THESES SIS/LIBRARY TELEPHONE:

Transcription

1 THESES SIS/LIBRARY TELEPHONE: R.G. MENZIES LIBRARY BUILDING NO:2 FACSIMILE: THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY library.theses@anu.edu.au CANBERRA ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA USE OF THESES This copy is supplied for purposes of private study and research only. Passages from the thesis may not be copied or closely paraphrased without the written consent of the author.

2 Desires More Truly Your Own The Idea of Autonomy Dennis John Loughrey Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University A dissertation submitted for the degree Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University May 1992

3 Declaration This dissertation is my own work, except where otherwise acknowledged. Dennis Loughrey

4 Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction Some Issues at a Glance 2 Chapter 1 The Hierarchy Model of Autonomy 4 Chapter2 Objections to the Hierarchy Model 45 Chapter3 The Hierarchy Model Revised: Second-order Desire Meets the Intellect 78 Chapter4 Introducing the Attunement Model: Autonomy without Second-order Desires 111 ChapterS Not Desiring, Attuning: The Attunement Model Compared with the Hierarchy Model 149 Conclusion A Brief Review 171 Bibliography 177

5 Acknowledgements Above all else, I want to thank my supervisors, Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson. Philip Pettit shared his philosophical insights, read my work and made valuable suggestions, and gave me constant encouragement. Frank Jackson also read my work, and provided valuable comments and criticisms. I learnt a lot from discussions with these philosophers, and from reading their work. I benefited from the help and support given by many other people. Of these people, I should most like to mention Dominic Hyde, Tony Street, Karen van den Broek and James Jordan, who made many helpful comments on chapters of my work. Were it not for their recommendations, my thesis would contain many more errors than I personally allowed to slip through. I owe a double debt to Dominic Hyde, who gave up a lot of time to get me out of a word processing crisis. Finally, I should like to thank our departmental secretary, Loraine Hugh, for her practical assistance and moral support.

6 Introduction Some Issues at a Glance In the piece of work that follows, I focus exclusively on personal autonomy in the sense of self-mastery. The autonomous person is one who has, in some sense or other, mastery over their desires.! Exactly what this sense is will be the subject of this thesis. With this in mind, I can state the central question of this work. It is: What relationship. would need to obtain between a person and their desires for that person to be autonomous? This can be put another way. The first part of the title of this work is a quotation from Harry Frankfurt's paper "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person".2 Taking what Frankfurt provides for us, the question we want can be put as follows: What is it to make- and act upon- a desire "more truly [one's] own"? This is the foremost problem that I mean to address in the present work as a whole. Here is the way the theme will develop. There are two conceptions, or models, of the idea of personal autonomy. Both concern the formation of desires. Yet each runs its own line about what it is to be autonomous with respect to one's desires, what it is to make one's desires more truly one's own. I introduce the first of these early on. And I hope to be on the way to providing the other conception before the 1 I will often use the third person plural pronoun to refer to the person in order to avoid both the cumbersome "his or her" and the unsuitable "his" (or "her"). 2 Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXVIII, No. I (1971), p. 13.

7 3 end of this work as a whole. I can say in advance that, when all the arguments are in, it is the latter model which comes out looking superior to the former. Or so I shall argue. In a little more detail, here is an outline of what is to come. In chapter 1, I survey some of the literature on my topic. The literature provides us with a way into a discussion about the flrst of our models of autonomy, what I call the hierarchy model, for this is the dominant model to be found there. Hierarchy autonomy is based on an account of persons in terms of an hierarchy of desires- first-order desires, secondorder desires and so on. We will see that Frankfun is the main player, setting the agenda for the other writers. In chapter 2, I go on to criticise the dominant model by raising three problems. In the discussion there, some attention is given to a retouching of the hierarchy model in the light of the notion of decisive commitment. However, the retouched version is shown to have shortcomings as well. In chapter 3, I discuss a revised hierarchy model. Although this revised account fares better than the original account in respect of our set of problems, it is still vulnerable to a challenge which I advance. In chapter 4, I attempt to deyelop an alternative. I label this the attunement model. In chapter 5, I compare and contrast it with the hierarchy model. It will be shown there that the sons of considerations which tell against the hierarchy model do not present a serious challenge to the attunement model. We will see, in addition, that the attunement model has advantages over the hierarchy model. Finally, in a shon conclusion, I sum up the findings from each of the previous chapters, and I bid farewell to the hierarchy model of autonomy.

