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On the Concept
of Personhood
A Comparative Analysis of Three Accounts
Martin Alexander Vezér
What
does it mean to be a person? Is there a special set of
criteria that must be met in order for one to be correctly called a
‘person’? Are
all humans persons? Or can it be that some humans are not persons? What
about nonhuman beings;
can anything
nonhuman be categorized as a person? All of these questions aim at
discovering
the nature of personhood and determining the kinds of entities that can
properly be
considered persons. When
addressing these questions, however, the answers that one comes up with
may
vary according to the way one defines ‘personhood’.
In this essay, I will focus
on these questions by comparing the accounts of personhood given by
three
contemporary thinkers who hold contrasting positions on the issue:
Harry
Frankfurt, Joseph Raz and Gary Watson. The first section of this essay
explains
Frankfurt’s
account of personhood. The second
section focuses on a criticism of Frankfurt’s
view waged by Raz and the alternative account of personhood that Raz
advocates.
Similarly, the third section focuses on a criticism of Frankfurt’s
view posited by
Watson and the
alternative account of personhood that Watson advances. Throughout the
course
of this essay, I will highlight the flaws of Frankfurt’s
account which I think make his theory rather problematic. Since the
scope of
this essay is mainly concentrated on Frankfurt’s
thesis, I will mention the accounts of personhood that Raz and Watson
offer
only for comparative purposes, without delving into a critique of their
theories as well.
1. Frankfurt’s
Account of Personhood.
In
his essay “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a
Person,” Harry Frankfurt argues that the criteria of
personhood demand more
than just a certain type of genetic constitution. A person is a special
entity
whose existence is more profound than one’s biological
happenstance. Being of
the species Homosapien is neither a necessary nor a sufficient
condition of
personhood. Conceptually speaking, the philosophic notion of
‘personhood’ is
defined in a way that neither necessarily includes all human entities
nor
precludes all nonhuman entities from qualifying as persons. In Frankfurt’s words,
Our concept
of ourselves as persons is not to
be understood… as
a concept of attributes that are necessarily species-specific. It is
conceptually possible that members of novel or even of familiar
nonhuman
species should be person; and it is also conceptually possible that
some
members of the human species are not persons.
Now,
if the biological constitution of an entity does not
hold the key criteria for personhood, where should we look? Frankfurt
postulates that in order for an individual to be properly counted as a
person,
she must identify with her desires in a way that is indicative of her
having a
(free) will. He defines a ‘person’ as an agent who
has the ability to identify
with her desires in a way that allows her to effect and select the
motivations
which move her to action. A ‘person’ is thus one
who has the power to engage
herself with her will while deliberating about her motivations.
Frankfurt
maintains that it just so happens that humans appear to be unique in
that they constitute
the only species which has the capacity to properly identify with their
desires
and have a will. Although “[h]uman beings are not alone in
having desires and
motives, or in making choices,” he states, “[i]t
seems to be peculiarly characteristic
of humans… that they are able to form…
‘second-order desires’ or ‘desires of
the second order’ [which is a necessary condition for having
a will].”
A “second order-desire” is a desire which makes
mention of some other desire. That
is, a second-order desire is a desire to desire something. To
understand this
notion, consider how it contrasts against a desire of the first order:
a first
order desire makes no mention of any other desire. If I want to eat a
chocolate
bar, go to the movies, participate in political debate or design a
subway
system, then I have first-order desires which push me toward action.
There are
many degrees of wanting within the first order. These degrees of
wanting range
from ‘not being aware of a first-order desire but acting on
it unconsciously’,
to ‘being fully aware of a first-order desire and going after
it at all cost’
(including death). Also, one may be ambivalent about first-order
desires, such
as when there are two or more competing desires. Or, one may be sure
about a
desire when it “univocally” pressures her to act a
certain way. The hallmark of
all desires of the first order, though, is that they not make mention
of
additional desires.
In contrast, a desire of the second order is a desire to have a certain
desire.
If, for example, I want to want to eat vegetables, or I want to want to
do my
homework, then I have second-order desires.
Besides
just wanting certain
things, humans tend to want to want certain things. To be sure, humans
have
first-order desires such as the ones mentioned above, but sometimes
they also
want to be the authors of their desires. On the other hand, nonhuman
animals
seem at most only to have first-order wants. They want to live, eat,
play,
etc., but they seem indifferent as to the kinds of wants they have.
According
to Frankfurt,
humans are the only creatures
that appear “to have the capacity for reflective
self-evaluation that is
manifested in the formation of second-order desires.”
