Pick up your phone, and you will probably recognise the feeling.
Not the useful times. The other times. The hundredth time today — the one where your hand was already moving before you had decided anything, where you watched yourself open the same application you had opened ninety seconds earlier, and a small flat voice at the back of your mind said again? really? — and you did it anyway. You did not want to want it. You wanted to be the kind of person who puts the phone down and reads a book. Instead you sat there, moved by a craving you were ashamed of.
Now consider something quite different that you did this week, something just as automatic.
Perhaps you put your shoes on and went for the usual run without debating it. Perhaps you called your mother on the drive home, because you always call her on the drive home. Perhaps you told the truth in a moment when the lie was right there and easier, and it came out of you without deliberation, as though it had already been decided. That was a kind of craving too — a habit, a settled disposition, something in you that acted without your stopping to weigh it. It was caused, every bit as much as the reach for the phone. But you do not regard that one with shame. You endorse it. Asked why you did it, you would not say "I could not help it." You would say "because that is who I am — the person I am trying to be."
So there are two wants. Both automatic. Both caused — both running on the same machinery of habit and history and brain chemistry we spent last episode tracing. And you stand in opposite relations to them. One you experience as imposed on you. The other you claim as your own. One acts on you against your will; the other is the want you would choose to be moved by.
That difference is worth keeping in mind, because a whole theory of freedom rests on it — a theory that says you can be completely caused, every bit as caused as last episode argued you were, and completely free at the same time, with no contradiction between the two.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. Choice and Blame, episode three of eight.
Think back to the atoms case — the strongest case we could build against you, and where last week left off. Every choice the downstream result of things you never authored; the causal chain running back indefinitely; no link in it that is purely your own. We built it properly and granted it — and then we found a gap in it. It proved that every choice is caused. But then, without any further argument, it treated caused as meaning not free, as though those were two names for one thing. We tested that on the best thing you have ever done — a choice caused through and through that was, past all doubt, entirely your own — and found that the two claims were not the same. So the whole dispute narrowed to a single word: free. And the question we were left holding was this: even if every choice is caused, does caused actually mean unfree — and if it does not, what is the freedom that blame requires?
Tonight we meet the philosopher whose whole position rests on that gap. He looks at the determinist and says: granted — all of it. The regress, the laboratory, the chain. You are never the uncaused author of yourself, and I will not pretend otherwise. And you are still free, your blame is still fair, and the difference between the phone in your hand and the run you are proud of is exactly where the freedom lies. His whole claim is that the free-will problem has been badly cast from the start — that the freedom that actually matters never depended on escaping your causes.
It is the most reassuring answer in this entire argument, and many able philosophers think it puts the problem to rest for good. So tonight we build it as carefully as we built the atoms case — and then we ask whether it dissolves the problem, or merely moves it somewhere harder to see.
The philosopher is Harry Frankfurt, and the case he built his account on is the one tonight's title points to: two addicts. He set it out in a paper published in 1971, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person."
Take the two men. Same drug, same dose, the same craving — chemically identical, at the same intensity in both. And suppose, to make the case hard, that in each of them the craving is strong enough that he will use tonight whatever else is true. Both will end with the needle. On the outside, at the level of what happens, the two are indistinguishable.
Inside, they are nothing alike.
The first man hates it. He wants to be clean. He has a desire to use — that is the craving — but above that desire sits a second one: he wants not to want the drug. He wishes the craving were not his. When it moves him, he experiences it as an intrusion, a force acting on him, something happening to him that he would remove from himself if he could. He uses, and throughout he is opposed to the very thing that makes him use. Frankfurt calls him the unwilling addict.
The second man has made his peace with it. Perhaps he has decided this is who he now is; perhaps he has stopped fighting; perhaps he never fought. He has the same craving — the same first desire to use — but his second desire lines up behind it. He wants to want it. He is not opposed to the craving; he endorses it. When it moves him, it is not an intrusion. It is him. Frankfurt calls him the willing addict.
Now, both are caused. Both are addicted. Neither one, in any sense the determinist cares about, could have done otherwise tonight — the craving was going to win in each of them. So on the atoms picture from last episode the two are identical: two determined creatures, two causal chains running back indefinitely, two needles. The determinist's measure cannot tell them apart.
But we can. And the difference we can see is the whole of Frankfurt's idea.
Here it is. We all have ordinary desires — to eat, to sleep, to check the phone, to use. Frankfurt calls these first-order desires: desires directed at the world, at what to do. But human beings are unusual among animals in also having desires about their desires. You can want to want something. You can want not to want something. The smoker who wishes he did not crave the cigarette has a second-order desire — a desire directed down at his own first desire, arguing against it. When a person throws his full weight behind such a desire, Frankfurt calls it his second-order volition, or his will: the desire he wants to be the one that moves him.