8 Chapter 1 The Hierarchy Model of Autonomy This is the first of five chapters. In these five chapters, the problem I mean to address goes like this. It is open to us, says Harry Frankfurt, to make one out of the set of our desires "more truly [our] own".! But what could this mean? What sort of relation would we need to bear to our desires in order to be moved by desires which we make more truly our own? What we are asking about, although it goes under different names, deserves to be called autonomy, in the sense of self-mastery. Given this, we can rephrase the question as: How are we to understand the idea of personal autonomy? In this chapter I discuss Frankfurt's - but not only Frankfurt's - way of answering such questions. This is a way of understanding autonomy in terms of a hierarchy of desires. I say plenty about this in section Ill onwards. But before getting on to that, there are some preparatory tasks. In section I, I separate out the idea of personal autonomy that interests me from other notions. And in section II, I discuss what I take to be some central intuitions about autonomy. These intuitions are about the basic concept of autonomy itself. In section III, I start to discuss a specific conception of the concept of autonomy. Section Ill is the central section in the chapter. It is also by far the longest 1 Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person",Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXVIII, No. 1 (1971): 5-20.

9 5 section. There I attempt to provide a literature review. My interest in going through various writings on the topic is to show that, although there are differences between these writings, they have much in common. They share a way of understanding autonomy which I label the hierarchy model. In section IV, I sum up some of the chief features of this model. Finally, in section V, I report whether the hierarchy model meets with the central intuitions about personal autonomy discussed in section II. So much for the preamble. Now down to business. I In this section, I am concerned with unravelling separate strands in discussions that sometimes go under the name "autonomy". I assume, from the start, that autonomy is a kind of freedom. In an important article, Gerald MacCallum argues that we need to understand freedom as a triadic relation of the form "xis free from y to do z", where x ranges over persons, y over constraints and z over actions or ends. Alluding to disputes which have rested on the confused "freedom from", "freedom to" distinction, MacCallum argues that the triad gives us "a means of managing sensibly [these] writings".2 I believe that just as MacCallum's format can help resolve old disputes in this area, so too can it provide us with the means to locate different senses of personal autonomy. Differences between some of the senses of autonomy, I claim, will show up as differences between the variables on the freedom triad. 2 Gerald MacCallum, "Negative and Positive Freedom", Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXVI ( 1967):

10 6 Before going further, I shall pause to say something about the relevant variables. Firstly, x. When we are talking about personal autonomy we are talking about individual persons. Now turn to y, which stands for constraints. On constraints, Joel Feinberg says this: "A constraint is something - anything - that prevents me from doing something". 3 Constraints can be external or internal. External constraints are to be found in laws, regulations and in general any actions by others which restrict one's opportunities. Some examples of internal constraints are headaches, obsessive thoughts, pathological desires and so on. And the action variable, z? This variable indicates the range of relevant options. For example, you may be free from various constraints to leave town, to walk on the grass, or to write a novel. Now turn to the different senses. On first glancing at the autonomy literature we can spot fairly quickly that much of it is devoted to discussion of autonomy as a kind of right, always potentially under threat from paternalism. Here the constraint is external. It is interference by others - individuals or the state - in people's lives. Consider for a moment an example. Suppose that I am a surgeon, and you are my patient, and that you require a blood transfusion, otherwise you may die. Suppose further that you are a Jehovah's Witness. Now, if I give you a blood transfusion, for your own good, to be sure, but against your wishes, then I am overriding your autonomy. I offend against your autonomy, not because I do not consider your desire not to have your blood transfused, for I may well take your desire into account when calculating what I should do, but because I interfere in a domain - your own health -where you alone have sovereignty.4 (Of course, by assumption, if I don't give you the transfusion, you may die. This is what exercising autonomy can do to you). 3 Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p In connexion with this, see Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives, (Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1977), especially chapter 5; see also Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chapter 1; see finally, Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress (eds.), Principles of Biomedical Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), chapter 3.

11 7 What we are talking about here is a notion of autonomy that clearly overlaps with what some think of as negative liberty.5 One is constrained, for example, from acting as one wants to, as one sees fit, by an external interference in one's life stemming from the action of another person, persons or organisation. And this is not just a problem to do with compulsory treatment in health-care situations. The problem appears on the larger canvas. Consider Gerald Dworkin's view that autonomy has work to do as a political ideal, a moral ideal and a social ideal. As a political ideal, autonomy can be used to argue against the paternalism of governments which inflict some view of the good life, or the good society, on its citizens, thereby disregarding each individual's own point of view. As a moral ideal, individuals, their own consciences, and their own principles, should be considered sacred, and should be left untainted by the demands of a moral tradition. As a social ideal, autonomy stands in sharp contrast to the imposition by social institutions -for instance, advertising - in the. lives of people. As Dworkin says: "In all three areas - moral, political, social- we find that there is a notion of the self which is to be respected, left unmanipulated, and which is, in certain ways, independent and selfdeterrnining".6 The role of the autonomy which we see here is to set limits on interference by others in our lives, in our determining for ourselves the lives we will lead. At issue is a respect for autonomy which derives from the work of Kant. Such respect is highly valued by liberals. Roughly, the idea is that the best way to bestow autonomy on somebody is by letting them get on with their lives in their own way.7. 5 I have in mind here, roughly, freedom of action- the freedom from constraints to do what you choose. What goes under the heading "negative liberty" is usually more refined. The immortal classic to do with negative liberty is Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty", Four Essays on Liberty, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969): Dworkin, op. cit., pp In her recent article, "Liberty and Autonomy", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. LXXXVTI (1987): , Susan Mendus advances a view about autonomy-based liberalism. Mendus focuses not on the absence of external constraints, such as threats, nor on the absence of internal constraints in the sense of pathological desires and the like, but on the autonomy requirement that one be free from the will of others - "freedom from the suffocating constraint of social mores and customs". This requirement is subjected by Mendus to an argument which reveals a serious