Furthermore,
Frankfurt maintains
that there are two types
of second-order desires. The first type of second-order desire is one
that may
move a person to action by coextending to a desire of the first order.
But this
first type of second-order desire might also be
“truncated” if it has no
coextending first-order desire which gives it the motivational push
necessary
to move an individual to action. For
instance, if I have the second-order desire to want to do my homework
(that is,
I want to want to do my homework), and I also have the first-order
desire to do
well in school (that is, I want to do well in school), then perhaps my
second-order desire to want to do my homework coextends to my first-
order
desire to do well in school in such a way that I am actually moved to
do my
homework. But this second-order desire may also be truncated if there
is no
coextending desire of the first order. If I want to want to do my
homework, but
there is no desire of the first order to boost the motivational force
of my
wanting to want to do my homework, then I might decide to ignore my
homework
and do something else instead. At any rate, according to Frankfurt this
first
type of second-order desire fails to meet the standard of willfulness
because,
although it consists of a desire to desire something, it does not
consist of a
desire to desire something that is accompanied by an actual desire for
that
second-order desire to motivate action. An individual with this kind of
second-order desire does not identify with that desire independently of
any
first-order desire.
There is
also a second type of second-order desire which is independent of
first-order
desires and therefore indicative of an individual’s willful
agency. This type
of second-order desire Frankfurt
calls “second-order
volition.” He writes that willful agency is “not
coextensive with the notion of
first-order desires. It is not the notion of 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.”
Second-order volitions are second-order desires supported and
encouraged by
one’s self. Accordingly,
‘persons’ are
agents who identify with their second-order desires and willfully
decide
whether those desires are worth pursuing.
A
creature which has second order desires but not second-order volition Frankfurt calls a
“wanton.” Essentially, a wanton does
not care about willfulness. A wanton’s desires move it
without it necessarily
wanting to be moved by them. Creatures which Frankfurt
suggests may count as wantons include nonhuman animals, very young
children,
and possibly some adult humans. A wanton may be rational, but it has no
real
concern about the desirability of its desires. It is indifferent to the
way in
which its desires are ranked in relation to each other and it does not
identify
with a second-order desire independently of its desires of the first
order. A
wanton acts as a sort of arena for desires to compete against each
other –
unlike a person who acts as an agent having control over her desires. A
person
not only has reason, but she uses reason to critically assess the way
in which
her desires are ranked, and she orders this ranking appropriately
according to
her will.
To
elucidate the distinction between persons and wantons, we should
consider the
following scenario which Frankfurt
uses to
exemplify his point. There are two men incorrigibly addicted to a drug,
say
cocaine. One is a person unwillingly addicted to the drug, and the
other is a
wanton addicted to the drug. Neither of these men can quit his habit,
but they
are still markedly different. The wanton addict, on the one hand, has
conflicting first-order desires: (1) he desires desperately to ingest
the drug
so that he can feel its effects, but (2) he also desires desperately to
refrain
from taking the drug because he knows that it has side effects which
are
harmful to his wellbeing. He is also, however, indifferent about which
of his
competing desires move him to action. He both wants the drug and does
not want
the drug simultaneously, but he does not care about affecting the
ranking of
these desires so as to bring one desire above the other. Rather, he
passively
allows the desires to sort themselves out in relation to each other by
letting
the strongest one move him to action. His
passive nature is due either to his
inability to self-reflect or to his total indifference about the
quality of his
desires and motives.
The
unwilling addict, on the other hand, is also a man with two conflicting
desires
of the first order: (1) he desires desperately to ingest the drug so
that he
can feel its effects, but, like the wanton, (2) he also desires
desperately to
refrain from taking the drug because he knows that it has side effects
which
are harmful to his wellbeing. The unwilling addict is different from
the
wanton, however, because (a) he has an additional desire (viz. of the
second
order) to refrain from taking the drug because he desires to desire to
refrain
from it,
and (b) he has a second-order volition since he desires that his
second-order
desire lead him effectively to action by causing him to will against
ingesting
the drug.
Even if the unwilling addict fails to refrain from taking the drug due
to the severity
of his addiction, he is still a person because he identifies his
second-order
desire with his will and desires that it translate into a motivation
which can
lead to action.
In one
sense, wantons might be free to achieve the object of their desires
(e.g. if
the wanton addict has an ample supply of cocaine at hand), but in the
sense
which is relevant to personhood, wantons are not free because they are
unable
to recognize the desirability of their desires and they are unable to
affect
the motivations which led them to action.