And Frankfurt's claim — the one that recovers freedom from the atoms — is this. You act freely, with a free will, when the desire you actually act on is the desire you want to act on: when your second-order will aligns with your first-order desire, when the want that moves you is one you endorse. The willing addict has that alignment; his craving and his endorsement point the same way, and the action proceeds from the self he identifies with. The unwilling addict lacks it; the craving pulls him one way while everything he identifies with strains the other. Same behaviour, opposite freedom. One man is moved by a want that is his. The other is moved by a want that has taken hold of him.
This explains a lot, because it settles on what you noticed at the start. The phone in your hand and the run you are proud of are both caused, both automatic, both downstream of history and chemistry — and you knew at once, without any theory, that one of them was yours and that the other had hold of you. Frankfurt is telling you what that knowledge consists in. It is the alignment. The run you endorse — first desire and second-order will pointing the same way. The phone you are pulled by — the want moves you while the self you would answer for rejects it. You were not confused when you felt the difference. You were registering the one thing about a caused creature that matters for freedom: not whether the want has a cause, but whether you endorse it.
And notice what this does to last episode's whole problem. We spent an hour establishing that you are never the uncaused author — that there is no link in you that started itself from nothing. Frankfurt says: granted, and it does not matter. That was never where freedom lay. You do not need to be the first cause of your wants. You need your wants to be aligned in the right way within you — and that alignment is something a fully determined creature can perfectly well have. Determinism does not touch it. The willing addict is as determined as the unwilling one, and he is free in the only sense Frankfurt thinks worth the name: he is acting on the will he wants to have.
This is why many able philosophers think the problem simply dissolves. The freedom you were afraid of losing — the uncaused, magical kind — you never had and never needed. The freedom you actually care about, the kind that makes the courage yours and the cruelty his, was inside the causal world the whole time: caused all the way down, and free where it counts.
This is the most reassuring position the argument has yet reached. But Frankfurt now does something sharper. He turns to the very thing your anger has leaned on since the man at the table — the claim that the person could have done otherwise — and sets out to show that you never needed that either.
Return to the man at the table — the one who relapsed. What your anger wanted from him — what it has always wanted from everyone — was that he could have done otherwise: that a genuine alternative was open, that he could have taken the other course and did not. Every act of blame you have ever made has leaned on that. There was another option available, and the person did not take it.
Frankfurt thinks that whole demand is a mistake — not false, but beside the point. He holds that a person can be fully responsible for something he could not possibly have avoided. And he devised a case to show it, in a second paper, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," published in 1969.
Here is the case. Imagine a man — call him Jones — who is about to make a decision; say he is deciding whether to do something cruel. Unknown to Jones, a neuroscientist is watching his brain in real time, and this scientist badly wants Jones to choose the cruelty. He has wired Jones so that if Jones ever showed the first neural sign of choosing the other way — of deciding not to do it — the scientist could intervene, adjust the relevant activity, and force the cruel choice regardless. So the cruel outcome is fixed. There is no possible course tonight in which Jones comes away clean. If he wavers, the scientist takes over. He genuinely cannot do otherwise.
But Jones never wavers. He decides to do the cruel thing entirely on his own, for his own reasons, exactly as he would have done if no scientist had been present. The scientist sits with his hand near the switch and never has to move it. He is a bystander; he does nothing.
Now ask the question that tests the whole demand. Is Jones responsible?
Plainly he is. He chose it. He wanted it, he reasoned his way to it, he did it for his reasons; the scientist never touched him. You would blame Jones without hesitation, and you would be right to. And yet Jones could not have done otherwise — the alternative was sealed off the entire time. Frankfurt takes this to be not a curiosity but a revealing instance of how responsibility always works: a case in which a man is fully to blame for an act he was unable to avoid. Which means that the power to have done otherwise, the thing your anger has demanded from the first night, the thing the determinist swore you had lost, may be something responsibility never required.
Weigh what that does to the whole picture. Last episode the fear was that determinism removes the power to have done otherwise, and that without it blame collapses. Frankfurt replies: it does not — not because you retain that power, but because blame never depended on it. Blame depended on something else: on whether the act came from you — your reasons, your will, the want you endorse — and that requires no open alternative at all. Jones is the demonstration. Seal off every alternative, and provided the man does the thing as himself and for his own reasons, the blame still holds.
So two of last episode's central fears have now gone. You need not be the uncaused author — Frankfurt's account of the aligned will handled that. And you need not have been able to do otherwise — the Jones case handles that. Determinism can grant both, and your blame survives regardless.
Now the sharpest reply the critics make — one that does not go away.
