Frankfurt on Second-Order Desires and the Concept of a Person

In this article I look at some the issues, problems and (it seems to me) self-imposed dilemmas that emerge from Harry Frankfurt's well-known essay 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person'. That essay has exerted a widespread influence on subsequent thinking in ethics and philosophy of mind, especially through its central idea of 'second-order' desires and volitions. Frankfurt's approach promises a third-way solution to certain longstanding issues - chiefly those of free-will versus determinism and the mind/body problem - that have up to now resisted the best efforts of philosophical deliverance or therapy. It looks very much like the kind of answer that would avoid the 'high priori road' of any Kantian or suchlike metaphysical approach by adopting a broadly naturalized conception of human moral agency while not going so far down the path toward wholesale ethical naturalism as to lose the benefits (of personhood, choice, self-knowledge, and at any rate relative autonomy) that come with the Kantian conception. However I suggest that this appearance is deceptive and that Frankfurt's way of addressing these issues - especially his leading idea of second-order desires and volitions - lies open to a long-familiar range of objections from both a naturalist (anti-Kantian) and a strong autonomist (anti-naturalist) quarter. More specifically, I show that his notion of moral will as possessing a multiplex structure whereby higher-order volitions can reject or countermand the promptings of unregenerate first-order desire is one that must inherently give rise to various problems of a logical, metaphysical, and - most importantly in this context - ethical character. I conclude that a thoroughgoing naturalism is the only response that can meet the kinds of challenge increasingly mounted from various scientific quarters, notably those of neurophysiology and cognitive psychology.