12 8 We can say, then, that constraints are often set in play by the actions of other agents. Yet constraints can be internal too. For instance, you may be prevented from doing what you want by, say, blinding headaches. Or you may not be able to function properly owing to severe depression. And such constraints may prevent you from determining for yourself your way of life-they may block your autonomy. Let us briefly examine another possibility. Suppose you do what you want to do, but that this desire of yours is produced as a result of the machinations of some evil scientist. Surely in this case, you are a slave to your desire, however much you may be doing or getting what you want. For you act on a desire which is - quite literally- not your own. It is, rather, the scientist's; or more strictly it is the desire the scientist wants you to have. For those who find this example a bit far-fetched, we could cite instead desires which result from hypnotism and- some would say- the desires which the process of socialisation leaves us with. 8 The sort of autonomy that I most want to talk about is stronger than any of the above variants. This is autonomy in the sense of self-mastery. It will not suffice for this stronger sense of autonomy that one is free from constraints - whether external or internal- to what one wants. What is more, it will not suffice even if one is free from external interference of the aforementioned type, the type where one acts on desires which are, quite literally, other than one's own, and which are in fact the hypnotist's or the scientist's. The sort of constraint or impediment to action that is found exclusively on this stronger sense of autonomy is an internal one.9 It is an agent's own desires. difficulty in the doctrine of autonomy-based liberalism, that it will not produce a society in which liberty, toleration and plurality, are given the prominent place they have in liberal thinking. 8 Eleonore Stump has an example about a desire-producing scientist in her "Sanctification, Hardening of the Heart, and Frankfurt's Concept of Free Will", Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXXXV, No. 8 (1988), pp ; for an hypnotist, see Richard Lindley, Autonomy (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 25; and on socialisation, Robert Young's Personal Autonomy: Beyond Negative and Positive Liberty (Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986) is recommeoded. 9 Although I certainly do not want to give the impression that the dimensions of freedom under threat from the hypnotist &c. - or from conditioning - are not important; whatever level of

13 9 Let me say more to illustrate this. Frankfurt writes about an unwilling drug addict who, although hating their addiction, is nevertheless overcome by their craving for the drug. In a very real sense this craving is an obstacle to the addict's autonomy. It is as much an obstacle as something external, for instance threats or being locked in a room. In relation to the addict's craving, autonomy in the sense of self-mastery is called for. It is obstacles to autonomy taking this form, that of an agent's own desires, which I shall concentrate on in my presentation. Henceforth when I talk about autonomy, I have in mind the stronger sense, this sense of autonomy as self-mastery. What does such self-mastery involve? As I indicated, I will speak of desires which you make more truly your own. But what is this special sort of relationship one can have with one's desires? The answer to these questions rather depends on which conception of autonomy you favour. In section III onwards, we shall examine what Frankfurt's conception says about this. Later still, in chapters 4 and 5, we shall turn to what a rival conception has to say. 10 II While we are still on a general note, I shall set out what I take to be some central intuitions about the idea of personal autonomy. I offer these as, if you like, a set of autonomy in this stronger sense of self-mastery one possesses, it may be of little avail if one is unfree in any of these other ways. 10 In setting up the problem in this way, using expressions found in Frankfurt's writing - in particular, desires "more truly [your) own"- to convey the basic idea of autonomy, I do not mean to give the impression that I am sympathetic to Frankfurt's own account. On the contrary -as we shall see - I believe that I can do better than Frankfurt's account of what it is to be moved by a desire more truly your own.

14 minimal conditions which an account of autonomy should meet if it is to be worthy of our further scrutiny. 10 Firstly, consider the history of the term itself. "Autonomy" - as many writers on autonomy have remarked- goes back to the Greek terms autos (self) and nomos (rule). In ancient times, the term applied to self-rule in Greek city-states. In more recent times, the term "autonomy" has been applied to persons. At heart is the basic idea, quite in line with the origin of the term, that we are autonomous when we rule ourselves, as opposed to being ruled. In relation to this, note that autonomy as concerns us involves ruling over one's own desires. As we have seen in section I, we are talking about a strong sense of autonomy as self-mastery, where the relevant constraints are one's own desires. Hence to lack autonomy in the way that interests us is to be ruled by one's own desires. Turn to our second intuition. This concerns the role of belief in the self-ruled life. We have seen that ruling over one's desires is fundamental. But belief has an important role too in autonomy. Imagine you hold irrational or crazy beliefs. Clearly being in this unhappy state will impair your autonomy however autonomous you are in relation to your desires. The third intuition. This point picks up quite nicely on the last. Not only does your autonomy consist in ruling over your desires (and your beliefs), the ruling over has to be done by you. Not only does your autonomy have to be worked for, it has to be worked for by you. In fact, I should think it conceptually impossible for others to bring your autonomy about. While we can speak, quite coherently, of "making somebody free" in, say, the sense of freedom of action, we cannot speak of autonomy in this way, and this because autonomous activity is something that only the person themself- the autonomous agent- can engage in. For example, in the context of external constraints to one's autonomy, Robert Young makes this remark. "While institutional arrangements of various kinds may

