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Discussion with Harry G. Frankfurt
I condition as, among other things, a site of mat-
The Importance of Being Earnest
(about the Right Things)
Ortwin de Graef
Nor could I find an imperfection there,
Nor blame the wanton act that showed so fair—
To me whatever freak she plays is good.
TENNYSON, ‘Sonnet (She took the dappled partridge)’
Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be —
By what distractions he would be possessed,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity —
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.
Matthew ARNOLD, ‘The Buried Life’
There are various ways to come to terms with
human matters — as we must still call them, beg-
ging the question — among them the issue of
what matters to humans. One can adopt a
resolutely and perhaps narrowly scientific stance
and gather empirical evidence about human pref-
erences and their actual or putative grounding in
order to so describe what mattering means to
humans. One can choose a genealogical or his-
torical perspective and study the ways in which
humans have explicitly and implicitly conceived
of themselves as recipients of mattering through-
out human history — this typically generates phi-
losophy as commentary. Or one can choose the
apparent askesis of armchair-phenomenology — a
kind of self-imposed sensory deprivation indulged
in by philosophers whose intent it is it to con-
ceptually elucidate the structure of the human
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 15
___________________________________
tering.
There are of course many shades and combi-
nations of these attitudes, but as a rule people in
the truth business tend to think of themselves as
especially one or the other. Harry Frankfurt, for
instance, clearly favours the third description as
the properly philosophical or theoretical endeav-
our: the paucity of footnotes supplying substanti-
ating empirical evidence for key statements in his
arguments is matched only by the paucity of
deferential references to dead philosophers in the
course of his thought subsequent to its departure
in Descartes. (This is so much so that the few
sudden outcrops of facts and proper names that
Frankfurt does let through startle the reader — re-
reading The Importance of What We Care About
last week I sensed a slight shock on encountering
the name ‘Locke’ in the middle of an argument
about free action. The fact that it turned out to be
Don and not John did, however, soften the impact
somewhat.)
Yet Frankfurt’s non-historical and relatively
self-enclosed philosophical practice is not ag-
gressive or dogmatic: it takes itself seriously
enough to pursue its task in its own terms, but
this ‘structural’ attempt to “see things clearly for
what they are”1 seems in principle open to inter-
ruptions from more strictly scientific and from
textual-historical fellow-thinkers. More specifical-
ly, it appears to me that a short-circuit between
Frankfurt’s thought and an alternative
philosophical constellation can do more than
generate bullshit (which perhaps, to some extent,
and for reasons admirably set out by Frankfurt
himself, it must nonetheless do).2 In what fol-
lows I should like to briefly outline one or two
such interruptions in the margin of Frankfurt’s
impressive achievement.
In the opening paragraph of his justly famous
essay on ‘The Importance of What We Care
About’, Harry Frankfurt sets out to address what
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he sees as a lack in current philosophical concern:
next to the epistemological and the ethical
inquiries that make up the bulk of philosophical
practice, Frankfurt proposes to plot a third course,
intent on “another thematic and fundamental
preoccupation of human existence — namely,
what to care about.” (Importance, p. 80) Such are
the paragraphs to which the remainder of philo-
sophical writings are footnotes: the paragraph
promises us no less than a systematic articulation
of the human condition along lines hitherto
neglected yet patently inevitable. Moreover, we
are promised deliverance from the nursery-rhyme
tyranny of the classical philosophical triad of the
True, the Good and the Beautiful — which, given
the maddening elusiveness of especially the last
of these three is an exhilarating prospect indeed.
But no sooner has this promise been made
than Frankfurt starts to qualify it: rather than a
“formal and exhaustive account” of the study of
care and importance, we will be offered a “ten-
tative and fragmentary” commentary on “a few of
its central concepts and issues”. This qualification
is not just a token gesture: it soon transpires that
Frankfurt suspects that the task he has set himself
is doomed never to fully meet its completion, and
this in the sense that his primary building blocks
— the concepts of caring and importance — can-
not be analyzed satisfactorily at all. Ten years
later, this suspicion has hardened into assertion
when, in his iconoclastic revelation of the
oxymoron at the heart of much moral philosophy
— the usefulness of final ends — Frankfurt diag-
noses the notion of importance as “systematically
inchoate”3 and thus “not susceptible to orderly
and analytically definitive elucidation.” In 1982,
Frankfurt can still write that it is “unclear”
whether “a useful account of the concept [of
importance] can be developed without running
into [...] circularity” (Importance, p. 82); in 1992
this hesitant caveat has turned into a full-blooded
curse: “Any attempt to formulate a defining cri-
terion for the concept of importance is therefore
bound to be circular.”4
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 16
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Now, this fundamental obstacle does not pre-
vent Frankfurt’s thought from getting underway
and from making genuinely important contribu-
tions to the study of human matters; yet it does
haunt his work as a slightly uncanny signature
tune set, most memorably, to the words “voli-
tional necessity”. Since importance cannot be
exhaustively articulated by philosophers, it cannot
be so articulated by humans suffering (from) it,
which entails that at the very core of the human
condition there lurks a moment of ineluctable
inarticulacy. What is crucial to this moment is
that it is at the same time beyond our grasp and
our most intimate essence; it is the proper face of
our personhood, yet it is also a mask imposed on
us at a level we cannot relate to.
