A Note on Wholeheartedness

In “The Faintest Passion”, Harry Frankfurt wrote: “It is a necessary truth about us, then, that we wholeheartedly desire to be wholehearted.”

Wholeheartedness has long been on the list of proposed virtues, with supporters as diverse as Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. We are more accustomed to being exhorted to it: “Leave off your wretched ambivalence! Put aside distractions! Tend to the one thing needful!”

But if Frankfurt is right these exhortations are in a way beside the point. If we necessarily desire to be wholehearted, then we should not need exhortation. Perhaps the exhortations are merely reminders; but it might nonetheless strike one as odd that some respond to them with ambivalence, or at least seem to. How can we be ambivalent when reminded of our own desires, desires that we cannot fail to possess?

Ambivalence Frankfurt defines as follows:

Ambivalence is constituted by conflicting volitional movements or tendencies, either conscious or unconscious, that meet two conditions. First, they are inherently and hence unavoidably opposed, that is, they do not just happen to conflict on account of contingent circumstances. Second, they are both wholly internal to a person’s will rather than alien to him; that is, he is not passive with respect to them.

The second condition will be trivial if one counts all a person’s desires and beliefs as internal to them; Frankfurt needs it because he does not. It also seems clearly right, though, if we follow Frankfurt in positing an ‘inner’ or ‘true’ self (not his chosen terms) which consists of the beliefs and desires with which one is identified: if there is such a self it is the one whose ambivalence concerns us. So either way this condition should be granted.

The first condition is too weak, however. Consider the following passage from William James’ Principles of Psychology:

With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone-poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back. Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.

Many of these do in fact conflict because of contingent circumstances: the fact that the active part of most human lives is rarely more than 80 years, and very often much less, is in fact the chief driver of the supposed conflict here. There are imaginable cases of genuinely necessary conflicts of this kind in a human life – a person who genuinely desires both to be a lifelong meditative ascetic and to star in pornographic films, say – but these are mostly not the important kinds of ambivalence most of us face. We are ‘forced’ to choose, in whatever sense that word is appropriate in cases like these, not by necessity logical or metaphysical or physical, but simply by the dumb statistical unlikelihood of being able to do something worthwhile along more than one or two lines in the limited amount of time we shall have if we are lucky.

But I want to grant the idea that ambivalence is concerned with desires that necessarily conflict regardless, for the sake of argument, because I think that even with this artificially strong condition in place, Frankfurt’s claim does not follow.

What is the argument? Frankfurt writes: “Is it possible to be satisfied with ambivalence? A person may certainly come to accept the fact that he is ambivalent as unalterable. It seems to me, however, that it is not a fact with which he can possibly be satisfied. No one can be wholeheartedly ambivalent, any more than someone can desire unequivocally to betray himself or to be irrational. That someone accepts his ambivalence can only mean that he is resigned to it; it could not mean that it satisfies him. Perhaps conditions are imaginable in which a person might reasonably regard ambivalence as worthwhile in order to avoid some even more unsatisfactory alternative. But no-one can desire to be ambivalent for its own sake.”

Why not? The idea here seems to be that

-         To be ambivalent is to desire x and desire y even though x and y cannot both be achieved.

What does a person gain and lose by abandoning either the desire for x or the desire for y? Their gain is that they no longer must, of necessity, have at least one desire that will not be satisfied. Their loss, though, is that now there is only one thing which can satisfy them, whereas before they had two, of which either one would have given them at least some satisfaction.

Is having a desire unsatisfied worse than not having the desire at all? I am not sure. If we weight these two things equally, though, it seems as though either one is OK. That is, we have x & ~ y, ~x & y, and ~x & ~y as our three possibilities. The wholehearted person yields satisfaction in the first case and not in the other two; the ambivalent person receives a half-yield of satisfaction in the first two cases and none in the third.

With no information about their concrete circumstances, what can we say about this?

If we value satisfaction and don’t care about frustration, the ambivalent person is actually better off: he has three possible outcomes, two of which pay off and one of which doesn’t, whereas the non-ambivalent person has two outcomes, one of which pays off and one of which doesn’t. The expected yield of ambivalence is 2/3, as opposed to the 1/2 which comes from wholeheartedness.

If we only care about frustration, then Frankfurt is right: the ambivalent person will always feel some frustration, whereas the non-ambivalent person will only feel it half the time.