15 11 well undermine autonomy, it does not follow that the adjustment of these arrangements will necessarily corifer autonomy". He gives an example. If abortion is illegal, a woman's autonomy, understood as the working towards a long-term plan, is limited. Yet if abortion then becomes legally permissible, this will not, by itself, bestow autonomy on her. In such a case, although the woman would have a restriction to her liberty lifted, she would still have to do the acting. Young puts the point succinctly: "[F] rom there it is over to her... Autonomy has to be worked for. "11 The point is that autonomy calls for personal contribution. My main focus in the present work is not external constraints to one's autonomy but one's relationship with one's own desires. The mastery of one's own desires can only be one's "own doing".l2 Turn next to our fourth intuition. The picture emerging is that of the self-ruled life. A further part of such a self-ruled life, we now add, will be some degree of evaluation. In relation to this, it is worth noting that Stanley Benn distinguished autonomy from autarchy. Autarchy is the state of the ordinary chooser. The autarchic person is able in ordinary conditions to direct their life to some extent. Yet Benn reserved the term "autonomy" to refer to an ideal. The autonomous person has the capacity for more than everyday choice procedures. Such a person engages in selfexamination of his values and principles- "they are his, because the outcome of a still-continuing process of criticism and re-evaluation". The ideal, apparently, is "the person who is his own cause, his own handiwork".j3 Note here that Benn' s interest was with an active sense of autonomy, one where continuous evaluation of self is given a very high profile. This active sense is one that 11 y. 9 oung, op. ell., p.. 12 Relevant here is Frankfurt, op. cit., p.l5. 13 S.I. Benn, "Freedom, Autonomy and the Concept of a Person", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1975-6), pp. 124, 129; see also Benn's A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp , and p. 175 onwards.

16 12 may not be for everybody.14 And I think that something less than this will do. On a more down-to-earth reading of autonomy, evaluation would still be central, but it would come in the form of deliberation. We can be certain, I think, that autonomy involves at least deliberation. As Frankfurt says, "we customarily regard deliberation as paradigmatically connected to the exercise of autonomy".15 So autonomous people make decisions. But what type? Well, one type could be what Walter Kaufmann calls fateful choices. These determine how we will go on in the future, they are choices that "mould our future".16 On the other hand, there could be more or less routine decisions, perhaps made in accordance with some life-style commitment or general principle stemming from a fateful choice, made earlier. The autonomous person, then, evaluates. Equally clearly, the autonomous person acts in the light of decisions taken, living up to their plans or principles. This is our filth intuition. It seems obvious that autonomy, unlike beauty, is not something we contemplate. Rather we sh.ould conceive of autonomy as something that requires action. This point provides us with a cue to introduce a sixth intuition. Given that autonomy involves action, should this be action in accordance with long-term plans, commitments and so on? Should autonomy be viewed, then, as a long-term, or even a life-long affair? One writer who thinks so is Robert Young. Young argues 14 John Benson speculates about a tendency to overstress evaluation in a way which pushes autonomy away from life in an article captioned "Who is the Autonomous Man?", Philosophy, 58 (1983): There he refers to Bruno Bettleheim's study of autonomy among inmates of a German prison camp during World War II. In his study, Bettleheim observed that Jehovah's Witnesses possessed enormous will power under the most appalling conditions. They were hard workers, always loyal to their fellow prisoners, and they never allowed prison conditions or the behaviour of the SS guards to overwhelm them. Yet intellectually the Wimesses were rigid and narrow. A far cry, perhaps, from the ideal of a critical, ever vigilant evaluator. And yet they seem to be autonomous, at least in one sense. See Bruno Bettleheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961). 1 5 See "Identification and Wholeheartedness" in his compilation volume The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p Walter Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy (New York: Wyden, 1973), chapters 1 and 8.