The inevitable consequence of this inarticulacy
at the level of the person is a problem of human
community and communication: for surely it not
only matters to us that something matters to us, it
must also matter to us that this mattering is cru-
cial to there being an us or a we to begin with.
Frankfurt justly does not write on the importance
of what I (or he) care (or cares) about, yet he is
also aware that the human community he thus
takes for granted is a vulnerable assumption.
The clearest mark of this vulnerability is, I
suggest, Frankfurt’s tendency to represent voli-
tional necessity by way of loaded examples: as a
rule, the characters in Frankfurt’s philosophical
fables are either strongly determined beings who
insist on something we all vaguely tend to
applaud anyway (Luther comes to mind, and the
mother who cannot part from her child), or they
are wanton creatures suffering from a lack of
volitional necessity. The volitionally determined
heroes of everyday and extraordinary commit-
ment exemplify what Frankfurt deems essential in
personhood; the wanton, indolent, mindlessly
indifferent and terminally bored airheads repre-
sent the lower limit of personhood and in fact fail
to make the grade — they do not belong in the
first person plural of Frankfurt’s thought. What is
relatively absent from Frankfurt’s gallery, howe-
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ver, is a character that does lay claim to pertain-
ing to the community of persons to the extent
that its will is, if anything, all too powerfully
antecedently fixed: to put it brutally, what
Frankfurt’s thought seems to shy away from is
the volitionally necessitated Nazi.5
Now, Frankfurt is obviously aware of this
problem, and at the end of his essay “On the
Necessity of Ideals” he indicates a way to further
pursue it by now quite openly equating volitional
necessity with love understood as a particular
force emphatically averse to universalizing com-
pulsions: “the fact that I am devoted to certain
ideals, or the fact that I love someone, does not
lead me to think that anyone who does not do the
same is making a mistake.”6 This, surely, is
going too fast: is it not precisely the essence of,
say, totalitarian ideology that it requires each and
all to be devoted to the same ideal? Frankfurt
immediately qualifies his statement by stipulating
that the particularity of volitional necessity does
not as such absolve us from responsibility to
“deliberation and rational critique”, but he does
not further elucidate precisely how this confronta-
tion is to take place. Instead, he concludes on the
salutary reminder that “The relationship between
love and reason is an ancient philosophical
theme, which it would be well for us to explore
anew.”
What seems to have happened is that the
initial tripartite division of philosophical anthro-
pology into epistemology, ethics and the study of
care is superseded by a more ancient constellation
powered by reason and love, which suggests —
but only suggests — that true volitional necessity
properly participates in the cause of the good and
that it thereby somehow protects us as humans
from the unthinkable to which the wilful Nazi is
inhumanly committed. In fact, this modulation
was already present from the very beginning, in
the symptomatic focus on logic and love as “the
two human capacities which we prize most high-
ly” (Importance, p. 89), but it does seem to be
the case that in his more recent work Frankfurt is
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 17
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more confident in focusing on belief and love
rather than on belief, obligation and care. Put
differently still, it seems that Frankurt’s intent to
limit the role of moral philosophy by insisting on
care as a non-moral core component of person-
hood is crossed by a more deep-rooted implicit
moralization of true commitment.
At this point I should like to move to my
question by interrupting Frankfurt’s project with
an alternative and equally ancient triad: the true,
the good and the object of judgement. In Kant’s
critical philosophy, epistemology and ethics are
complemented and indeed crucially interrelated
by the faculty of judgement — the faculty intent
on the beautiful, the sublime and the final end. I
cannot pretend to fully comprehend Kant’s sys-
tem, let alone briefly recapitulate it here, but I
suspect some elements of that system can be
brought into valuable friction with Frankfurt’s
thought. As a first step towards a more systematic
comparison let us consider what might be the
relation between the important and the beautiful.
That there is at least a family resemblance
between these two categories is clearly stated by
Frankfurt himself in a footnote to his thoughts on
logic and love (Importance, p. 89). The similarity
in question is the power of beauty (and of gran-
deur) to ‘overcome’ us in a way that ‘enhances’
us, but Frankfurt does not to my knowledge pur-
sue this similarity in any detail. Kant, on the
other hand, has a number of striking suggestions
in this respect — and none more pertinent, in the
present connection, than that of the universality
of the aesthetic judgement and its relation to
moral predisposition.
Like the important in Frankfurt, the beautiful
in Kant is a subjective category, i.e., it is not an
objective quality of the object considered inde-
pendently of the subject. Yet the aesthetic judge-
ment that declares something beautiful emphati-
cally assumes that everybody will agree with it:
such is what Kant calls the ‘allgemeine Stimme’,
the universal voice to which one accedes when
one judges something to be beautiful. This uni-
___________________________________
versality is importantly different from that proper
to the understanding (where necessity rules with
the force of constitutive principles) and to reason
(which is the field of the regulative principles of
the moral law proper) in that it is not founded on
an objective coercion by a prior law or postulate
of reason but instead arises from an entirely free
delight in harmonious form. Fascinatingly, this
delight in Kant also takes on a substantial moral
burden when he argues that he who gives evi-
dence of a proper appreciation of the beauty of
nature is probably a morally well-disposed being
— a suggestion whose very weirdness (as
registered by some of his most patient readers)
only serves to underscore its capital importance.
