What is required for autonomy, and do we fulfil those requirements?

This idea is explored in great depth in Frankfurt’s article ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, in which the idea of acting upon desires is crucial to the definition of persons, his view being that ‘one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person’s will.’  According to Frankfurt, a distinction is possible in persons between one’s desires which actually transpire into actions, and those which one wants to constitute one’s will, proposing that the statement ‘Α wants to X’ could be consistent with even the seemingly mutually exclusive ‘A would rather die than X’, justifying this with examples of how ‘second order volitions’ can represent the free will of an individual; an example of this being when a man wants to work, this is just one amongst many desires on has, and it is only if this desire becomes his effective will that he would be doing as he desired.  If his desire to watch television becomes stronger than his desire to work, then ‘what he wants at that time is not…what he wants to want’ – despite the fact that wanting to work is amongst his desires, it is not fulfilled.  This is in direct conflict with the view expressed by John Hospers, who says that ‘”could have desired differently,”…does not [make sense].’  It is in the differences between these two viewpoints that I see one of the fundamental debates of autonomy, whether or not we have free will.  At this point it is necessary to distinguish between free will and doing what one wants to do.  As Frankfurt says, ‘having the freedom to do what one wants to do is not a sufficient condition of having a free will.’  It is perfectly feasible that, if we take the example given previously relating to what one wants to do, that although one may be free to take that action, it is not one’s will which controls it.  At any given time, the desires of a person can change, according to whatever circumstances they may find themselves in, what Hospers refers to as the ‘springs of action’.  What no-one would argue is that we have any control over these ‘springs of action’, thus anti-humanists would conclude that we are not responsible for any of our actions, as they can all be attributed to these uncontrollable causes; Wolf states that ‘My desire for a pastry is clearly a result of the smells wafting from the bakery’, strongly suggesting this idea of causality, but if one looks at it from Frankfurt’s perspective, and that of a person dieting, representing the desire for a pastry as ‘A wants to X’, we can see some truth in one statement in particular, that ‘A does not ‘really’ want to X’, as A desires to lose weight.

By looking at these two contrasting arguments, the main condition regarding autonomy seems to relate to freedom of the will, and in particular the acceptance or refutation of Frankfurt’s idea that a person can be ‘free to want what he wants to want.’  If we are to completely eliminate the idea of autonomy, then we must logically prove that we are not responsible for any of the decisions, and consequently actions that we take.  There are many instances where we can see actions people have taken as a direct consequence of an external factor, some of which are listed by Wolf in her article, but to deny responsibility for all actions would need to go further, and to establish a cause behind the individual personality traits that result in the actions of a person; the ability or inability of the man to work despite the distraction of television, despite needing to work in order to fulfil his desires.  According to Hospers, ‘the influences that made us what we are are influences over which we had no control’, as what we perceive to be our own individual character is shaped and moulded by influences on us throughout life, and as all actions grow out of character, we should not be held responsible for our actions.

Personally, I feel that there are valid points made by philosophers who are on both sides of the debate; the idea of an individual desire, what one wants to do at any one time, I can agree with Frankfurt, may not be coherent with various other desires a person may have, and can thus not be described as the only option available; yet Hospers’ ‘I should have wanted X if I had wanted to’ seems to be so illogical as to affirm incontrovertibly the idea that we could not have thought other than we did think.

What we come to is this: at the moment at which we make a choice, is it causally impossible for us to make any other choice, that is to say, is there any possible way in which, given the identical conditions leading up to the same event, we would have made a different choice.  Despite all other influences upon a person being identical, if one would have it in one’s power to make a different decision given these circumstances, this would surely prove that the individual can be responsible for his actions.  For all that Frankfurt’s argument of ‘second-order’ desires and volitions may seem to indicate an enhanced level of responsibility; I do not believe it can overcome the arguments made by Hospers about the origins of these desires.  For although these desires may be contrary to the decision taken, this does not fundamentally alter the validity of any of Hospers’ arguments.  Consider the alternative view, if a desire did not come from an outside influence, where did it come from?  We would have to believe that each person was capable of miraculously producing desires completely unrelated to anything they had experienced.  Just as one would not envisage a nomadic tribesman without any knowledge of the outside world to desire modern electrical appliances, maybe we should not expect anyone to have any desires which do not originate from influences outside of their control.

However, with autonomy comes the idea of responsibility, and difficulties arise as to the idea of holding someone responsible for an action we do not believe they had the free will to make.  If we are not autonomous in our decisions, can we be at all morally responsible for them?  The logical answer to this seems to be no, yet this would make all people devoid of any moral responsibility for their actions, leaving us in an incredibly different world, where praise and blame do not exist.  The dilemma this leaves us in is explored by Roderick Chisholm, who though certain that we are not completely devoid of any moral responsibility for our choices, cannot find a strong argument against any of the premises which lead to that conclusion.

Bizarrely, to me it seems possible that far from being responsible for only the decisions we perceive to be rational, we may in fact be most responsible when we act irrationally.  Though a person may commit terrible deeds in ‘cold blood’, he may himself feel that his actions are rational, as a result of early influences; when he acts irrationally, he later feels that he should not have committed those acts which he ‘knows’ to be wrong, and may indeed feel responsible for them.

To conclude, I believe in order to be autonomous, we must first be capable of making different decisions under the same causal circumstances.  The contrasting viewpoints coming from the authors quoted in this essay show how divided opinion is on this, and though I lean slightly towards the idea that in reality, it is causally impossible for different choices to be made, it is quite clearly impossible to prove either way.  No matter how advanced computers get, I feel they will be unable to replicate the human brain to the extent required to put to the test choices made under the same circumstances, if we could even achieve the absolute identicalness required to make such a test valid, which I feel is the only conceivable way of establishing whether different decisions can be made.  I feel that another important condition to be fulfilled for autonomy, in addition to freedom of the will, relates to the origin of the will, as even if we were able to want other than we wanted, if our desires are completely determined by our upbringing, then whatever we do want becomes irrelevant, as our very characters are not created autonomously, and our very decisions have already been made for us.  Evidence of this surrounds us continually; be it the likelihood of offspring to follow the same political ideology as their parents, or parental traits being subconsciously present in their mature children.  Early environment has a profound influence on the lifestyle and opportunity of every single human being, and I consider Hospers statement ‘if we can overcome the effects of early environment, the ability to do so is itself a product of the early environment’ to be incredibly accurate.  Those lucky few, who, despite the majority of their childhood being spent in misery, overcome this to rise to great heights, do so as a result of the environment, or a significant event in their life; an inspirational teacher can affect with almost unrivalled positivity the prospects of even the least able student; the determination of one’s parents despite their hardship can profoundly inspire their child to reach for the stars; Edson Arantes do Nascimento would not have become known the world over as Pélé had he not been blessed with speed and great skill, but more importantly had the opportunity to utilise due to the overwhelming popularity of football in the favelas of Brazil.  This is why I feel that we cannot claim to be responsible for the origins of our will, and thus be autonomous.  As for moral responsibility, I feel my opinion closely matches that of Chisholm, as though I feel it exists, an explicit formulation which seems to ring true proves otherwise.  Whether or not autonomy and moral responsibility truly exist, however, it remains that these are two pillars upon which our society supports itself, and their remaining conceptually possible seems vital for its existence.

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