17 13 powerfully for the superiority of dispositional autonomy over occurrent autonomy. The former is autonomy over a long period of time. Autonomy in this sense may concern, say, my career plan. The latter is autonomy of the moment, the autonomy of short-term considerations. An example of this sense of autonomy would be when I choose to go and see a film, or to take the dog to the park. For Young, the dispositional variant is the "richer sense" of autonomy- the one which goes with one's life plan. "It is basically only this dispositional or comprehensive personal autonomy which enables an individual to enjoy a life that is unified, orderly, and free from self-defeating conflict over fundamentals",!? Related to this, another writer, Gerald Dworkin, has said that "autonomy seems intuitively to be a global... concept". And he chimes in with the view that autonomy is something that must be assessed over the long-term, perhaps the life-time. And yet we can perhaps imagine an autonomous person who does not value long-term considerations. Moreover, granted that autonomy does have a certain longterm tinge about 'it, autonomy also announces itself in the form of a series of individual decisions and actions. For an autonomous life is made up of a pattern of isolated encounters with one's desires. We need to consider those individual decisions and actions if we are to assess one's overall autonomy. So although the term "autonomy" suggests a way of life, I shall focus on the individual decisions which an autonomous person makes, as well as the actions an autonomous person takes. A further, seventh, intuition is that autonomy is a formal notion. The basic idea of autonomy is incompatible with any restiction in content to what an autonomous person can do. The self-ruled life is one in which it is up to the individual concerned to fill in the content Many current writers would go along with this. 17 y. 8 oung, op.clt., p..

18 14 Finally, by way of an eighth intuition, consider two notions which are related to autonomy. The first is prudence. Prudence tells you to look now, and act now, to fulfil future desires, thereby not allowing your present desires to constrain you. I imagine that the autonomous person is not a slave to short-term considerations, but rather one who takes the long-term view. The second is integrity. Integrity tells you to act on your own presellt desire, thereby not allowing other people's desires to constrain you.is Given that autonomy is self-rule or self-mastery over one's desires, the autonomous person should be well placed to be prudent and exercise integrity. To recap the main points made in this section. We have spoken of the self-ruled life. This will be a life where the person themself rules over their own desires (and beliefs), deliberates, acts on the basis of their decisions, and is likely to be prudent and display integrity. In addition, it will be up to the individual what content their selfruled life takes. Finally the self-ruled life may be lived in accordance with long-range plans. But whether this is in fact the case or not, we can measure a person's autonomy by seeing whether they act autonomously in individual choice situations. ls On prudence, see Thomas Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); on integrity, see Bernard Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism" in JJ.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp

19 15 III In this section, I move away from general comments, turning to a more specific account, or model, of autonomy. The foremost problem of my presentation as a whole is: How to understand personal autonomy? That is, how are we to interpret the idea of- in the phrase borrowed from Frankfurt - desires that ate made "more truly [one's] own"? The prevailing interpretation in contemporaty discussions - including Frankfurt's work- is to look to the distinction between a person's higher and lower levels of desire for the answer. On this interpretation, autonomy is based on a conception of a person as possessing an hieratchy of desires. I shall call this the hierarchy model of autonomy. What is it to act on a desire you make more truly your own? On the prevailing view it is, roughly, to act on the frrst-order desire which you have a second-order desire for (more generally: to act on the lower-order desire which you have a higherorder desire for).19 To put this another way, it is to act on the frrst-order desire which is in conformity to your second-order desire. This characterisation of autonomy is very Kantian. The ideal of the selflegislating individual who lays down their own rules or laws and lives by them comes to us from Kant. For Kant, the notion of the will plays a central role. To be autonomous, we manage our life by willing in accordance with our reason. This involves placing definite limits on certain lawless elements in us. If we ate autonomous, we ate free from disruptive desires and inclinations. Instead of being 19 However, for the sake of simplicity I shall in the current chapter usually speak of first- and second-order desires. In chapter 2, for the sake of an objection to the hierarchy model, we will need to consider desires at levels higher than the second. When this objection, and the reply to it, is out of the way, I shall frequently revert to speaking of second-order desires, for this is often the highest level of desire a person has.

20 16 driven by these, we adhere to the laws which we ourselves make and impose upon ourselves.20 But a qualifying remark. I do not wish to claim that we find in contemporary writings a pure-blooded Kantianism. Kant himself would, very likely, have rejected these writings. For modern accounts no longer recognise the link between autonomy and moral considerations, nor do they retain the substantive role played by Kant's particular conception of rationality. Yet they are Kantian, for all that. This is because of their emphasis on the central Kantian notion of the will, the very basis for today's hierarchy model of autonomy.21 The remainder of this section is devoted to a literature review. The central figure is Frankfurt, but there are others in the group as well. I do not try to include everybody though, for to date there has been a great deal written. Nor do I claim that my treatment is sensitive to important differences between the writers I do include. My main aim is simply to discuss some uses the Frankfurt hierarchy of desires has been put to. In doing this, I shall take a few points from each of the writers which I consider to be illustrative of the dominant "hierarchy model" of autonomy, thereby regrettably neglecting a wealth of material. We will see, however, just how influential the Frankfurt account has been in the recent literature. (i) Harty Frankfurt The chief spokesperson for the hierarchy model of autonomy is undoubtedly Harry Frankfurt. Yet in his celebrated paper "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", he never uses the term "autonomy". In his paper, Frankfurt offers a new 2 For example, Kant says, "the will is a faculty of choosing only that which reason, independently of inclination, recognises as practically necessary, i.e., as good." Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals in the Lewis White Beck translation (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 29; on Kantian self-determination, I refer the reader to Charles Taylor's stimulating article, "Kant's Theory of Freedom" in Zbigniew Pelczynski and John Gray (eds.), Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 1984), especially pp I am obliged to Kimon Lycos who pointed out to me the Kantian, self-legislating, nature of modern accounts of autonomy.