Now, irrespective of the persuasiveness (or
lack of it) of Kant’s arguments in this respect, his
claims do serve to highlight what is absent in
Frankfurt’s account: an attempt to ground the
concept of a person as a being committed to
caring for what is good — a being to be under-
stood as earnestly devoted to the right things. In
other words: what Kant tries to show in his con-
stellation of faculties is how it must come about
that human beings if they are earnest about their
being human are good — in Frankfurt there seems
no room for such commitment, although it will be
clear that he does care about it. Adherents of
UFO cults, Frankfurt has noted in response to
Peter Gay, ‘believe in reason’ but “they just don’t
know how to do it”.7 Similarly, there are those
who are committed to love but who just don’t
know how to do it. In both cases, the commit-
ment itself is fundamentally in error and generally
destructive — it is an aberration. But from what,
exactly? How, if at all, is true human care neces-
sarily care for what is good? Can this “come
about in a way other than by chance or as the
outcome of a sequence of natural causes”? (Im-
portance, p. 25) Does it require a return to grace?
Frankfurt: You didn’t read the verses at the be-
ginning of your written comments. I’d like to
read the first one: “Nor could I find an imperfec-
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 18
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tion there, / Nor blame the wanton act that
showed so fair — / To me whatever freak she
plays is good.” I believe that, and I want to pur-
sue the same line that I have enunciated already a
couple of times: a resistance to the excessive or
any moralization of the conception of the self.
I don’t want to ground the concept of a person
in the notion of a being committed to caring for
what is good, of a being to be understood as
earnestly devoted to the right things. I think, to
put it bluntly, that the Nazi may be leading just
as fully human a life as anyone else. And our
complaint against him is not that he’s making
some kind of mistake, but that he’s getting in our
way and the only reasonable response is not to
show him his error but to kill him or suppress
him in some way. I don’t think there is a solution
in reason to these kinds of moral disagreement.
What makes the choice of objects good is, as I
was suggesting before, what it does to the life of
the person who makes the choice. The Nazi may
find in his devotion to Nazi ideals an ability to
transcend himself, opportunities for self-sacrifice,
for absorption into a large community of like-
minded people who devote themselves in selfless
and courageous ways to something they think is
important. All these things are life-enhancing.
Now, to be sure, they are in the service of a
vicious and intolerable object, but that seems to
be external to the way in which they affect the
life of the individual himself. And that the
criticism of it is not that the caring has gone
wrong as a mode of caring, but that it’s socially
unacceptable. That may be wrong. Certainly there
has been the effort of philosophers and others
ever since the beginning of human history, as far
as we know it, to try to show that there is a coin-
cidence between the requirements of morality and
the requirements of reason. But I don’t think it
has ever been accomplished; I think that we
ought to acknowledge that it’s not in reason or in
rationality or in any objective consideration that
these things are grounded and that ultimately the
opposition of good and evil is not the opposition
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between those who have it right and those who
made a mistake, but the opposition between two
equally coherent and intelligible alternatives that
can only fight it out.
de Graef: I was just wondering whether the
point of your own suggestion is that there is a
similarity between the appreciation of beauty and
finding something important. But you would still
agree with Kant, however, that the sentiment of
beauty is universal whereas the notion of caring
is not. Or at least, there is this desire for it to be
universal. I was struck by the sentence in your
text where you say: ‘when I love a person or an
ideal, I do not expect other persons to be com-
mitted to that ideal as well, to that person as well.
I would not think of it as a mistake.’ But when
I’m committed to an ideal, I think there’s at least
a tendency to want this to be universal.
Frankfurt: Well, that depends on the ideal: if
it’s a moral ideal, then perhaps so, because moral
ideals are inherently universal ideals, but if your
ideal is the protection of some family tradition or
something of that sort, I don’t require everyone
else to see that as something to which they want
to devote their lives. If my ideal is a patriotic
ideal, I don’t expect it to be important for others.
de Graef: Where do you draw the line
between the morality of ideals and to what extent
are, for instance, patriotic ideals not moral ideals?
In republican traditions they would be.
Frankfurt: It may be. It’s a complicated ques-
tion whether patriotism can be made consistent
with the requirements of morality, or whether it
even is required perhaps by the requirements of
morality. It may be required by morality that you
be patriotic to your family, so to speak, that you
have a loyalty to your family: that’s something
comparable to your loyalty to your country, that
may be a sort of moral requirement. But it’s self-
moral because it’s not universal, because it
doesn’t apply to human beings as such. It may
apply to human beings as such as each may be
patriotic but not all to the same country, just as it
may be a requirement that everyone be loyal but
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 19
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not all to the same family. And it may be a re-
quirement or a feature of human life that we all
respond to beauty, that we are capable of awe,
but I don’t know if it’s necessary that we all find
the same things beautiful.
de Graef: No, but in our sentiment of it, we
do assume that everybody will experience the
same thing, even though — and that’s why I think
it’s important — we do not therefore locate it
objectively as a quality of that object in its own
right.