Thus, nonhuman animals (and even some humans at least on occasion) are
not
‘persons’ in this sense but
‘wantons’, not because they lack some basic freedom
to do what they want, but because they lack the freedom to engage
themselves
willfully with their desires.
According
to Frankfurt,
then, there are three possible
sorts of beings: (1) animal-like or automaton-like creatures that have
only
first-order desires; (2) wanton creatures that may have second-order
desires
but no second order-volitions;
and (3) persons who have second order-volition which attribute to them
a will.
2. Raz’s
perspective
In
“When We Are Ourselves: The Active and the
Passive,” the
first chapter of his book Engaging
Reason: On the Theory of Value and
Action, Joseph Raz
argues that Frankfurt’s
account of personhood overlooks the importance of reason. Contrary to Frankfurt, Raz maintains that
individuals are only truly
in control of their actions when they are guided by reason, and
individuals are
only persons when they recognize and intend to act on the values which
their
reason allows them to realize.
In this section, I will elaborate on Raz’s criticisms of Frankfurt’s
theory, and explain Raz’s own account of personhood.
As Raz
sees it, Franckfurt’s picture of personhood is a messy matrix
of desires
without any reference to an authentic mode of agency. He suggests that Frankfurt is walking on thin ice
by trying to explain how
an individual is the proper owner of some desires but not really the
owner of
other desires. As mentioned above, Frankfurt
claims that an individual owns the desires which she identifies with
but not
the desires which encroach upon her without her
‘willful’ approval. According
to Raz, this picture is obfuscated by an arbitrary and unjustifiable
disassociation of some of an individual’s desires from that
individual’s self. Raz
offers the following example to demonstrate his point.
When I want
a refrigerator and also want a
dishwasher, but, not
able to afford both, I form the desire—using Frankfurt's
formulations—to be
moved to action by, let us say, the desire for a refrigerator, and not
by the
desire for a dishwasher, it does not follow that the desire for the
dishwasher
is not really my own, that I relate to it in the way an addict relates
to the
craving to satisfy his addiction which he resents and tries to shake
off
without success.
Raz’s
point strikes at the heart of Frankfurt’s account: it
stuns Frankfurt’s
attempt to abandon ownership
of some desires (viz. those of the first order) while embracing other
desires
(viz. those which translate into second-order volitions). I believe Raz
is
correct to think it absurd to say that an agent who decides to develop
a
first-order desire into a second-order volition simply because
‘she must make a
choice’ among competing first-order desires is only the owner
of her
second-order volition but not owner of her the first-order desires
which failed
to reach the status of second-order volition. Really, it seems that all
of an
agent’s desires are hers; it is just that when not all of her
desires can be
satisfied, she chooses to act on one rather than the other.
Raz also
points out how Frankfurt’s
account fails to
explain how an agent can truly authenticate a desire as her own. Frankfurt’s focus on
second-order volitions begs the
questions: How can one know that her will is authentically the cause of
her
motivations and her motivations are not the cause of her will? How does
one
authenticate her desires as her own? How does one authenticate her
authentication that her desires are her own? And so on. Of course, the
trouble
of addressing these questions within the framework of Frankfurt’s
theory is that answers will invariably fall into infinite regress.
Raz’s
conception of personhood hinges on two important interrelated causal
distinctions. These distinctions are as follows. First, there must be a
separation between an individual’s self and her environment.
This separation is
necessary because it allows an individual to concentrate on her
motivations
despite external pressures coming from outside her. If there is no
causal
border between an individual’s self and her environment,
there is no way for
her self to be unaffected by the pressures of the outside world.
Second, there
must be a difference between what happens to an individual and how an
individual leads her life – and it is this difference which Frankfurt’s
account fails to address. This difference is necessary because it
allows an
individual to actively
participate in the process of deliberation as opposed
to merely holding a drove of desires like a container which passively
waits for the most pressing desires to spring into action.
If an individual does
not actively participate in the deliberative process, but just
passively holds
desires and acts on the strongest, then that individual has no real way
of
identifying with her will and thus no chance at qualifying as a person.
According
to this view, one only qualifies as a person when she personifies these
two distinctions;
that is, when her self is distinguishable from her environment and she
governs
her desires. For without these distinctions, it would be impossible to
act
willfully.
The
question is, then, when is it clearly the case that an individual has
the power
to act willfully instead of just succumbing to her strongest desire? As
I have
alluded to earlier, Raz rejects Frankfurt’s
theory of second-order volitions. Raz maintains that an individual who
is
responsive to reason has the power to act willfully and thus count as a
person.
