leave behind remains unreduced. Members of radically different
species may both understand the same physical events in objec-
tive terms, and this does not require that they understand the
phenomenal forms in which those events appear to the senses of
members of the other species. Thus it is a condition of their refer-
ring to a common reality that their more particular viewpoints
are not part of the common reality that they both apprehend.
The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint
is omitted from what is to be reduced.
But while we are right to leave this point of view aside in
seeking a fuller understanding of the external world, we cannot
ignore it permanently, since it is the essence of the internal world,
and not merely a point of view on it. Most of the neobehaviorism
of recent philosophical psychology results from the effort to sub-
stitute an objective concept of mind for the real thing, in order
to have nothing left over which cannot be reduced. If we acknowl-
edge that a physical theory of mind must account for the sub-
jective character of experience, we must admit that no presently
available conception gives us a clue how this could be done.
The problem is unique. If mental processes are indeed physical
processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically,” to
11 The relation would therefore not be a contingent one, like that of a cause
and its distinct effect. It would be necessarily true that a certain physical state
felt a certain way. Saul Kripke (op. cit.) argues that causal behaviorist and
related analyses of the mental fail because they construe, e.g., “pain” as a
merely contingent name of pains. The subjective character of an experience
(“its immediate phenomenological quality” Kripke calls it [p. 340]) is the
essential property left out by such analyses, and the one in virtue of which it
is, necessarily, the experience it is. My view is closely related to his. Like
Kripke, I find the hypothesis that a certain brain state should necessarily have
445
THOMAS NAGEL
undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to
be the case remains a mystery.
What moral should be drawn from these reflections, and what
should be done next? It would be a mistake to conclude that
physicalism must be false. Nothing is proved by the inadequacy
of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis
of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position
we cannot understand because we do not at present have any
conception of how it might be true. Perhaps it will be thought
unreasonable to require such a conception as a condition of
understanding. After all, it might be said, the meaning of
physicalism is clear enough: mental states are states of the body;
mental events are physical events. We do not know which physical
states and events they are, but that should not prevent us from
a certain subjective character incomprehensible without further explanation.
No such explanation emerges from theories which view the mind-brain
relation as contingent, but perhaps there are other alternatives, not yet
discovered.
A theory that explained how the mind-brain relation was necessary would
still leave us with Kripke’s problem of explaining why it nevertheless appears
contingent. That difficulty seems to me surmountable, in the following way.
We may imagine something by representing it to ourselves either perceptually,
sympathetically, or symbolically. I shall not try to say how symbolic imagina-
tion works, but part of what happens in the other two cases is this. To imagine
something perceptually, we put ourselves in a conscious state resembling the
state we would be in if we perceived it. To imagine something sympathetically,
we put ourselves in a conscious state resembling the thing itself. (This method
can be used only to imagine mental events and states-our own or another’s.)
When we try to imagine a mental state occurring without its associated brain
state, we first sympathetically imagine the occurrence of the mental state: that
is, we put ourselves into a state that resembles it mentally. At the same time,
we attempt to perceptually imagine the non-occurrence of the associated
physical state, by putting ourselves into another state unconnected with the
first: one resembling that which we would be in if we perceived the non-
occurrence of the physical state. Where the imagination of physical features is
perceptual and the imagination of mental features is sympathetic, it appears
to us that we can imagine any experience occurring without its associated
brain state, and vice versa. The relation between them will appear contingent
even if it is necessary, because of the independence of the disparate types of
imagination.
(Solipsism, incidentally, results if one misinterprets sympathetic imagination
as if it worked like perceptual imagination: it then seems impossible to imagine
any experience that is not one’s own.)
446
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
understanding the hypothesis. What could be clearer than the
words “is” and “are”?
But I believe it is precisely this apparent clarity of the word
“is” that is deceptive. Usually, when we are told that X is r we
know how it is supposed to be true, but that depends on a concep-
tual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the “is”
alone. We know how both “X” and “r” refer, and the kinds of
things to which they refer, and we have a rough idea how the two
referential paths might converge on a single thing, be it an object, a
person, a process, an event, or whatever. But when the two terms
of the identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how
it could be true. We may not have even a rough idea of how the
two referential paths could converge, or what kind of things they
might converge on, and a theoretical framework may have to be
supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework,
an air of mysticism surrounds the identification.
This explains the magical flavor of popular presentations of
fundamental scientific discoveries, given out as propositions to
which one must subscribe without really understanding them.
For example, people are now told at an early age that all matter
is really energy. But despite the fact that they know what “is”
means, most of them never form a conception of what makes this
claim true, because they lack the theoretical background.
At the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that
which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if
uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the be-
ginnings of a conception of how it might be true. In order to
understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event,
we require more than an understanding of the word “is.” The
idea of how a mental and a physical term might refer to the same
thing is lacking, and the usual analogies with theoretical iden-
tification in other fields fail to supply it. They fail because if we
construe the reference of mental terms to physical events on the
usual model, we either get a reappearance of separate subjective
events as the effects through which mental reference to physical
events is secured, or else we get a false account of how mental
terms refer (for example, a causal behaviorist one).
Strangely enough, we may have evidence for the truth of some-
447
THOMAS NAGEL
thing we cannot really understand. Suppose a caterpillar is locked
in a sterile safe by someone unfamiliar with insect metamorphosis,
and weeks later the safe is reopened, revealing a butterfly. If the
person knows that the safe has been shut the whole time, he has
reason to believe that the butterfly is or was once the caterpillar,
without having any idea in what sense this might be so. (One
possibility is that the caterpillar contained a tiny winged parasite
that devoured it and grew into the butterfly.)