Frankfurt: I’m just wondering if there’s any
truth in what Kant says about this. I certainly
don’t find it phenomenologically in my own ex-
perience, do you? When you find something
beautiful, when you are overcome with awe in
front of some great painting or piece of music,
does it even occur to you to wonder whether
everybody else has the same feelings?
de Graef: But I would think of specific
people, not perhaps of the human species.
Frankfurt: Certainly if I had any evidence that
I was the only person or that it was somehow
eccentric or idiosyncratic, that would begin to
bother me, but as you say, I don’t think I would
require that everybody should be of the same
opinion. So the universalization of it that Kant
seems to require seems to me to be excessive.
Arnold Burms: Perhaps one could replace the
Kantian idea by something that’s more plausible.
If I really like something, I know I’d like to share
the experience, to talk about it with others. I
remember a sentence coming from a French
writer, de Montherlant. He speaks about a doctor
who is writing down in his diary: ‘I feel very
happy, but unfortunately there’s nobody to whom
I can tell it’. So even if he’s not feeling unhappy,
he would like to talk about it, and I think when
we are confronted with something we really
admire, it seems to be a normal inclination to
speak about it and to be frustrated with others
when it turns out that they dislike the admired
object.
Frankfurt: And even so it seems to me that
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sometimes the experience of a deep esthetic ex-
perience is something that I’d rather not talk
about, that I would find it intrusive if someone
asked me: “how do you feel about this, tell me
what you feel or tell me what it seems to you.” I
don’t want this. It’s too much, it diminishes it,
reduces it to some sort of discourse to try to
articulate it but that seems to take away some of
the transcendent aspect of the experience. In the
kind of case I imagine, suppose I’m with
someone who means something to me and we’re
both experiencing some very powerful esthetical
experience. I may not want to talk about it, but
we know that each of us is having the same ex-
perience and that enhances the experience, even
though it’s not necessary or not possible to say
what the experience is. I think it’s true that shar-
ing may not be the articulation of it, but perhaps
a communication on some subarticulate level is
an enhancement of it — it’s true. I certainly don’t
think we ever want to keep it secret. It may be
private in the sense that we don’t want to have to
talk about it, but it’s not that we don’t want
anybody to know about it.
William Desmond: Could I just turn back to
the ethical? Esthetics is extremely important, cer-
tainly, but we can tolerate differences in a man-
ner that doesn’t seem always to be the case in
ethical issues. It strikes me as an extraordinary
statement to say that the Nazis were living a fully
human life, and I’d like you to elaborate a little
more on that. In relation to love for instance, one
can say that the Nazi individual loved his ideals,
but it was a love that had its own particularisms:
it was a love that precisely as a particular love
became a hatred for everything that didn’t con-
form to its own particularisms. So fundamentally
there is a potentially monstrous equivocation in
love itself.
Frankfurt: Well, there was hatred also on the
other side as well, it wasn’t only the Nazis that
hated their enemies. What I meant about the
Nazi, was, I hope, clear up to a point, that the
experience of believing in something deeply,
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 20
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sacrificing for it, joining with others in it, devot-
ing oneself to it, in a wholehearted way, is a life-
enhancing experience, before you even mention
what it is. It’s invigorating, it’s robust, it mobi-
lizes creative energies — that’s all to the good. I
don’t know what to say about hatred, the fact
that, in this case, the ideal to which the Nazi is
devoted is one in which hatred is inherent. That’s
not true of the opponents of the Nazis and they
hated the Nazis only because they had to — I
mean, the ideal of the democratic societies was
not an ideal that included hatred as an essential
constituent of it.
Desmond: Can I ask a question relating to
your conception of the will and Nietzsche’s?
Nietzsche’s view of life enhancement seems to be
peculiarly equivocal, if its very project is a
construction of different forms of life that stand
opposed to one another. I was wondering if you
have given any reflections to Nietzsche, since
behind the whole system lies the will to power,
but there is no ground of value. There is no
universal moral ethics or morality itself. I mean
Nietzsche had paroxysms of hatred about ‘moral-
ization’ or the ‘good man’. I suspect that you
don’t want to be brought into too close a proxim-
ity to Nietzsche, but one wonders why you
wouldn’t want to move in that direction.
Frankfurt: I don’t honestly know a lot about
Nietzsche. I’m not a great reader of Nietzsche,
although it’s certainly a part of our culture in a
way that makes it inescapable that one absorbs
Nietzschean ideas, and I’m sure that I have as
well. So I don’t know quite what to say about
this specific reference to Nietzsche’s ideas, but
I’m a little bit uncertain about what you have in
mind when you talk about the equivocity that you
referred to a couple of times.
Desmond: Well let’s say the Nazi’s love of his
own country turns into hatred of those who were
other.
Frankfurt: Where’s the equivocation: he loves
one thing and he hates another, that’s clear
enough.
___________________________________
Desmond: It’s the very love itself taking form
as hatred, that is to say, you can’t separate love
and hatred in an absolutely univocal sense
because certain forms of love themselves turn
into forms of hatred.
Frankfurt: That’s the point I was making
before, that hatred is inherent in the Nazi ideal
whereas it’s not inherent to the ideal of those
who were opposed to the Nazi’s. They hated only
because contingencies required it, evoked it, but it
wasn’t inherent in the fundamental commitment.