Unlike volitions of the second order, reason allows individuals to hold
beliefs
about what is objectively good. Further, unlike Frankfurt’s
description of orders of desires, reason as the criterion of personhood
does
not preclude an agent from owning any order of desire. As Raz puts it,
to see
oneself as subject to reason is to be
responsive to
reason to a minimal degree. That still allows room for one to believe,
mistakenly, and even irrationally, that one is responsive to reason.
And this
would be enough to satisfy the condition of my core account.
[…] The problem
with Frankfurt's
account is not that it is
subjective, but that it is subjective in the wrong way. The key to my
[Raz’s]
account is the objective notion of proper functioning, explained in
terms of
responsiveness to reason.
Although
an individual may act subjectively according to reason,
she still acts on what she thinks is objectively good. What matters is
not that
the agent choose
to act like she has a volition of the second order, but
that she recognize
the reason for her action as objectively good (even
if her recognition is mistaken).
3. Watson’s
perspective.
Another
interesting criticism to Frankfurt’s
account of personhood comes from Gary Watson in his essay
“Free Agency.” This
section begins with a review of Watson’s
criticism, and then moves into a discussion about the alternative
account of
personhood that he supports.
Watson
claims that Frankfurt’s
theory of personhood
is fatally flawed because it arbitrarily asserts that the point at
which an
individual authentically identifies with her desires is only reached
when she
holds them as second-order volitions. Contrary to Frankfurt,
Watson argues that an individual’s capacity to have
second-order volitions is
not an indicator of personhood. Frankfurt’s claim that
second-order volitions
are indicative of personhood is arbitrary because it fails to explain
why an
individual’s identification with her second-order volitions
is more
authentically governed by her will than is her following through with
desires
of any order at all (including first-order desires). As noted above, Frankfurt depicts a wanton as an
individual who is unable
to have volitions of the second order because his desires (whether of
the first
or second order) ultimately decide which desires are to be followed by
action. Since
a wanton does not decide which desires translate into action, the
wanton has no
will. Now, the problem Watson finds in this theory is that there is no
clear or
absolute distinction between the action carried out by an individual
who is
moved by desires of the first and second order, and the action carried
out by
an individual who is moved by a second-order volition. That is, while
Frankfurt
asserts that a wanton is unfree and will-less because its process of
deliberation is no more than a battle of competing desires, he fails to
explain
why an individual who acts on second-order desires with which she
‘genuinely’
wants to affect her will identifies with those desires any more
genuinely than
she does with desires which do not stem into second-order volitions. As
Watson
retorts, “Can’t one be a wanton, so to speak, with
respect to one’s
second-order desires and volitions?”
Frankfurt’s
description of a person is problematic
because he ascribes a special function to second-order volitions when
really
volitions of the second order may simply be desires of so called
“higher orders.”
Second-order volitions only arise when the number of competing
second-order
desires increases to the point where one must move past second-order
desires to
a next level (third, forth, fifth etc.) of desire. So while a
first-order
desire is simply ‘a desire for X’,
and a
second-order desire is ‘a
desire to desire X’,
a second-order volition is really ‘a desire to desire to
desire X’.
The way Frankfurt calls ‘a desire to desire to desire X’
a “second-order volition” rather than a
“third-order desire” is somewhat
misleading because it fails to explain the functional difference
between a
desire of the second order and one of the third, forth, fifth and so
on. Watson
underscores this problem with the following words.
Indeed,
practical judgments are connected with
“second-order
volitions.” For
the same considerations
that constitute one’s on-balance reasons for doing some
action, a,
are reasons for wanting the “desire” to do a
to
be effective in action, and for
wanting contrary desires to be ineffective. But in general, evaluations
are
prior and of the first order. The first-order desires that result from
practical judgments generate second-order volitions because they have
this
special status; they do not have the special status that Frankfurt
wants them to have because there is a higher-order desire concerning
them.
In
effect, Frankfurt
arbitrarily designates one
level of desire as indicative willfulness. This arbitrary depiction of
personhood is distorted because it fails to identify the functional
role that
the will plays in the process of a person’s deliberation and
evaluation of
competing desires. Looking at higher and higher orders of desires fails
to be a
way of discovering the moment at which an individual goes beyond the
state of
wantonness and grabs hold of some quintessential feature of willfulness
that allows
her to reach the status of personhood. The question that Watson now
faces is:
What is the quintessential feature of willfulness?