It is conceivable that we are in such a position with regard to
physicalism. Donald Davidson has argued that if mental events
have physical causes and effects, they must have physical de-
scriptions. He holds that we have reason to believe this even though
we do not-and in fact could not-have a general psychophysical
theory.12 His argument applies to intentional mental events, but
I think we also have some reason to believe that sensations are
physical processes, without being in a position to understand how.
Davidson’s position is that certain physical events have irreduc-
ibly mental properties, and perhaps some view describable in
this way is correct. But nothing of which we can now form a con-
ception corresponds to it; nor have we any idea what a theory
would be like that enabled us to conceive of it.13
Very little work has been done on the basic question (from
which mention of the brain can be entirely omitted) whether any
sense can be made of experiences’ having an objective character
at all. Does it make sense, in other words, to ask what my experi-
ences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me? We
cannot genuinely understand the hypothesis that their nature is
captured in a physical description unless we understand the more
fundamental idea that they have an objective nature (or that ob-
jective processes can have a subjective nature).14
12 See “Mental Events” in Foster and Swanson, Experience and Theory (Amherst,
1970); though I don’t understand the argument against psychophysical laws.
13 Similar remarks apply to my paper “Physicalism,” Philosophical Review
LXXIV (i965), 339-356, reprinted with postscript in John O’Connor, Modern
Materialism (New York, I969).
14 This question also lies at the heart of the problem of other minds, whose
close connection with the mind-body problem is often overlooked. If one
understood how subjective experience could have an objective nature, one
would understand the existence of subjects other than oneself.
448
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
I should like to close with a speculative proposal. It may be
possible to approach the gap between subjective and objective
from another direction. Setting aside temporarily the relation
between the mind and the brain, we can pursue a more objective
understanding of the mental in its own right. At present we are
completely unequipped to think about the subjective character
of experience without relying on the imagination-without taking
up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be
regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new
method-an objective phenomenology not dependent on em-
pathy or the imagination. Though presumably it would not cap-
ture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the
subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to
beings incapable of having those experiences.
We would have to develop such a phenomenology to describe
the sonar experiences of bats; but it would also be possible to
begin with humans. One might try, for example, to develop con-
cepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth
what it was like to see. One would reach a blank wall eventually,
but it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in ob-
jective terms much more than we can at present, and with much
greater precision. The loose intermodal analogies-for example,
“Red is like the sound of a trumpet”-which crop up in dis-
cussions of this subject are of little use. That should be clear to
anyone who has both heard a trumpet and seen red. But struc-
tural features of perception might be more accessible to objective
description, even though something would be left out. And con-
cepts alternative to those we learn in the first person may enable
us to arrive at a kind of understanding even of our own experience
which is denied us by the very ease of description and lack of
distance that subjective concepts afford.
Apart from its own interest, a phenomenology that is in this
sense objective may permit questions about the physical15 basis
15 I have not defined the term “physical.” Obviously it does not apply just
to what can be described by the concepts of contemporary physics, since we
expect further developments. Some may think there is nothing to prevent
mental phenomena from eventually being recognized as physical in their own
right. But whatever else may be said of the physical, it has to be objective. So
449
THOMAS NAGEL
of experience to assume a more intelligible form. Aspects of sub-
jective experience that admitted this kind of objective description
might be better candidates for objective explanations of a more
familiar sort. But whether or not this guess is correct, it seems
unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated
until more thought has been given to the general problem of sub-
jective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-
body problem without sidestepping it.16
THOMAS NAGEL
Princeton University
if our idea of the physical ever expands to include mental phenomena, it
will have to assign them an objective character-whether or not this is done
by analyzing them in terms of other phenomena already regarded as physical.
It seems to me more likely, however, that mental-physical relations will
eventually be expressed in a theory whose fundamental terms cannot be placed
clearly in either category.
16 I have read versions of this paper to a number of audiences, and am
indebted to many people for their comments.
450
- Article Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p.435
p.436
p.437
p.438
p.439
p.440
p.441
p.442
p.443
p.444
p.445
p.446
p.447
p.448
p.449
p.450
The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 433-569
Front Matter [pp.433-433]
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [pp.435-450]
Volition and Basic Action [pp.451-473]
Aristotle’s Introduction of Matter [pp.474-500]
Discussion
A Note on Wittgenstein and Heidegger [pp.501-503]
More Light on the Later Mill [pp.504-527]
Book Reviews
untitled [pp.528-533]
untitled [pp.533-536]
untitled [pp.536-540]
untitled [pp.540-544]
untitled [pp.544-547]
untitled [pp.547-548]
untitled [pp.548-551]
untitled [pp.551-553]
untitled [pp.553-555]
untitled [pp.556-560]
Books Received [pp.561-569]
Back Matter
- ebooksclub.org__Philosophy_for_the_21st_Century__A_Comprehensive_Reader
Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person
STOR
Harry G. Frankfurt
The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No.1 (Jan. 14, 1971),5-20.
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THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
VOLUME LXVIII, NO.1, JANUARY 14, 197 1
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FREEDOM OF THE WILL AND THE CONCEPT
OF A PERSON
W HAT philosophers have lately come to accept as analy-sis of the concept of a person is not actually analysis of
that concept at all. Strawson, whose usage represents the
current standard, identifies the concept of a person as “the con-
cept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of
consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics …
are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type.” 1
But there are many entities besides persons that have both mental
and physical properties. As it happens-though it seems extraordi-
nary that this should be so-there is no common English word for
the type of entity Strawson has in mind, a type that includes not
only human beings but animals of various lesser species as well.