Desmond: Hatred is itself a formation of love,
in this and maybe in other cases also, in other
forms of love. For instance, I love a particular
woman, and because I love her, in a certain
intense way I hate all those whom I perceive as
potential opponents. You can’t always separate
the two.
Frankfurt: OK, suppose that we have that
situation, where the love entails a hatred. What
do you want say about that?
Desmond: Well, I’m just asking the question
of a philosopher: if we do put love at the centre
of our philosophical reflections, don’t we have to
really delve into, become deeply mindful of that
equivocity: that good and evil are not, so to say,
univocally separable, precisely because when love
comes in the picture, you have this promiscuity
of the two, and we find ourselves in the midst of
that promiscuity.
Frankfurt: I think that is an important point.
Spinoza talks about ideals of life and rejects
certain ideals that many people adopt, precisely
because they undermine themselves, because they
lead to the very thing that they’re designed to
enable us to escape from, that they lead to com-
petition, to anxiety, to hatred and disorder. And
he recommends therefore that we find for our
ideals things that do not have this equivocity. So
he thinks that if you devote yourself to the acqui-
sition of knowledge, this doesn’t lead you into
competition with others because knowledge is not
scarce. The knowledge of one person in fact
increases the likelihood that others can acquire
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 21
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the knowledge, because you can help them,
whereas wealth is scarce, because what I have, is
what you don’t have. So I suppose one could say
the same thing about love, that one way of dis-
criminating among possible objects of love is
whether they are or are not equivocal in the way
that you described.
II
The Desire of People to be Identified
With Something Different from What They Are
Arnold Burms
Burms: I will limit myself to a brief description
of a phenomenon which could perhaps be per-
ceived as a distortion or perversion of caring.
What I have in mind is something which is dis-
tinguished from volitional necessity. Being guided
by volitional necessity is a form of being active
because I am governed in my actions by some-
thing I really care about. This, however, could be
contrasted with a phenomenon which perhaps
does not occur in your work, but I was wonder-
ing what you would say about it. What I have in
mind is the desire of people to be identified with
something that may be very different from what
they actually are. For instance, I might very much
wish to be a calm and courageous person, without
ever being certain whether I can in fact be that
sort of person or not. And I may do all sorts of
things in order to convince myself that I am that
sort of person. In such a case, it seems to me, I
make two different mistakes. I am mistaken in
thinking that this is an ideal for me, but I am also
mistaken in the mode of identification. In the
case of volitional necessity, I seem to have a
power which derives from a genuine commit-
ment. In the other example, there is no deep
commitment, but a wish to acquire that power. I
am trying to build up a kind of self-respect, and I
use the mode of identification to acquire that self-
respect. Something seems to go wrong here and
I’m intrigued about the existence of that possibili-
ty. One of the things that made me reflect on this
___________________________________
is a remark made by Kant about the moral educa-
tion of children. Kant said that in order to instil
the moral attitude one should not represent virtue
as useful, but one should try to evoke the austere
authority of the moral law and bring about, in
children, this desire: “I would like to be like
this.” To me, it seems obvious that this desire to
be a moral person is very different from the
willingness to be moved by the moral law.
Frankfurt: Well I was surprised a little bit; I
didn’t remember that reference to Kant. I’m not
sure how conceptually fundamental it is.
Volitional necessity can arise with respect to
anything. It may be anything at all that grips me
and makes me incapable of even considering any
alternative, makes alternatives unthinkable for me.
It may be that the vision of rectitude and of in-
tegrity and of straightness is so compelling that,
once I am gripped by it, I couldn’t possibly bring
myself to violate it, and that this is only, as you
suggest, an indirect access to the moral law.
It’s not the moral law itself that grips me, it’s the
image of my own integrity that grips me. That
can happen, but where’s the problem then?
Burms: Well I think one is not in the same
way in the grip of it. You have given very sug-
gestive descriptions of volitional necessity, this
capacity to be actively caring. I think that these
descriptions do not apply very well to the phe-
nomena I have in mind. I often give as an
example a poem by the Dutch poet, Ida Gerhardt,
in which she speaks about the fear of examina-
tions, and how she was able to overcome her
fears. On the day of her thesis defence when she
saw her father sitting in the first row, she felt that
she would be able to defend herself without fear
because she wanted to make him proud of her. I
would see that as an example of volitional ne-
cessity. This is to be contrasted with the other
phenomenon I have described. Rather than being
attracted by this ideal image of a courageous
person, she becomes courageous out of a deep
identification with her father. The two situations
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 22
___________________________________
seem to be quite different: in one case (Ida
Gerhardt’s), a person is moved by an identifica-
tion, whereas in the other case, one tries to move
in the direction of an identification.
Frankfurt: That’s a very interesting thought. I
haven’t been sensitive to this difference and I
think it’s a genuine one, which ought to make it
for a more complicated account of these things.
III
Some Questions about
the Activity-Passivity Relation
Paul Smeyers
These days hardly anyone would disagree that our
identity is constituted by the social structure to
which we belong. But we also say that we
‘identify ourselves with’, even in general terms,
say with a particular sex, group or subculture.