Look again at the moment the scientist is watching for. He intervenes only if Jones shows the first sign of turning the other way. So there must be such a first sign — some flicker, some initial neural movement towards choosing otherwise — for the scientist to react to. And the critics — their term is the flicker of freedom — say: there is your alternative possibility, concealed in the trigger. Jones could not have completed the other choice, granted; but there was still a difference between the world in which he begins to turn and the world in which he does not, and perhaps that sliver is what responsibility needs. Frankfurt's defenders answer that a flicker so slight — an involuntary twitch the scientist would erase at once — is far too thin to bear the weight of deserved blame, and that no one's actual blaming has ever rested on it. The argument remains live; people are still in it.
But it does not rescue the man at the table. Even the critics are not claiming that Jones needed the full power to have done otherwise that your anger wanted — the genuinely open alternative, the clear second course freely passed over. They are searching for a flicker. And whatever a flicker is, it is not what your anger at the table was demanding. So that demand — that he could have done the whole other thing, walked away, taken the open alternative, and chose not to — is, at the very least, in serious difficulty. Responsibility may run on far less than you supposed.
Which leaves one question in the open. If blame needs neither the uncaused author nor the open alternative, what does it need? What must be true of a person for the blame to be fair?
There is an answer, and it is the most influential one now on offer.
The answer is John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, in their 1998 book Responsibility and Control, one of the most influential accounts of moral responsibility in the field today. It takes up where Frankfurt left off. If blame does not need the open alternative, what does it need? Their answer is a single phrase: the act must come from a mechanism that is reasons-responsive.
That phrase carries the whole account, so consider it carefully. Set alternatives aside. Set aside whether some other course was open. Ask instead about the actual process that produced the act — the deliberation, the weighing, the wanting and deciding that ran inside the person and issued in the action. And ask one thing of it: would that process have responded to a reason? Had a sufficient reason to act otherwise been present, would this mechanism have registered it, weighed it, and been moved by it? Not "did it," but "would it have." Is it the kind of process that answers to reasons, or the kind that produces the same result whatever reasons arrive?
That is the criterion. A reasons-responsive mechanism is one that would have responded had the reasons been there. And Fischer and Ravizza hold that this is the whole of what responsibility requires: that the act issued from a mechanism that was yours and that would have responded to reason. They call your ownership of that process guidance control — you need not have been able to steer towards a different outcome; you need only to have been the one directing this process, a process that answers to reasons. And this is why the view has a name of its own: semicompatibilism. Grant the determinist everything. Grant the chain. Grant, even, that you genuinely could not have done otherwise — concede the entire question of alternatives. Responsibility still stands, because it never rested on alternatives. It rested on whether your acting mechanism would have responded to reason. And a determined world is full of mechanisms that would have.
Apply it to the two addicts, and it fits. Why is the unwilling addict the one we do not fully blame? Not because he could have done otherwise — he could not; the craving was going to win. It is because his mechanism would not have responded. You could have given him every reason there is — his children, his health, his one life — and the craving would have overridden all of it. No reason could reach him. Whereas an ordinary person making an ordinary cruel choice: give him a strong enough reason and he would have changed course. His mechanism was reasons-responsive. It simply was not responding to the good reasons that night, because he let the bad ones prevail. That is what makes him blameworthy — not that an alternative was open, but that the process could have responded to reason and did not.
Now apply it to yourself — to a real case, not a hypothetical.
Take something you actually did this week — not your worst, not your best, an ordinary choice with another person on the other end of it. The sharp thing you said. The favour you did not do. The corner you cut. Do not ask "could I have done otherwise" — you have watched that question fail twice now. Ask the new one: was the process that moved me one that would have responded? Had a good enough reason to do better been in front of you, would that process have caught it and changed course? Or were you, in that moment, closer to the unwilling addict — a process closed to reason, with none able to affect it?
The test sorts your own life as you apply it. Some of what you did was reasons-responsive: you would have done better with a better reason, which means the bad reason was yours, which means you are answerable for it. And some of it, honestly, was not — you were exhausted, or panicking, or so far into a fixed pattern that no argument could have reached you, and the blame loosens, just as it loosens for the unwilling addict. The test works. It draws the line your own blaming already half-draws. And nowhere in applying it did you need to be uncaused, and nowhere did you need an open alternative. Caused to the root, no alternatives required, and the blame still sorts cleanly into fair and unfair. This is the most fully developed defence of your blame in the field, stated at its full strength. Many people stop here, satisfied that the problem is solved.
Here is why we should not stop here.
Three things trouble this account, and not one of them has been answered — not because I am avoiding them, but because the field has not answered them.
The first you have already met: the flicker. We leave it where we left it — live and unresolved, defenders and critics still disputing whether a twitch is enough.