Still, this hardly justifies the misappropriation of a valuable philo-
sophical term.
Whether the members of some animal species are persons is surely
not to be settled merely by determining whether it is correct to ap-
ply to them, in addition to predicates ascribing corporeal character-
istics, predicates that ascribe states of consciousness. It does vio-
lence to our language to endorse the application of the term ‘per-
son’ to those numerous creatures which do have both psychological
and material properties but which are manifestly not persons in
any normal sense of the word. This misuse of language is doubtless
innocent of any theoretical error. But although the offense is “merely
1 P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), pp. 101-102. Ayer’s
usage of ‘person’ is similar: “it is characteristic of persons in this sense that be-
sides having various physical properties … they are also credited with various
forms of consciousness” [A. J. Ayer, The Concept 0/ a Person (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1963), p. 82]. What concerns Strawson and Ayer is the problem of
understanding the relation between mind and body, rather than the quite dif-
ferent problem of understanding what it is to be a creature that not only has
a mind and a body but is also a person.
5
6 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
verbal,” it does significant harm. For it gratuitously diminishes our
philosophical vocabulary, and it increases the likelihood that we
will overlook the important area of inquiry with which the term
‘person’ is most naturally associated. It might have been expected
that no problem would be of more central and persistent concern to
philosophers than that of understanding what we ourselves essen-
tially are. Yet this problem is so generally neglected that it has been
possible to make off with its very name almost without being no-
ticed and, evidently, without evoking any widespread feeling of loss.
There is a sense in which the word ‘person’ is merely the singu-
lar form of ‘people’ and in which both terms connote no more than
membership in a certain biological species. In those senses of the
word which are of greater philosophical interest, however, the cri-
teria for being a person do not serve primarily to distinguish the
members of our own species from the members of other species.
Rather, they are designed to capture those attributes which are the
subject of our most humane concern with ourselves and the source
of what we regard as most important and most problematical in
our lives. Now these attributes would be of equal significance to us
even if they were not in fact peculiar and common to the members
of our own species. What interests us most in the human condition
would not interest us less if it were also a feature of the condition
of other creatures as well.
Our concept of ourselves as persons is not to be understood, there-
fore, as a concept of attributes that are necessarily species-specific.
It is conceptually possible that members of novel or even of fa-
miliar nonhuman species should be persons; and it is also con-
ceptually possible that some members of the human species are not
persons. We do in fact assume, on the other hand, that no member
of another species is a person. Accordingly, there is a presumption
that what is essential to persons is a set of characteristics that we
generally suppose-whether rightly or wrongly-to be uniquely
human.
It is my view that one essential difference between persons and
other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person’s will.
Human beings are not alone in having desires and motives, or in
making choices. They share these things with the members of cer-
tain other species, some of whom even appear to engage in delib-
eration and to make decisions based upon prior thought. It seems
to be peculiarly characteristic of humans, however, that they are
able to form what I shall call “second-order desires” or “desires of
the second order.”
FREEDOM OF WILL AND CONCEPT OF A PERSON 7
Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that,
men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and
motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their pref-
erences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to
have the capacity for what I shall call “first-order desires” or “de-
sires of the first order,” which are simply desires to do or not to
do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, ap-
pears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is mani-
rested in the formation of second-order desires. 2
I
The concept designated by the verb ‘to want’ is extraordinarily
elusive. A statement of the form “A wants to X”-taken by itself,
apart from a context that serves to amplify or to specify its mean-
ing-conveys remarkably little information. Such a statement may
be consistent, for example, with each of the following statements:
(a) the prospect of doing X elicits no sensation or introspectible
emotional response in A; (b) A is unaware that he wants to X;
(c) A believes that he does not want to X; (d) A wants to refrain
from X-ing; (e) A wants to Y and believes that it is impossible for
him both to Y and to X; (f) A does not “really” want to X; (g) A
would rather die than X; and so on. It is therefore hardly sufficient
to formulate the distinction between first-order and second-order
desires, as I have done, by suggesting merely that someone has a
first-order desire when he wants to do or not to do such-and-such,
and that he has a second-order desire when he wants to have or
not to have a certain desire of the first order.
As I shall understand them, statements of the form “A wants to
X” cover a rather broad range of possibilities. 3 They may be true
even when statements like (a) through (g) are true: when A is un-
aware of any feelings concerning X-ing, when he is unaware that
he wants to X, when he deceives himself about what he wants and
2 For the sake of simplicity, I shall deal only with what someone wants or
desires, neglecting related phenomena such as choices and decisions. I pro-
pose to use the verbs ‘to want’ and ‘to desire’ interchangeably, although they
are by no means perfect synonyms. My motive in forsaking the established
nuances of these words arises from the fact that the verb ‘to want’, which suits
my purposes better so far as its meaning is concerned, does not lend itself so
readily to the formation of nouns as does the verb ‘to desire’. It is perhaps ac-
ceptable, albeit graceless, to speak in the plural of someone’s “wants.” But to
speak in the singular of someone’s “want” would be an abomination.
s What I say in this paragraph applies not only to cases in which ‘to X’ refers
to a possible action or inaction. It also applies to cases in which ‘to X’ refers to
a first-order desire and in which the statement that ‘A wants to X’ is therefore
a shortened version of a statement-“A wants to want to X”-that identifies a
desire of the second order.
8 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
believes falsely that he does not want to X, when he also has other
desires that conflict with his desire to X, or when he is ambivalent.
The desires in question may be conscious or unconscious, they need
not be univocal, and A may be mistaken about them. There is a
further source of uncertainty with regard to statements that iden-
tify someone’s desires, however, and here it is important for my pur-
poses to be less permissive.