Who we are does not seem to be exhausted by an
ascribed identity by others. This is not only
because others can be mistaken about ourselves,
but also and more importantly, because we might
resist a particular ascription with which one is
saddled. And of course, sometimes, there is also
our desire to change. The latter is at stake for
instance when we ponder upon who we are and
why we do certain things. And though it does not
follow that we change because we want to do so,
it is also incorrect to state that it does not play a
part at all. Given the precedence of the inter-
subjective level, i.e., the priority of the third-per-
son perspective concerning the constitution of the
subject, it is therefore crucial to indicate how the
individual, conceived from the very beginning at
this level, can at the same time be thought of in a
way which permits, for instance, incorporation of
this caring for particular ethical demands, without
however falling into the trap of subjectivism.
Many issues are involved here, such as: How to
understand that a subject can express herself?
And what does express mean here, i.e., what is it
that is expressed? How is the identity of a person
conceived given that actors have several affilia-
___________________________________
tions? And how can we, in spite of the different
ways we fill in our identities, still operate on an
intersubjective level? In other words, how can we
think this intersubjective level in such a way that
it at the same time transcends the individual but
enables her to express herself by means of it.
Working within the context of psychology and
educational sciences, more specifically within the
area of philosophy of education, I find
Frankfurt’s ideas very interesting. The relevance
of his insights can hardly be overstated. ‘What
we care about’ can play a crucial role for the way
we conceive child-rearing and even education.
Both agency and self-consciousness are presup-
posed. A person who cares about something
identifies herself with what she cares about and
her outlook is inherently prospective. Frankfurt
also stresses that here we deal with ‘something
one finds oneself in’, different from what one
indicates by ‘choice’. Finally, by what he calls
‘volitional necessity’, he makes it clear that it is
not entailed that the person who is subject to
‘volitional necessity’ is passive at all. What is
involved is that she is unwilling to oppose it and
this unwillingness is itself something which she is
unwilling to alter. To be bound by a value
enables one to know that one is someone, and
only then one experiences oneself as a unity, he
argues. It is about the relationship between activ-
ity and passivity that I want to raise a question.
To recall: on the one hand ‘one finds oneself’ in,
on the other an active process is involved, i.e., of
identification. How can this be understood? What
is needed in other words, is some ammunition to
understand the dynamics of this active process of
identification.
There are at least two interesting ways how
such a kind of activity can be thought of. And I
am interested to hear which kind, if any, would
be your choice. Or, alternatively, why these
answers cannot be compatible with your general
stance.
An obvious candidate to think this activity can
be found within the (feminist) ethics of care.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 23
___________________________________
Because we want to care, we do not identify
ourselves with the present identity we come up
with. Here one is confronted with a kind of
empiricist reading of the care imperative. Without
arguing that what is, is of necessity good, Nod-
dings does claim that natural caring — some
degree of which each of us has been dependent
upon for our continued existence — is the natural
state that we inevitably identify as ‘good’. “The
ethical self is an active relation between my ac-
tual self and a vision of my ideal self as one-
caring and cared-for. It is born of the fundamen-
tal recognition of relatedness; that which connects
me naturally to the other, reconnects me through
the other to myself. As I care for others and am
cared for by them, I become able to care for
myself. The characteristic ‘I must’ arises in con-
nection with this other in me, this ideal self, and
I respond to it. It is this caring that sustains me
when caring for the other fails, and it is this
caring that enables me to surpass my actual un-
caring self in the direction of caring.”8
Ethical behaviour is seen by Noddings as a
‘human affective response’ and ethical caring, the
relation in which we do meet the other morally,
is described as arising out of natural caring. The
relation of natural caring (that is the human con-
dition), that we consciously or unconsciously
describe as ‘good’, is the condition toward which
we long and strive. This provides for us the mo-
tivation to be moral. In a caring relationship the
other’s reality is seen as a possibility for oneself,
one projects one’s own reality onto the other. But
caring also involves stepping out of one’s own
personal frame of reference into the other’s. One
considers the other’s point of view, her objective
needs, and what she expects of us. The attention,
the mental engrossment is on the cared-for, not
on oneself. Indeed, Noddings rejects the notion of
universal caring (caring for everyone) on the
grounds that it is impossible to actualize and
leads to substitute abstract problem solving and
mere talk for genuine caring. The one caring
acknowledges her finitude with both sadness and
___________________________________
relief. She cannot do everything, though she is
not indifferent to the persons she has not yet
encountered. The key-words that characterize
Noddings’ position are thus: receptivity, related-
ness and responsiveness, and ethical behaviour is
linked with the human condition. To put care
central in society means that we pay attention to
others’ needs, that we take up our responsibility
to do something about these; that we develop the
competencies and the adequate means to achieve
that and that we then listen how others evaluate
our actions.
But there are, of course, problems with this
position. Not in the least with its naturalism. For
instance, this position cannot make clear why to
care for this rather than for that. I would
therefore like to focus on Wittgenstein’s attention
to expressive utterances as in his dealing with
expressions of pain and of confessions (both are
one-place predicates). Such expressions are con-
nected differently with the world than descrip-
tions of states of affairs. Avowals shift semantic
force from a relation of word to world to a
relation of word to the agent’s activity within a
world. Here response is a matter of adjustments,
of positioning ourselves so that we can perform
certain actions or ask questions which invite
clarifications. In the case of confessions concerns
for truth remain, but are subordinated to what
Wittgenstein calls “criteria for truthfulness”9.