21 account of personhood. This analysis of a person provides the basis for an account of what he calls "freedom of the will" For Frankfurt, what is distinctive about persons is not that they have ordinary or first-order desires, but that they possess the additional capacity to form second- or higher-order desires. Roughly, second-order desires are desires about desires. Consider an example. I may not only want to pour myself a drink; I may, in addition, want not to want to pour myself a drink. My possession of such second-order desires makes for the possibility of my freedom of the will. Following Frankfurt, let us consider two contexts in which second-order desires can appear. First, there is an unusual sort of case where an agent has a second-order desire to bring about a ftrst-order desire to do X, but has no desire whatsoever to do X, and may even desire not to do X. Frankfurt's example for this sort of case is an agent who desires to have a desire for a certain drug, but does not want this desire to be effective. The agent in this example just wants to ftnd out how it feels to want the drug. Now consider the other context. It involves the sort of second-order desires which we have an interest in for present purposes. These are desires to desire to X, where an agent has a desire to X and now wants that desire to be effective (or to be frustrated). For Frankfurt, having the latter sort of second-order desire means that the agent must already have the relevant first-order desire. In the former case, the unusual case, in which the agent merely wants to feel what it is like to have a first-order desire for a drug, but not to be moved by it, the agent need not already have the first-order desire for the drug. This agent may want only to bring about a first-order desire. As Frankfurt comments, "if the drug were now to be administered to him, this might 22 I think that Frankfurt's article is a good place to start, for it will open up a lot of the remaining literature. The reference is in footnote 1 above. The article reappears in Frankfurt's recent collection, The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): However, I shall continue to refer to its original appearance in the Journal of Philosophy.

22 18 satisfy no desire that is implicit in his desire to want to take it". But unlike the unusual case, the agent in the latter case will actually have a first-order desire. On this, Frankfurt says, "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 [=effective desire]".23 It is this latter sort of second-order desires that are of interest to Frankfurt. He calls these desires, second-order volitions. These are desires to be moved by (or not to be moved by, as the case may be) a first-order desire. An example is: I want my frrst-order desire to work to be the desire which moves me all the way to action. Frankfurt calls a frrst-order desire which moves you to action a first-order volition. Now persons are beings who have the capacity to form second-order volitions, second-order desires that certain of their frrst-order desires be effective. As a person, I am able to desire that I am moved by my desire to do my work. Yet there are, besides, those who lack this capacity. Frankfurt calls these beings, wantons. The wanton "does not care" which of their desires move them to action. Although, as Frankfurt is careful to remark, this is not to say that wantons do not deliberate. On the contrary, they may take pains to deliberate about how to bring about certain states of affairs and so on. But, as Frankfurt stresses, it is characteristic of wantonhood that they are "not concerned with the desirability" of their own desires. The example offered is a drug addict, tom between the desire to take the drug and the desire to avoid the drug, but refusing to take sides in this internal conflict. This addict, this wanton addict, is, "in respect of his wanton lack of concern, no different from an animal". Or so Frankfurt would have us believe. Another addict graces Frankfurt's pages. This addict is a person. Frankfurt calls this addict, the unwilling addict. Like the wanton addict, the unwilling addict has 23 Ibid., pp. 9,10.

23 19 conflicting first-order desires: a ftrst-order desire to take the drug as well as a firstorder desire to avoid the drug. But, unlike the wanton addict, the unwilling addict does take sides in this internal conflict. 24 He comes down, he legislates, in fact, on the side of his desire to avoid the drug. When Frankfurt separates persons from wantons in this fashion, we come across a certain picture. This is the picture of the Frankfurtian person reflecting about the desirability of their own ftrst-order desires. Wantons do not do this. The wanton is represented as one who "does not care" about their desires. This is "due either to his lack of the capacity for reflection or to his mindless indifference to the enterprise of evaluating his own desires and motives". By contrast, a person does participate in such evaluation.25 We shall return to this. Frankfurt's account of fredom of the will is founded on his analysis of persons. It is only because persons have the capacity for second-order desires, says Frankfurt, that they are rightly placed to possess, or to lack, freedom of the will. And it is worth noticing that wantons, because they have no second-order desires, don't get a look in when it comes to exercising freedom of the will. How does Frankfurt's account of freedom of the will go? Well, one way to illustrate this is to return to our freedom triad. Recall it is of the form: xis free from constraints y to do z. Frankfurt speaks about freedom of action. What he calls freedom of action, can perhaps be thought of, on the triadic formula, as being the freedom from constraints - presumably external and internal- to what you want. Frankfurt believes that we can best understand his account of freedom of will (autonomy) by analogy with such freedom of action. Just as, in the case of freedom 2 4 Ibid., pp ; see also, Amartya Sen, "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory" in his Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) - in particular, I point you in the direction of his idea of rankings of preference rankings; in the context of decision theory, Richard Jeffrey's "Preferences among Preferences" in his The Logic of Decision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1983), is an important article. 25 Frankfurt, op.cit.. pp ; Frankfurt adds that what we are talking about is evaluation, however capricious, irresponsible or immoral it might be.