Consider first those statements of the form “A wants to X” which
identify first-order desires-that is, statements in which the term ‘to
X’ refers to an action. A statement of this kind does not, by itself,
indicate the relative strength of A’s desire to X. It does not make
it clear whether this desire is at all likely to playa decisive role in
what A actually does or tries to do. For it may correctly be said
that A wants to X even when his desire to X is only one among his
desires and when it is far from being paramount among them. Thus,
it may be true that A wants to X when he strongly prefers to do
something else instead; and it may be true that he wants to X de-
spite the fact that, when he acts, it is not the desire to X that moti-
vates him to do what he does. On the other hand, someone who
states that A wants to X may mean to convey that it is this desire
that is motivating or moving A to do what he is actually doing or
that A will in fact be moved by this desire (unless he changes his
mind) when he acts.
It is only when it is used in the second of these ways that, given
the special usage of ‘will’ that I propose to adopt, the statement
identifies A’s will. To identify an agent’s will is either to identify
the desire (or desires) by which he is motivated in some action he
performs or to identify the desire (or desires) by which he will or
would be motivated when or if he acts. An agent’s will, then, is
identical with one or more of his first-order desires. But the notion
of the will, as I am employing it, is not coextensive with the no-
tion of first-order desires. It is not the notion df something that
merely inclines an agent in some degree to act in a certain way.
Rather, it is the notion of an effective desire-one that moves (or
will or would move) a person all the way to action. Thus the no-
tion of the will is not coextensive with the notion of what an agent
intends to do. For even though someone may have a settled inten-
tion to do X, he may nonetheless do something else instead of do-
ing X because, despite his intention, his desire to do X proves to
be weaker or less effective than some conflicting desire.
Now consider those statements of the form itA wants to X” which
identify second-order desires-that is, statements in which the term
FREEDOM OF WILL AND CONCEPT OF A PERSON 9
‘to X’ refers to a desire of the first order. There are also two kinds
of situation in which it may be true that A wants to want to X. In
the first place, it might be true of A that he wants to have a desire
to X despite the fact that he has a univocal desire, altogether free
of conflict and ambivalence, to refrain from X-ing. Someone might
want to have a certain desire, in other words, but univocally want
that desire to be unsatisfied.
Suppose that a physician engaged in psychotherapy with narcotics
addicts believes that his ability to help his patients would be en-
hanced if he understood better what it is like for them to desire the
drug to which they are addicted. Suppose that he is led in this way
to want to have a desire for the drug. If it is a genuine desire that
he wants, then what he wants is not merely to feel the sensations
that addicts characteristically feel when they are gripped by their
desires for the drug. What the physician wants, insofar as he wants
to have a desire, is to be inclined or moved to some extent to take
the drug.
It is entirely possible, however, that, although he wants to be
moved by a desire to take the drug, he does not want this desire to
be effective. He may not want it to move him all the way to action.
He need not be interested in finding out what it is like to take the
drug. And insofar as he now wants only to want to take it, and not
to take it, there is nothing in what he now wants that would be
satisfied by the drug itself. He may now have, in fact, an altogether
univocal desire not to take the drug; and he may prudently arrange
to make it impossible for him to satisfy the desire he would have if
his desire to want the drug should in time be satisfied.
It would thus be incorrect to infer, from the fact that the physi-
cian now wants to desire to take the drug, that he already does de-
sire to take it. His second-order desire to be moved to take the drug
does not entail that he has a first-order desire to take it. If the drug
were now to be administered to him, this might satisfy no desire
that is implicit in his desire to want to take it. While he wants to
want to take the drug, he may have no desire to take it; it may be
that all he wants is to taste the desire for it. That is, his desire to
have a certain desire that he does not have may not be a desire that
his wiIl should be at all different than it is.
Someone who wants only in this truncated way to want to X
stands at the margin of preciosity, and the fact that he wants to
want to X is not pertinent to the identification of his will. There
is, however, a second kind of situation that may be described by ‘A
wants to want to X’; and when the statement is used to describe a
10 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
situation of this second kind, then it does pertain to what A wants
his will to be. In such cases the statement means that A wants the
desire to X to be the desire that moves him effectively to act. It is
not merely that he wants the desire to X to be among the desires
by which, to one degree or another, he is moved or inclined to act.
He wants this desire to be effective-that is, to provide the motive
in what he actually does. Now when the statement that A wants to
want to X is used in this way, it does entail that A already has a de-
sire to X. It could not be true both that A wants the desire to X to
move him into action and that he does not want to X. It is only if
he does want to X that he can coherently want the desire to X not
merely to be one of his desires but, more decisively, to be his will.4
Suppose a man wants to be motivated in what he does by the
desire to concentrate on his work. It is necessarily true, if this sup-
position is correct, that he already wants to concentrate on his work.
This desire is now among his desires. But the question of whether
or not his second-order desire is fulfilled does not turn merely on
whether the desire he wants is one of his desires. It turns on whether
this desire is, as he wants it to be, his effective desire or will. If,
when the chips are down, it is his desire to concentrate on his work
that moves him to do what he does, then what he wants at that time
is indeed (in the relevant sense) what he wants to want. If it is some
other desire that actually moves him when he acts, on the other
hand, then what he wants at that time is not (in the relevant sense)
what he wants to want. This will be so despite the fact that the
desire to concentrate on his work continues to be among his desires.
II
Someone has a desire of the second order either when he wants sim-
ply to have a certain desire or when he wants a certain desire to be
his will. In situations of the latter kind, I shall call his second-order
desires “second-order volitions” or “volitions of the second order.”