The second is sharper, and it strikes at the centre of Frankfurt's account. The willing addict is free, we said, because he endorses the craving — his second-order will lines up behind it. But where did that endorsement come from? He did not author it out of nothing either. The endorsement is a desire like any other — caused, given to him, grown out of history and chemistry exactly as the craving beneath it was. So a hard question follows: if you were caused to endorse the want that moves you, in what way is the endorsement yours that the craving is not? Has the problem not simply moved up one level — from "is the desire mine" to "is my endorsement of the desire mine" — with the same regress waiting at the new level? Frankfurt and those who follow him have answers, and they are not foolish ones. But the worry does not dissolve. The thing that was meant to make the want yours turns out to be as caused as the want.
And the third is the one to carry out with you, because everything after tonight will lean on it. Suppose the whole account works. Suppose your mechanism was reasons-responsive, the will was yours, the endorsement holds. You have earned something real — you have earned answerability. You can be held to account. You can be asked to answer for what you did, and the asking makes sense, because you are the kind of creature reasons can reach. That is not nothing. But look closely at what your blame actually wants. Late at night, angry at the man who relapsed or at yourself, your blame is not merely recording that you are answerable. It wants something heavier. It wants him to deserve it — to deserve the suffering, for it to be fitting that the suffering falls on him, earned and merited. And here is the gap no one on the compatibilist side has clearly closed: to show that your mechanism would have responded to reason is to show that you can be held to account. It is not obvious — it is very far from obvious — that it shows anyone deserves to suffer for what he did. Being answerable and deserving to suffer may be two different things. And your blame has been demanding the second one all along.
So where has tonight left you? In a stranger place than the comfort it advertised.
You came in last week holding the atoms case, which delivered the bad news: you are never the uncaused author of yourself. Tonight a philosopher took that bad news, set it aside, and built freedom regardless. Frankfurt said the freedom worth wanting was never the absence of causes — it is whether the want that moves you is one you endorse, the way you endorse the run and are merely pulled by the phone. Then he sealed off every alternative for the determined Jones and showed blame still landing on a man who could not have done otherwise — so the open alternative your anger kept demanding may be something blame never needed. And then Fischer and Ravizza named what blame does need: a mechanism that is yours and that would have responded to reason. None of it requires anything magical. All of it survives in a fully determined world. This is a genuinely strong case that your blame is sound, and it deserves to be taken seriously. It is neither a trick nor an evasion. Many serious people think the matter ends right here.
But it does not end here, and you have seen the two reasons why, and I will not smooth them over. The thing that was meant to make the want yours — the endorsement, your identifying with it — turned out to be as caused as the want it endorsed, so the question of whether it is really yours was not answered but moved up a level. And the larger reason: even granting that the whole account works, what it earns you is answerability — you can be held to account, asked to answer, because you are a creature reasons can reach. And your blame, the real thing, has never wanted only that. It wants desert. It wants the suffering to be deserved. Nothing tonight closed the gap between being answerable and deserving; it opened it. So the comfort was real, but something was lost in the same moment: your blame may be perfectly fair in one sense — you are answerable, the mechanism was yours — and still be reaching for something heavier that no one has yet shown to be there, or shown not to be.
So you do not get to set this down tonight either. Last week the atoms would not let you off. This week the rescue will not let you rest — it saved more of your blame than you expected, and less than your blame actually wants.
And there is someone who thinks the compatibilist has conceded the whole case.
Think back to what Frankfurt and Fischer did to arrive here. They handed the determinist the power to have done otherwise. They gave it up — said, in effect, you could not have done otherwise, and you are responsible all the same. And many people — perhaps the part of you that flinched when Jones could not escape — want to stand firm and refuse: that is too much to concede; when I chose, the future really was open, and I really did close it, and that openness is not something I will trade for a redefinition, however clever. Next week we meet them: the libertarians, who hold that you are the genuine author, the real origin — the point at which a genuinely open future is settled by you and by no one else — and who think the compatibilist settled the dispute too easily. We will build their position as carefully as we built tonight's. And then we will find what it costs.
That argument is for next week. For tonight, keep one thing in mind. When your blame arrives certain of itself — he could have done otherwise, that is why it falls on him — set it beside what happened tonight. The most powerful defender of your blame has just told you that you may be entirely right that it falls on him and entirely wrong that he could have done otherwise — that those two claims, which you had fused, come apart once again, in a new place. And he has told you, in the same breath, that even when your blame is fair, you have still not been shown that it reaches what it is actually reaching for. You still face him. The blame is still yours. It came through tonight in better shape than the atoms left it — and it still has not shown you that he deserves it.
That is where we are. Stronger, and no safer.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.