Harry Frankfurt
1929 – 2023 · Langhorne, Pennsylvania; Princeton
A philosopher of the will who argued that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise.
Key ideas
It was long assumed that you are responsible for an action only if you could have done otherwise. In 1969 Frankfurt challenged this with cases in which a person acts on their own, but a hidden mechanism would have forced the same choice if they had wavered. They could not have done otherwise, yet they seem fully responsible. These Frankfurt cases changed the free will debate.
In 1971 he proposed a theory of free will based on hierarchical theory of free will. Persons do not just have desires; they have desires about their desires. You act freely when the desire that moves you is one you want to be moved by. The theory is a major form of compatibilism.
He also wrote on love and caring as sources of meaning, and his short essay On Bullshit, distinguishing bullshit from lying, became an unlikely bestseller in 2005.
Life, briefly
Frankfurt taught at Ohio State, Rockefeller University, Yale and Princeton, where he spent the end of his career. He worked on René Descartes early on before turning to the will and moral responsibility.
Major works
- Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility (1969)
- Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person (1971)
- The Importance of What We Care About (1988)
- On Bullshit (2005)
Appears in
Further reading
- WikipediaHarry Frankfurt