N ow it is having second-order volitions, and not having second-order
desires generally, that I regard as essential to being a person. It is
4 It is not so clear that the entailment relation described here holds in cer-
tain kinds of cases, which I think may fairly be regarded as nonstandard, where
the essential difference between the standard and the nonstandard cases lies in
the kind of description by which the first-order desire in question is identified.
Thus, suppose that A admires B so fulsomely that, even though he does not
know what B wants to do, he wants to be effectively moved by whatever desire
effectively moves B; without knowing what B’s will is, in other words, A wants
his own will to be the same. It certainly does not follow that A already has,
among his desires, a desire like the one that constitutes B’s will. I shall not
pursue here the questions of whether there are genuine counterexamples to
the claim made in the text or of how, if there are, that claim should be altered.
FREEDOM OF WILL AND CONCEPT OF A PERSON II
logically possible, however unlikely, that there should be an agent
with second-order desires but with no volitions of the second order.
Such a creature, in my view, would not be a person. I shall use the
term ‘wanton’ to refer to agents who have first-order desires but
who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of
the second order, they have no second-order volitions. s
The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care
about his will. His desires move him to do certain things, without
its being true of him either that he wants to be moved by those de-
sires or that he prefers to be moved by other desires. The class of
wantons includes all nonhuman animals that have desires and all
very young children. Perhaps it also includes some adult human
beings as well. In any case, adult humans may be more or less wan-
ton; they may act wantonly, in response to first-order desires con-
cerning which they have no volitions of the second order, more or
less frequently.
The fact that a wanton has no second-order volitions does not
mean that each of his first-order desires is translated heedlessly and
at once into action. He may have no opportunity to act in accord-
ance with some of his desires. Moreover, the translation of his de-
sires into action may be delayed or precluded either by conflicting
desires of the first order or by the intervention of deliberation. For
a wanton may possess and employ rational faculties of a high order.
Nothing in the concept of a wanton implies that he cannot reason
or that he cannot deliberate concerning how to do what he wants
to do. What distinguishes the rational wanton from other rational
agents is that he is not concerned with the desirability of his de-
sires themselves. He ignores the question of what his will is to be.
Not only does he pursue whatever course of action he is most
strongly inclined to pursue, but he does not care which of his in-
clinations is the strongest.
Thus a rational creature, who reflects upon the suitability to his
desires of one course of action or another, may nonetheless be a
wanton. In maintaining that the essence of being a person lies not
in reason but in will, I am far from suggesting that a creature with-
out reason may be a person. For it is only in virtue of his rational
5 Creatures with second·order desires but no second-order volitions differ sig-
nificantly from brute animals, and, for some purposes, it would be desirable to
regard them as persons. My usage, which withholds the designation ‘person’
from them, is thus somewhat arbitrary. I adopt it largely because it facilitates
the formulation of some of the points I wish to make. Hereafter, whenever I
consider statements of the form “A wants to want to X,” I shall have in mind
statements identifying second·order volitions and not statements identifying
second-order desires that are not second-order volitions.
12 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
capacities that a person is capable of becoming critically aware of
his own will and of forming volitions of the second order. The
structure of a person’s wiIl presupposes, accordingly, that he is a
rational being.
The distinction between a person and a wanton may be illus-
trated by the difference between two narcotics addicts. Let us sup-
pose that the physiological condition accounting for the addiction
is the same in both men, and that both succumb inevitably to their
periodic desires for the drug to which they are addicted. One of the
addicts hates his addiction and always struggles desperately, al-
though to no avail, against its thrust. He tries everything that he
thinks might enable him to overcome his desires for the drug. But
these desires are too powerful for him to withstand, and invariably,
in the end, they conquer him. He i-s an unwilling addict, helplessly
violated by his own desires.
The unwilling addict has conflicting first-order desires: he wants
to take the drug, and he also wants to refrain from taking it. In
addition to these first-order desires, however, he has a volition of
the second order. He is not a neutral with regard to the conflict
between his desire to take the drug and his desire to refrain from
taking it. It is the latter desire, and not the former, that he wants
to constitute his will; it is the latter desire, rather than the former,
that he wants to be effective and to provide the purpose that he will
seek to realize in what he actually does.
The other addict is a wanton. His actions reflect the economy of
his first-order desires, without his being concerned whether the de-
sires that move him to act are desires by which he wants to be
moved to act. If he encounters problems in obtaining the drug or
in administering it to himself, his responses to his urges to take it
may involve deliberation. But it never occurs to him to consider
whether he wants the relations among his desires to result in his
having the will he has. The wanton addict may be an animal, and
thus incapable of being concerned about his will. In any event he
is, in respect of his wanton lack of concern, no different from an
animal.
The second of these addicts may suffer a first-order conflict simi-
lar to the first-order conflict suffered by the first. Whether he is
human or not, the wanton may (perhaps due to conditioning) both
want to take the drug and want to refrain from taking it. Unlike
the unwilling addict, however, he does not prefer that one of his
conflicting desires should be paramount over the other; he does not
prefer that one first-order desire rather than the other should con-
FREEDOM OF WILL AND CONCEPT OF A PERSON 13
stitute his will. It would be misleading to say that he is neutral as
to the conflict between his desires, since this would suggest that he
regards them as equally acceptable. Since he has no identity apart
from his first-order desires, it is true neither that he prefers one to
the other nor that he prefers not to take sides.