These criteria connect the agent’s own in-
vestments and expressive desires to the
descriptions that she might offer. Expressing
oneself depends on the capacity to make the
identification (to align one’s conative sense with
the activity being performed) and the possibility
of taking reflective responsibility for that invest-
ment or identification. Identification is not simply
a matter of attentive investment. It is not simply
in how one acts but in how one wants to be
understood as one cares about the action. The
play of investments must be interpreted first in
relation to what seems to have shaped the agent’s
investments in the past, and then in terms of how
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 24
___________________________________
that past can be mediated into a future. Here
particular attention is paid to the ways in which
concerns for ethical identities provide interest in
pursuing moral values; a thicker ‘psychological’
account of those interests than is common in ana-
lytic ethics is produced. And finally, once can
argue here that we can define self-reflexive moral
judgements in terms of how the first person
engages others from whom identities are sought,
and through that dialogical model it will show
why the agent might want to submit itself to
impartial third-person criteria for assessing its
actions and even its projects.
Subjective agency is thus characterized that
we can understand agents as responding to con-
cerns about worthiness without thereby being
seduced into subjection and subordination. Here
the person is seen in the process of negotiating
for an identity with an audience imagined as a
tribunal whose understanding, if not whose ap-
proval, is necessary for the agent’s being con-
firmed in the substance that the expressive activ-
ity seeks. Though the audience can be almost
entirely imaginary, to grasp the various roles it
plays it is better to envision it as representative of
an actual community. Here one concentrates on
how the second-person function contributes to the
identification process and thus treats the confer-
ring of identity as a dialogical process responsible
to cultural grammars but capable of modifying
that grammar to accommodate specific expressive
traits. Thus one invokes modes of judgement that
not only bring to bear the necessary knowledge
and sympathy to assess actions, but also the flexi-
bility to take into account the transformations that
the agent might work on the vocabulary shared
with the audience. That flexibility also gives a
useful way to imagine how agents internalize
social norms (not as rigid rules or conventions to
be manipulated) as aspects of dialogues by which
we both try to invoke approval and work towards
personalized identifications with the cultural
structures framing our investments. The ‘you’
serves both as constraint that holds one to obliga-
___________________________________
tions and as a source of idealization that pulls the
agent towards certain versions of its and its au-
dience’s ‘best selves’.
Here obligation proves almost entirely a sense
of duty to oneself, a sense of how one can repre-
sent oneself to oneself as if one were worthy of
certain predicates in the eyes of those with whom
one is engaged. Here we monitor ourselves to ask
whether or not we are living in accord with what
we project as not simply a good life but the best
possible ways of maintaining those relationships.
This ethics of attunement is content with ana-
logues of the beautiful in which the way one
experiences oneself in a range of specific har-
monies with others becomes an end in itself.
What is pursued is a sociality fundamental to its
own self-enjoyment. The agent does not want
universal agreement for its own sake, but seeks a
mode of assessment that will allow it to maintain
in the eyes of others, and hence in its own self-
representations, the identity of one who bases
judgments on internalizing shareable models of
assessment. Such an agent must follow third-
person procedures but by positing a second-per-
son basis (for accepting such conditions) one
secures that our relation to the procedures takes
on considerable flexibility and moreover that the
procedures need not be grounded in terms of
some independent principle. One thus remains
responsible to specific determinations of ends, but
one also places those determinations within com-
plex discursive frameworks and clear expectations
about the actions that must follow to secure the
desired identity.
Personal identity is thus connected to accept-
ing certain social procedures, not as imposed but
as necessary for certain realizations of ourselves.
Indeed, what makes a judgement binding is not
the coercive power of the judge but the commit-
ment of the agent. The sense of responsibility that
is proposed redistributes the relation between
passive and active basic to responsiveness. Ex-
pressivist theory argues that one cannot distribute
responsibility (as a consent to bear the con-
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 25
___________________________________
sequences of particular actions) without a strong
sense of what commitments agents make them-
selves responsible for. Thus responsibility is
defined as consenting to the practical conse-
quences deriving from acting in accord with
identities we invest in. In this sense the problems
with ‘volitional necessity’ are transcended by
bringing this matter (i.e., the passivity-activity
dimension) through the idea of ‘worthiness in the
eyes of the other’, thus through the second-order
again on the intersubjective level. What we take
as somehow fulfilling us, to a certain extent also
in a naturalistic way, binds us to the ways of
structuring our concerns so that others can partici-
pate in a common framework. I wonder thus
whether this can get your approval and whether it
can answer the problem I raised.
Frankfurt: This is a very rich and complex thesis
and formulation of the problematic. I must say to
begin with that my own interests are not prima-
rily ethical or moral, but metaphysical. I’m really
interested — when it comes to talking about iden-
tity and identification — with just what it means
for a person to identify himself with some rather
than with other of his own feelings, inclinations,
desires, impulses and so on, and less with the
question of what accounts for his choice of what
to identify with and what the bearing of this has
upon moral or ethical questions. However, these
questions are certainly not totally outside the
scope of my interest and I’ll try to say something
about it.