Watson
explains that Frankfurt’s
description of the
structure of a person’s will is similar to Plato’s
description of the structure
of a person’s soul insofar as they both recognize that
personhood involves a
division between types of motivation. These two thinkers are different,
however, in the way that they describe the nature of motivational
divisions. On
the one hand, Frankfurt
claims that there are
divisions among levels
of desire. Plato, on the other hand,
maintains that
there are divisions among the sources
of desire. Watson disagrees
with Frankfurt and
sides with Plato by stating
that the division among motivational forces that reveals the essence of
personhood is not to be found in a division between levels of desire,
but
rather it is to be found “among independent sources of
motivation.”
Namely, the independent source of motivation that is the quintessential
feature
of willfulness and personhood is an individual’s ability to evaluate.
Watson holds
that persons can be moved by evaluations because of their ability to
use
reason. In order to understand the link between reason and evaluation,
it is
worth while to define the meaning of reason as Watson sees it. Watson’s
view of
reason sharply contrasts
against that of Hume who considers reason to be a sort of mental
instrument
which humans use to determine the most efficient way to satisfy their
desires. Hume
considers reason to be “the slave of
desire.” Unlike
Hume, Watson sees reason
not merely as a tool for satisfying desires, but as a tool for
discovering
value and thus allowing value to act as a motivational force.
Accordingly, this
view distinguishes between values and desires and maintains that each
is an
independent source of motivation. Values are different from desires for
two
important reasons:
First, it is
possible that what one desires is
not to
any degree valued, held to be worth while, or
thought good; one assigns
no
value whatever to the object of
one’s
desire. [e.g. Tonya desires to
hurt Nancy
because she is jealous.] Second, although one may indeed value what is
desired,
the strength of one’s desire may not properly reflect the
degree to which one
values its object; that is, although the object of a desire is
valuable, it may
not be deemed the most valuable in the situation and yet
one’s desire for it
may be stronger than the want for what is most valued. [e.g. Tom values
celibacy more than sex, but he desires sex more than celibacy.]
It
is important to note that the process of evaluation may
involve an agent’s seeing the value of something without
necessarily desiring
it (such as being celibate); and, conversely, it may involve an
agent’s seeing
how a desire lacks value (such as hurting someone in a jealous rage)
even
though one feels motivated to pursue it. Both desires and values can
lead an
individual to action. Since, however, sometimes desires contradict
values and
vice versa, and each has independent motivational clout, each must be
an
independent source of motivation.
Motivationally,
the distinction between the conception of values and the conception of
desires
rests in the way an individual sees each of these motivations as an
independent
consideration which has the power to lead one to action. Reason is
crucial to
the evaluation process because it causes individuals to consider
certain things
valuable. And since personhood is dependent upon one’s
ability to evaluate, and
one’s ability to evaluate is dependent upon reason,
personhood is also
dependent upon reason.
Therefore,
according to this account, a ‘person’ is an agent
who “has the capacity to
translate his values into action; his actions flow from his evolutional
system.”
A person is moved not just by desires but by values which he recognizes
because
of his ability to reason. Personhood is achieved by individuals who
move beyond
the passive
state of merely acting upon their strongest
desires
and into the active
state of using reason to identify courses of action that are
independently
valuable and worthy of pursuit.
Concluding remarks
Each
of the three thinkers discussed in this essay has a
unique view of what it means to be a person. While Frankfurt claims
that a
person is an individual who acts on second-order volitions, Raz and
Watson
reject that claim and point out faults in Frankfurt’s
argument. Raz’s view shows how Frankfurt
underestimates
the importance of reason
vis-à-vis personhood. Watson further stresses the
importance of reason and outlines the necessity of discerning between values
and desires
as independent motivational forces. Frankfurt
raises the important issue of defining criteria for personhood. Raz and
Watson
follow suit by scrutinizing Frankfurt’s
account and suggesting their own criteria. The question that is now at
hand is
whether Raz and Watson have successfully provided arguments which
support their
respective definitions of personhood without running into the kinds of
problems
that Frankfurt
encountered.
York University
About the
Author
References
Frankfurt,
Harry.
“Freedom of the Will and the Concept of
a Person.” Journal
of Philosophy, Jan. 1971, pp. 5-20.
Raz, Joseph. Engaging
Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action. (Oxford
University
Press, 2006.)
Watson, Gary.
“Free
Agency.” Mind,
Vol. 96 no. 382,
April 1987.
In Frankfurt’s
words (pp. 10-11), “[i]t is logically possible, however
unlikely, that there
should be an agent with second-order desires but with no volitions of
the
second order.”
Joseph
Raz, Engaging
Reason: On the Theory of
Value and Action, (Oxford University Press,
2006),
p.3.