It makes a difference to the unwilling addict, who is a person,
which of his conflicting first-order desires wins out. Both desires are
his, to be sure; and whether he finally takes the drug or finally
succeeds in refraining from taking it, he acts to satisfy what is in a
literal sense his own desire. In either case he does something he
himself wants to do, and he does it not because of some external
influence whose aim happens to coincide with his own but because
of his desire to do it. The unwilling addict identifies himself, how-
ever, through the formation of a second-order volition, with one
rather than with the other of his conflicting first-order desires. He
makes one of them more truly his own and, in so doing, he with-
draws himself from the other. It is in virtue of this identification
and withdrawal, accomplished through the formation of a second-
order volition, that the unwilling addict may meaningfully make
the analytically puzzling statements that the force moving him to
take the drug is a force other than his own, and that it is not of
his own free will but rather against his will that this force moves
him to take it.
The wanton addict cannot or does not care which of his conflict-
ing first-order desires wins out. His lack of concern is not due to his
inability to find a convincing basis for preference. It is due either
to his lack of the capacity for reflection or to his mindless indiffer-
ence to the enterprise of evaluating his own desires and motives. 6
There is only one issue in the struggle to which his first-order con-
flict may lead: whether the one or the other of his conflicting de-
sires is the stronger. Since he is moved by both desires, he will not
be altogether satisfied by what he does no matter which of them is
effective. But it makes no difference to him whether his craving or
his aversion gets the upper hand. He has no stake in the conflict
between them and so, unlike the unwilling addict, he can neither
6 In speaking of the evaluation of his own desires and motives as being char·
acteristic of a person, I do not mean to suggest that a person’s second-order
volitions necessarily manifest a moral stance on his part toward his first-order
desires. It may not be from the point of view of morality that the person eval-
uates his first-order desires. Moreover, a person may be capricious and irre-
sponsible in forming his second-order volitions and give no serious considera·
tion to what is at stake. Second-order volitions express evaluations only in the
sense that they are preferences. There is no essential restriction on the kind
of basis, if any. upon which they are formed.
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
win nor lose the struggle in which he is engaged. When a person
acts, the desire by which he is moved is either the will he wants or
a will he wants to be without. When a wanton acts, it is neither.
III
There is a very close relationship between the capacity for form-
ing second-order volitions and another capacity that is essential to
persons-one that has often been considered a distinguishing mark
of the human condition. It is only because a person has volitions
of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lack-
ing freedom of the will. The concept of a person is not only, then,
the concept of a type of entity that has both first-order desires and
volitions of the second order. It can also be construed as the con-
cept of a type of entity for whom the freedom of its will may be a
problem. This concept excludes all wantons, both infrahuman and
human, since they fail to satisfy an essential condition for the en-
joyment of freedom of the will. And it excludes those suprahuman
beings, if any, whose wills are necessarily free.
Just what kind of freedom is the freedom of the will? This ques-
tion calls for an identification of the special area of human expe-
rience to which the concept of freedom of the will, as distinct from
the concepts of other sorts of freedom, is particularly germane. In
dealing with it, my aim will be primarily to locate the problem
with which a person is most immediately concerned when he IS
concerned with the freedom of his will.
According to one familiar philosophical tradition, being free is
fundamentally a matter of doing what one wants to do. Now the
notion of an agent who does what he wants to do is by no means
an altogether clear one: both the doing and the wanting, and the
appropriate relation between them as well, require elucidation. But
although its focus needs to be sharpened and its formulation refined,
I believe that this notion does capture at least part of what is im-
plicit in the idea of an agent who acts freely. It misses entirely, how-
ever, the peculiar content of the quite different idea of an agent
whose will is free.
We do not suppose that animals enjoy freedom of the will, al-
though we recognize that an animal may be free to run in what-
ever direction it wants. Thus, having the freedom to do what one
wants to do is not a sufficient condition of having a free will. It is
not a necessary condition either. For to deprive someone of his
freedom of action is not necessarily to undermine the freedom of
his will. When an agent is aware that there are certain things he
is not free to do, this doubtless affects his desires and limits the
FREEDOM OF WILL AND CONCEPT OF A PERSON IS
range of choices he can make. But suppose that someone, without
being aware of it, has in fact lost or been deprived of his freedom
of action. Even though he is no longer free to do what he wants to
do, his will may remain as free as it was before. Despite the fact
that he is not free to translate his desires into actions or to act ac-
cording to the determinations of his will, he may still form those
desires and make those determinations as freely as if his freedom
of action had not been impaired.
When we ask whether a person’s will is free we are not asking
whether he is in a position to translate his first-order desires into
actions. That is the question of whether he is free to do as he pleases.
The question of the freedom of his will does not concern the rela-
tion between what he does and what he wants to do. Rather, it
concerns his desires themselves. But what question about them is it?
It seems to me both natural and useful to construe the question
of whether a person’s will is free in close analogy to the question of
whether an agent enjoys freedom of action. Now freedom of action
is (roughly, at least) the freedom to do what one wants to do. Analo-
gously, then, the statement that a person enjoys freedom of the
will means (also roughly) that he is free to want what he wants to
want. More precisely, it means that he is free to will what he wants
to will, or to have the will he wants. Just as the question about the
freedom of an agent’s action has to do with whether it is the action
he wants to perform, so the question about the freedom of his will
has to do with whether it is the will he wants to have.
It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second-order
volitions, then, that a person exercises freedom of the will. And it
is in the discrepancy between his will and his second-order volitions,
or in his awareness that their coincidence is not his own doing but
only a happy chance, that a person who does not have this freedom
feels its lack. The unwilling addict’s will is not free. This is shown
by the fact that it is not the will he wants. It is also true, though
in a different way, that the will of the wanton addict is not free.