24 20 of action, the relevant question to ask is whether or not you are doing what you want to do, so too, when the discussion turns to freedom of will (or autonomy), we ask whether or not the desire that moves you is the one you want to be moved by. It is in securing the conformity of his will [his effective first-order desire] to his second-order volitions... 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. 26 Clearly, what counts for my freedom of will is whether the desire for which I have a second-order counterpart is effective, as I want it to be, and whether this occurs as a result of my efforts. So autonomy, on Frankfurt's hierarchical model, involves being free from those of your own desires which you do not want to be effective, free to act upon the desire that you want to be effective. Observe how neatly Frankfurt's freedom of action and Frankfurt's freedom of will dovetail. While the former involves the absence of constraints to what you want, the latter is represented as the absence of constraints to what you want to will. I turn now to a note about the role of efforts in Frankfurt's account of freedom of will. Although Frankfurt is not particularly explicit on this, it is clear I think that second-order volitions are those which an agent aims to fulfil through efforts of will. Frankfurt's unwilling addict struggles, but eventually acts "against his will" in taking the drug, so does not have freedom of will.27 And Frankfurt alludes to the possibility of failing to possess freedom of will even though a first-order desire is in conformity with a second-order desire because "their conformity is not [the agent's] own doing".28 We shall see a little later in this chapter that John Bigelow, Susan Dodds 26 Ibid., p He is, though, a person because he has second-order volitions. 28 Frankfurt, op. cit., p. 15.

25 and Robert Pargetter in a recent joint paper bring out this idea of efforts of will more than Frankfurt, their precursor, does. 21 We are now in a position to set out what Frankfurt means by desires that are one's "own". An example. I want to want to do my work. I already want to work but this is, suppose, just one among several relevant first-order desires which I possess at this time. My second-order volition is that my desire to work, out of all my first-order desires, be the one which moves me, as Frankfurt would say, all the way to action. If I am moved by some unwanted desire, say the desire to play snooker with John, then I do not possess freedom of will. Of course this desire, this desire to play snooker, is mine, in a literal sense. But the other, the other desire, the desire to work, is the desire which I make- in Harry Frankfurt's words- "more truly [my] own". If I am moved by this desire, this desire I have made my own, then I have freedom of will (or autonomy). The contrast Frankfurt provides us with is a desire which is, as he puts it, "other than [my] own". This is a desire which I do not want to be moved by at the second-level. In my example, this is the desire to play snooker. If I am moved by this desire, then I am moved by a desire that is, to Frankfurt, "a force other than [my] own". When Frankfurt writes of being moved in this way, his insight is that one's desires can be just as alien to a person as anything produced by external agencies. Being moved by desires "other than [an agent's] own" means that the agent is "estranged from himself, or that he finds himself a helpless or a passive bystander to the forces that move him".29 For Frankfurt, this is the sense in which one's own desire can be an obstacle to one's autonomy. To sum up. Frankfurt uses his notion of a hierarchy of desires to draw a distinction between persons and wantons, and to give sense to his idea of a desire 2 9 Ibid., pp. 13, 17.

26 22 more truly your own. What is it to make a desire more truly your own? The answer is to have a second-order volition to be moved by it. Frankfurt's hierarchy of desires also forms the basis for his conception of freedom of will. Freedom of will with respect to a first-order volition requires that volition to be in accord with the agent's second-order volition. This account of freedom of will involves what we might call self-legislation. You have two conflicting ftrst-order desires. Your second-order volition enters the conflict. Your autonomy consists in your effective ftrst-order desire (that is, your ftrst-order volition) being in conformity with your second-order desire, and being in conformity as a result of your efforts. What matters as far as your autonomy is concerned is whether, as a result of your own own efforts of will, you are moved by the desire you want to be moved by. Autonomy on this account is an exercise in control. This, then, has been the Frankfurt hierarchy account. It occupies an important place in contemporary work on autonomy and related issues. We shall see later that it sets the agenda for other writers in the area. (ii) Oerald Dworkin In the work of Gerald Dworkin, we meet again the hierarchical view of persons. Apparently, Dworkin and Frankfurt both arrived at the hierarchy view at around the same time, each independently of the other. Frankfurt does not use the term "autonomy". Dworkin does. However, each develops the idea of autonomy in their own way. While Frankfurt in his "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" concentrates on the freedom of will of individual agents, where the relevant constraints are the agent's own desires, Dworkin, in his book-length discussion, wants his account of autonomy to be able to do, as well, some work in countering arguments for paternalism, some