If we care about both, then the non-ambivalent person is better off, but only slightly so. His average satisfaction-frustration is 0, whereas the ambivalent person’s is -1/3. With no information about the situation at hand, then, I suppose we can conclude that a person who cares both about having desires satisfied and not having them frustrated is better off betting on wholeheartedness than on ambivalence.

Is there some a priori reason to suppose that ambivalence will tend to skew the probabilities here? One could argue, for example, that more desires mean more directions for using energy and therefore less likelihood of getting any of the things one wants. And there would be some truth to such a supposition in many real-world contexts. But not all: for example, young persons, who are unclear about their actual abilities, often learn what things they are good and which experiences they actually value by pursuing a variety of different goals, some of which may be incompatible. For a young person, then, a certain degree of ambivalence might actually make long-term satisfaction more likely, inasmuch as making first stabs at satisfying many different desires might help to teach her which ones she was likely to be able to satisfy and which ones had component acts which were satisfying to her in their own right, as opposed to perhaps painful intermediate steps to a prima facie satisfying long-term goal.

I think there is more to be said about this, and this is all I have time for for today. But it does seem that if we want even necessarily incompatible desires to generate a desire for wholeheartedness, we need to say something about the value of satisfied and unsatisfied desires. For now we can at least say that without that, there is no theorem here.

Naturalized Libertarian Free WIll - What You Need

This is the list from class, reproduced for convenience. If anyone sees things that need to be added or has questions, let me know!

(1) Object-causes which (a) do not reduce to event causes, and (b) which have originating events 'in time'.

(2) An account of objects taking on states which keeps the object which takes on the state as an object-cause of the state. (This might be easy, actually, since an object's taking on a state (e.g. putting your bike into 3rd gear) clearly involves the object, and if you have (1) and (3) and (4) worked out that's probably all you need to get this too. But it seems as though you might need it if you think that human beings aren't 'brute' causes so much as beings that cause things by getting into particular states).

(3) There are 'emergent' objects which satisfy (1) and (2) and which do not 'reduce' to their constituent parts, because they introduce 'new causal powers' into the world that cannot be fully analyzed in terms of the causal powers of their parts.

(4) Persons are objects of type (3).

(5) 'Willings', 'intentions', 'tryings', 'attemptings', or some subset and/or aspect thereof - the agent-component of actions - are among the states of type (2) that persons take on.

It seems as though if you have these five things you have the best an emergentist can do for naturalized free will. Human beings bring new causal powers into the world which do not fully depend on their constitution and only depend on what has come before them in the sense that whatever assembled the persisting emergent physical structure which leads them to emerge was the cause of their coming-to-be, but not (somehow - this is the point pressed earlier) of their actions.

So then, can we get (1)-(5)? And if we do, is this free will, or is there still something missing? What is it?

Side Note - Davidson's Art

Donald Davidson in "The Material Mind" discusses the case of one Art, a synthetically constructed human being, who is ex hypothesi exactly like one of us in all psychologically relevant respects, and suggests that we should/would not deny such a person title to free will just because their origin was entirely determined by outside processes. Davidson thinks that the possibility of Art does something close to providing a knock-down argument for Compatibilism, as far as I can tell. I agree that there is a strong compatibilist intuition that Art pumps in us, but it would be nice to have the argument a little more precise than Davidson makes it (or than I made it in the 'quantum sperm' example).

As was pointed out in class, if we make an exact copy of a person, including whatever gives him free will, then trivially the exact copy has free will. But an exact copy of e.g. a dualist self would include a duplication of his soul. Maybe this doesn't matter; but we don't our claim to come to nothing more than "If you make an exact copy of someone who has free will, the copy will have free will", because the worry is that the result is then trivial because the free will itself got copied.

I think if we assume some sort of underlying physical substrate, as Davidson does, the argument gets clearer.

1. If we make an exact physical copy of a physical being, that being will have all the mental properties (if any) of the being thus copied.

2. Free will is a mental property of some physical beings.

3. Therefore, if we make an exact physical copy of a physical being who has free will, that being will have free will.

4. Exact physical copies may be produced deterministically or indeterministically, naturally or artificially, and with or without purpose or guiding intelligence.

5. Therefore, beings who have free will may be produced in deterministic or inderrministic ways, naturally or artificially, and with or without purpose or guiding intelligence.