The wanton addict neither has the will he wants nor has a will
that differs from the will he wants. Since he has no volitions of
the second order, the freedom of his will cannot be a problem for
him. He lacks it, so to speak, by default.
People are generally far more complicated than my sketchy ac-
count of the structure of a person’s will may suggest. There is as
much opportunity for ambivalence, conflict, and self-deception with
regard to desires of the second order, for example, as there is with
regard to first-order desires. If there is an unresolved conflict among
16 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
someone’s second-order desires, then he is in danger of having no
second-order volition; for unless this conflict is resolved, he has no
preference concerning which of his first-order desires il to be his
will. This condition, if it is so severe that it prevents him from
identifying himself in a sufficiently decisive way with any of his
conflicting first-order desires, destroys him as a person. For it either
tends to paralyze his will and to keep him from acting at all, or it
tends to remove him from his will so that his will operates without
his participation. In both cases he becomes, like the unwilling ad-
dict though in a different way, a helpless bystander to the forces
that move him.
Another complexity is that a person may have, especially if his
second-order desires are in conflict, desires and volitions of a higher
order than the second. There is no theoretical limit to the length
of the series of desires of higher and higher orders; nothing except
common sense and, perhaps, a saving fatigue prevents an individ-
ual from obsessively refusing to identify himself with any of his
desires until he forms a desire of the next higher order. The tend-
ency to generate such a series of acts of forming desires, which
would be a case of humanization run wild, also leads toward the
destruction of a person.
It is possible, however, to terminate such a series of acts without
cutting it off arbitrarily. When a person identifies himself decisively
with one of his first-order desires, this commitment “resounds”
throughout the potentially endless array of higher orders. Consider
a person who, without reservation or conflict, wants to be moti-
vated by the desire to concentrate on his work. The fact that his
second-order volition to be moved by this desire is a decisive one
means that there is no room for questions concerning the perti-
nence of desires or volitions of higher orders. Suppose the person
is asked whether he wants to want to want to concentrate on his
work. He can properly insist that this question concerning a third-
order desire does not arise. It would be a mistake to claim that,
because he has not considered whether he wants the second-order
volition he has formed, he is indifferent to the question of whether
it is with this volition or with some other that he wants his will to
accord. The decisiveness of the commitment he has made means
that he has decided that no further question about his second-
order volition, at any higher order, remains to be asked. It is rela-
tively unimportant whether we explain this by saying that this
commitment implicitly generates an endless series of confirming de-
sires of higher orders, or by saying that the commitment is tanta-
FREEDOM OF WILL AND CONCEPT OF A PERSON 17
mount to a dissolution of the pointedness of all questions concern-
ing higher orders of desire.
Examples such as the one concerning the unwilling addict may
suggest that volitions of the second order, or of higher orders, must
be formed deliberately and that a person characteristically struggles
to ensure that they are satisfied. But the conformity of a person’s
will to his higher-order volitions may be far more thoughtless and
spontaneous than this. Some people are naturally moved by kind-
ness when they want to be kind, and by nastiness when they want
to be nasty, without any explicit forethought and without any
need for energetic self-control. Others are moved by nastiness when
they want to be kind and by kindness when they intend to be nasty,
equally without forethought and without active resistance to these
violations of their higher-order desires. The enjoyment of freedom
comes easily to some. Others must struggle to achieve it.
IV
My theory concerning the freedom of the will accounts easily for
our disinclination to allow that this freedom is enjoyed by the
members of any species inferior to our own. It also satisfies another
condition that must be met by any such theory, by making it ap-
parent why the freedom of the will should be regarded as desirable.
The enjoyment of a free will means the satisfaction of certain de-
sires-desires of the second or of higher orders-whereas its absence
means their frustration. The satisfactions at stake are those which
accrue to a person of whom it may be said that his will is his own.
The corresponding frustrations are those suffered by a person of
whom it may be said that he is estranged from himself, or that he
finds himself a helpless or a passive bystander to the forces that
move him.
A person who is free to do what he wants to do may yet not be
in a position to have the will he wants. Suppose, however, that he
enjoys both freedom of action and freedom of the will. Then he
is not only free to do what he wants to do; he is also free to want
what he wants to want. It seems to me that he has, in that case, all
the freedom it is possible to desire or to conceive. There are other
good things in life, and he may not possess some of them. But there
is nothing in the way of freedom that he lacks.
It is far from clear that certain other theories of the freedom of
the will meet these elementary but essential conditions: that it be
understandable why we desire this freedom and why we refuse to
ascribe it to animals. Consider, for example, Roderick Chisholm’s
quaint version of the doctrine that human freedom entails an ab-
18 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
sence of causal determination. 7 Whenever a person performs a free
action, according to Chisholm, it’s a miracle. The motion of a per-
son’s hand, when the person moves it, is the outcome of a series of
physical causes; but some event in this series, “and presumably one
of those that took place within the brain, was caused by the agent
and not by any other events” (18). A free agent has, therefore, “a
prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us,
when we act, is a prime mover unmoved” (23).