27 23 locking of horns with those who would put constraints in place in our lives. As mentioned in section I above, he writes about "a notion of the self which is to be respected, left unmanipulated". The type of interference, then, that concerns Dworkin is not just interference with one's liberty or freedom of action, but also with "one's ability to choose his mode of life",30 He is particularly interested in ways - hypnotism, manipulation &c. - that an agent's evaluational faculty can be subverted. Autonomy requires a capacity to form a hierarchy of desires, yes, but it also requires procedural independence. What interests me here is how Dworkin develops his account of what I have called autonomy as self-mastery- mastery over one's own desires. The key role in this account is the hierarchy of desires. Dworkin writes that a person can have their liberty restricted and yet want this at the second-level. For Dworkin, a case in point is Odysseus. This epic hero orders his sailors to tie him to the mast so that when the sirens start their singing, he will be unable to sail his ship to destruction. Dworkin says of Odysseus that: He has a preference about his preferences, a desire not to have or to act upon various desires. He views. the desire to move his ship closer to the sirens as something that is no part of him, but alien to him.31 By prudently ordering his sailors to bind him to the mast, Odysseus's liberty or freedom of action is restricted, for he will have a ftrst-order desire which he will not be able to act upon, but not his autonomy; in fact, his autonomy is enhanced. Dworkin's dual-level account of personhood joins Frankfurt in holding that the autonomous agent evaluates their own first-level desires. For example, in 30 Dworkin, op. cil.,pp. 9-14; to see a shift in Dworkin's view compare with his earlier, "The Concept of Autonomy", Grazer Phi/osophische SIUdien, Vol (1981), pp Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy, op. cit., pp

28 24 distinguishing autonomy from liberty he warns that to concentrate only on what is happening on the ground-level is "to iguore a crucial feature of persons, their ability to reflect upon and adopt attitudes toward their first-order desires, wishes, intentions. "32 "I think", says Dworkin, "we fail to capture something important about human agents if we make our distinctions [concerning motivation] solely at the first level".33 The upshot of this is that there are cases where the difference between two agents lies, not in their first-order desires, but in their second-order desires. Dworkin offers cases of being motivated by jealousy, anger and the desire to smoke. I hope he would not mind my developing the last of these in the following way. I desire to smoke. You desire to smoke. I want that I not be moved by my desire to smoke. I wish I didn't have this craving. You, on the other hand, desire that you have your desire to smoke, you quite like being moved in this way. So we are different in a quite fundamental way. We radically diverge from each other in that we have different second-order desires. I don't want to be the sort of person who smokes, the sort of person who is always craving cigarettes. You do not mind being that sort of person at all. As in Frankfurt, the ultimate test of autonomy is whether or not one's motivating desire is as one wants it to be. Consider this excerpt. The idea of autonomy is not merely an evaluative or reflective notion, but includes as well some ability both to alter one's preferences and to make them effective in one's actions and, indeed, to make them effective because one has reflected upon them and adopted them as one's own.34 As I see it, this is pretty much fundamentalist hierarcy model doctrine. It is worth noticing the type of example Dworkin selects. In the important first chapter of The Theory and Practice of Autonomy, Dworkin cites not only the case of 32 Ibid., p.l Ibid.,p.l Ibid., p.l7.

29 25 Odysseus, but the case of a drug addict who tries to change their behaviour. Other of his examples feature various powerfully-felt motivations such as jealousy, anger, the desire to smoke. As in the work of Frankfurt, the nature of Dworkin's selections, each involving a strongly felt desire, betrays - I believe - something important. It shows roughly that Dworkin conceives of autonomy as involving a struggle for control over one's strongly-felt desires. The idea of efforts of will is central here. Autonomy demands that you, as it were, put down your strongly-felt desires. The clearest index of this way of thinking is, I believe, to be found in the account I now turn to. (iii) John Bi~elow. Susan Dodds and Robert Parutter Recent work done by Bigelow, Dodds and Pargetter has much in common with the Frankfurt account. In a lovely paper entitled "Temptation and the Will"35 these writers acknowledge that they "derive some guidance" from Harry Frankfurt's "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person". Recall that Frankfurt sees the notion of a hierarchy of desires to be essential for personhood, and he makes use of this analysis to base his account of freedom of the will. In a not dissimilar fashion, Bigelow, Dodds and Pargetter look to the hierarchy of desires to explain strength and weakness of will, and to do this within the framework of decision theory. So while Frankfurt writes about freedom of will, Bigelow, Dodds and Pargetter write about strength of will. But I believe that both camps come together on essentials. To help to understand Bigelow, Dodds and Pargetter's account of strength and weakness of will, consider what they say about temptation. As in Frankfurt, we come across a discussion of a particular kind of obstacle to an agent's action. This obstacle is one of the person's own desires. Recall Frankfurt's picture of internal 3S John Bigelow, Susan M. Dodds and Robert Pargetter, "Temptation and the Will". I heard this paper at the 1989 AA.P. Conference. It has since appeared in print in American Philosophical Quarterly, op. cit.