You pretty much have to either be a dualist or claim that actual histories are essential to the nature of physical beings to deny 1 and 2; worries about psychological structure and/or physical law don't really matter to endorsing the conclusion.


So if you don't take one of those approaches, this argument seems to show that the actual causal history of organisms is irrelevant to whether or not they have free will. So there's a sort of antinomy here between this argument and arguments that distant causation undermines free will. Which is what we were trying to get to earlier.


A note about anomalous monism. The above considerations seem to show that there must be at least one psychophysical law if every event is (among other types, perhaps) a physical event: namely, every exact copy of the entire physical universe is also an exact copy of the entire mental universe. Furthermore, if we accept various sorts of commonly accepted views to the effect that minds are local and discrete - that mental properties supervene, even if only in a token-token way, on physical properties - or perhaps that events occurring within a particular mind supervene, even if only in a token-token way, on physical events occurring within that mind (or even within that mind's backwards light-cone) - then it seems that we have a second psychophysical law as well, namely, that every exact copy of the relevant physical organisms (perhaps, plus their environments) is also an exact copy of the minds that go with those organisms.

I do not see how to escape this, and Davidson's intuitions about Art actually require it - otherwise we can simply shrug and say that the total lack of psychophysical laws makes it completely unsurprising that we have free will (if we do) and this Art who is identical to us but who came to be in a different, fully deterministic way is not - even if he is an exact clone.

I don't think this is a special problem for anomalous monism, though - the view is still easily stated as claiming that there are no type-type mental-physical superveniences, or as Davidson put it no psychophysical laws, other than the laws of identity stemming from events under multiple descriptions and sets thereof being the same events and/or sets of events.

'Naturalized' Libertarian Free Will - The Basic Idea

This is a summary of our last class, with details for the future. If people want to work on this for their final papers, let me know; if a lot of you do we will go into it more later, but for now I think we should keep canvassing different views and get the compatibilists their fair say.

O'Connor made the intriguing suggestion that 'emergent' selves might serve as plausible loci of agent-causation within a naturalistic worldview. The idea here can perhaps be drawn out by parallel to dualistic free will. For the dualist, the non-material mind is automatically 'on another level' or 'outside the physical universe' in important ways; so it can be an uncaused cause of things within the physical universe. Aside from worries about causal interaction and unity, though - which are not intrinsically 'physicalist' or 'naturalist' in character - the dualist picture also seems to simply push the questions back to another level. What creates the non-material mind? Is it determined by prior non-material causes, or is it free? In what does its freedom consist? If the non-material mind has beliefs and desires, do those determine its actions? (The analogy here to questions about what is the ultimate cause of God if God is the ultimate cause of the world is exact, in my view.) I don't say that these questions are insoluble, except perhaps the causal unity issue - which I have never been able to see my way around - but they are serious.

The 'emergent self as the locus of free will' approach gets around the hard questions the dualist must answer by making the 'other level' within the same causal network as the other stuff. Emergent selves would be  entities which are made up of or constituted by ordinary physical stuff (atoms, genes, etc.) but whose persistent structural organization introduces new causal powers into the world which do not reduce to the causal powers of their constituent parts. Such selves would be constitutionally dependent on the way the world is, but not causally dependent on the way the world is, because the actions they caused would be traced back to them rather than to their various constituents.

The defender of this view still has to answer the 'Propson objection', namely that if these emergent selves have something like a particular self-character that emerges from particular details of their structure, then even if the selves bring about new causal powers, it will be plausible to suppose that those new causal powers depend on prior causes which led to the whole to be organized in precisely the way it is. Further, denying this would seem to entail that the 'self-structure' must be shared among all human selves - but is it? I suppose there's a line of thought through Husserl and Heidegger that might at least offer some support to this claim, but the idea of structural phenomenological invariants of human experience is controversial, to put it mildly. Another possibility would be quasi-Kantian in nature: there is some kind of transcendental structure of selfhood which is filled in through our particular history and decision-making but which is nonetheless somehow prior to it. This is going to be hard, but I think it would be interesting to see how the going goes.

Also, though, there are going to be questions about emergence that the dualist does not have to answer, as well as questions about object-causation and the metaphysics of personhood that the dualist will also have to answer. In the next post I'll put up a list of things that I think the naturalized defender of libertarian free will has to provide us to make out a case for naturalized libertarian free will.