This account fails to provide any basis for doubting that animals
of subhuman species enjoy the freedom it defines. Chisholm says
nothing that makes it seem less likely that a rabbit performs a
miracle when it moves its leg than that a man does so when he
moves his hand. But why, in any case, should anyone care whether
he can interrupt the natural order of causes in the way Chisholm
describes? Chisholm offers no reason for believing that there is a
discernible difference between the experience of a man who mirac-
ulously initiates a series of causes when he moves his hand and a
man who moves his hand without any such breach of the normal
causal sequence. There appears to be no concrete basis for prefer-
ring to be involved in the one state of affairs rather than in the
other.8
It is generally supposed that, in addition to satisfying the two
conditions I have mentioned, a satisfactory theory of the freedom
of the will necessarily provides an analysis of one of the conditions
of moral responsibility. The most common recent approach to the
problem of understanding the freedom of the wiIl has been, indeed,
to inquire what is entailed by the assumption that someone is mor-
ally responsible for what he has done. In my view, however, the re-
lation between moral responsibility and the freedom of the will
has been very widely misunderstood. It is not true that a person is
morally responsible for what he has done only if his wiIl was free
when he did it. He may be morally responsible for having done it
even though his will was not free at all.
A person’s wiIl is free only if he is free to have the wiIl he wants.
This means that, with regard to any of his first-order desires, he is
free either to make that desire his will or to make some other first-
7 “Freedom and Action,” in K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism (New
York: Random House, 1966), pp. 11-44.
8 I am not suggesting that the alleged difference between these two states of
affairs is unverifiable. On the contrary, physiologists might well be able to
show that Chisholm’S conditions for a free action are not satisfied, by establish·
ing that there is no relevant brain event for which a sufficient physical cause
cannot be found.
FREEDOM OF WILL AND CONCEPT OF A PERSON 19
order desire his will instead. Whatever his will, then, the will of
the person whose will is free could have been otherwise; he could
have done otherwise than to constitute his will as he did. It is a
vexed question just how ‘he could have done otherwise’ is to be
understood in contexts such as this one. But although this ques-
tion is important to the theory of freedom, it has no bearing on the
theory of moral responsibility. For the assumption that a person is
morally responsible for what he has done does not entail that the
person was in a position to have whatever will he wanted.
This assumption does entail that the person did what he did
freely, or that he did it of his own free will. It is a mistake, how-
ever, to believe that someone acts freely only when he is free to do
whatever he wants or that he acts of his own free will only if his
will is free. Suppose that a person has done what he wanted to do,
that he did it because he wanted to do it, and that the will by which
he was moved when he did it was his will because it was the will he
wanted. Then he did it freely and of his own free will. Even sup-
posing that he could have done otherwise, he would not have done
otherwise; and even supposing that he could have had a different
will, he would not have wanted his will to differ from what it was.
Moreover, since the will that moved him when he acted was his will
because he wanted it to be, he cannot claim that his will was forced
upon him or that he was a passive bystander to its constitution.
Under these conditions, it is quite irrelevant to the evaluation of
his moral responsibility to inquire whether the alternatives that he
opted against were actually available to him.9
In illustration, consider a third kind of addict. Suppose that his
addiction has the same physiological basis and the same irresistible
thrust as the addictions of the unwilling and wanton addicts, but
that he is altogether delighted with his condition. He is a willing
addict, who would not have things any other way. If the grip of his
addiction should somehow weaken, he would do whatever he could
to reinstate it; if his desire for the drug should begin to fade, he
would take steps to renew its intensity.
The willing addict’s will is not free, for his desire to take the
drug will be effective regardless of whether or not he wants this
desire to constitute his will. But when he takes the drug, he takes
it freely and of his own free will. I am inclined to understand his
situation as involving the overdetermination of his first-order de-
9 For another discussion of the considerations that cast doubt on the prin-
ciple that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he
could have done otherwise, see my “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsi-
bility,” this JOURNAL, LXVI, 23 (Dec. 4, 1969): 829-839.
~o THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
sire to take the drug. This desire is his effective desire because he is
physiologically addicted. But it is his effective desire also because
he wants it to be. His will is outside his control, but, by his second-
order desire that his desire for the drug should be effective, he has
made this will his own. Given that it is therefore not only because
of his addiction that his desire for the drug is effective, he may be
morally responsible for taking the drug.
My conception of the freedom of the will appears to be neutral
with regard to the problem of determinism. It seems conceivable
that it should be causally determined that a person is free to want
what he wants to want. If this is conceivable, then it might be caus-
ally determined that a person enjoys a free will. There is no more
than an innocuous appearance of paradox in the proposition that
it is determined, ineluctably and by forces beyond their control,
that certain people have free wills and that others do not. There
is no incoherence in the proposition that some agency other than a
person’s own is responsible (even morally responsible) for the fact
that he enjoys or fails to enjoy freedom of the will. It is possible
that a person should be morally responsible for what he does of his
own free will and that some other person should also be morally re-
sponsible for his having done it.10
On the other hand, it seems conceivable that it should come
about by chance that a person is free to have the will he wants. If
this is conceivable, then it might be a matter of chance that certain
people enjoy freedom of the will and that certain others do not.
Perhaps it is also conceivable, as a number of philosophers believe,
for states of affairs to come about in a way other than by chance
or as the outcome of a sequence of natural causes. If it is indeed
conceivable for the relevant states of affairs to come about in some
third way, then it is also possible that a person should in that third
way come to enjoy the freedom of the will.
HARRY G. FRANKFURT
The Rockefeller University
10 There is a difference between being fully responsible and being solely re-
sponsible. Suppose that the willing addict has been made an addict by the de-
liberate and calculated work of another. Then it may be that both the addict
and this other person are fully responsible for the addict’s taking the drug,
while neither of them is solely responsible for it. That there is a distinction
between full moral responsibility and sole moral responsibility is apparent in
the following example. A certain light can be turued on or off by flicking either
of two switches, and each of these switches is simultaneously flicked to the “on”
position by a different person, neither of whom is aware of the other. Neither
person is solely responsible for the light’s going on, nor do they share the re-
sponsibility in the sense that each is partially responsible; rather, each of them
is fully responsible.