One of the most fundamental sources of our
moral concerns is, I think, the fear of loneliness,
the fear of isolation. It seems to me that to a
considerable extent our sense of our own reality
depends upon the way in which our reality is
taken seriously by and reflected in the attitudes
and behaviour of other people. We want to be
taken seriously, we want to be accepted, we want
people to be willing to enter into active relation-
ships with us. Whether that depends so much on
worthiness I don’t know. I think there’s a ten-
___________________________________
dency to exaggerate the role of moral evalution in
human life. Philosophers take it more seriously, I
think, than is actually warranted by the extent to
which it determines our conduct and our attitudes.
I think there are other bases, other than worthi-
ness, upon which we expect others to take us
seriously. They don’t have to admire us, they
don’t have to think we’re wonderful or think
even that we’re good. And especially it seems to
me in certain kinds of relationship like love,
intimate relationships, the evaluation seems to me
to be relatively insignificant. My attitude toward
my children, for instance, has very little to do
with my evaluation of their worthiness. I don’t
know if they’re worthy or not, the question
doesn’t even seem to be appropriate. In more
voluntary relationships, where I have a choice to
enter into them or not, the question of the ap-
propriateness or worthiness of the other person
becomes more pertinent, but in those relationships
over which I have less control, like parental re-
lationships or relationships based on some spon-
taneous response, some sort of infatuation, some
sort of attraction or love, where it’s not entirely
under my control, the question of worthiness
seems to me to be less immediate, less direct.
At the beginning of your remarks, you said
something about falling into the trap of subjec-
tivism. I’m not sure what the trap of subjectivism
is and whether I’d be so reluctant to fall into it.
Maybe you could explain a little bit further, so
that I can decide how to stand with respect to
that.
Smeyers: Well, the problem seems to be to
combine in some way what we think is good for
us with what everyone else thinks is good for us.
Now, going to the one extreme, you can empha-
size the subjective level and you may find no
activity in the person any more, with regard to
the standards or norms that are intersubjectively
accepted. On the other hand, if you look at the
individual in itself, it might be the case that only
he or she thinks that certain things are
worthwhile, which are out of touch of this inter-
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 26
___________________________________
subjective level. I think I just wanted to make the
contrast between the two. If we want to combine
the first person with the intersubjectivity in order
to solve this activity/passivity problem, we have
to make sure that we neither go in the one
extreme, nor in the other extreme, because we
would necessarily fail.
Frankfurt: Of course individuals differ and
they vary with respect to how important it is to
them to maintain the intersubjectivity and to what
extent they are prepared to fall into the trap of
subjectivity and to make their own demands and
to let the rest of the world decide what
accomodations they want to make. So I don’t
know if this is a necessary or a conceptual ne-
cessity or a psychological feature which is vari-
able and subject to various contingencies.
I don’t know to what extent this is fully rel-
evant to the issues with which you are concerned,
but it seems to me that to a considerable extent
the decisions that people make concerning how to
identify themselves and what to identify
themselves with, are determined by the kind of
life that they think they will have if they make
one decision or an other. The model that I think
of or the paradigm that I think of is an adoles-
cent, who is reviewing various possibilities for
his future life and trying to decide what sort of
life he wants to lead, what he wants to devote
himself to, whether he wants to devote himself to
developing his artistic talent or whether he wants
to develop himself to some sort of socially
valuable activity, perhaps in philanthropic work,
or perhaps in a political life, or whether he wants
to devote himself to scientific inquiry, or whether
he wants to devote himself simply to cultivation
of his own tastes and interests. And it seems to
me that the decision there is not made on the
basis of an evaluation of the various objects to
which the person is considering devoting himself.
It’s not a question of whether the life of a
physician is more valuable or less valuable than
the life of an artist, or whether social justice is
more important or less important than scientific
___________________________________
truth. That may enter into the decision, but I
think the primary basis for the decision lies in
what the person feels he can live most fully as,
what will bring out the best in him, what will
enable him to realize most completely the
capacities for an invigorating and robust e-
motional and intellectual and volitional life. So I
don’t know whether this is the trap of sub-
jectivity, but I do want to place emphasis on how
the individual evaluates various alternatives in
terms of the kind of life that a person pursuing
those alternatives has, rather than simply in terms
of the value of the goals to which those alter-
natives are directed. Now to be sure, insofar as
someone cares about the welfare of the world, or
the interests of other people or the opinions of
other people or the way in which his life will be
seen by other people, that will have an effect on
the kind of life he thinks that it is worthwhile for
him to live. But again I think that this is a contin-
gent matter and that at the limit it’s possible for
someone coherently to reject all considerations
except more or less objective ones and to base his
decision almost entirely upon his evaluation of
the kind of life that he himself will have, in-
dependent of moral considerations. You see, the
notion of morality is a fairly elusive one, it can
be understood in various ways. I think of
morality primarily as concerned with how one is
related to other people, how one’s behaviour,
how one’s attitudes, how one’s actions in various
ways affect the lives of other people. Now that’s
an important consideration, but it’s hard for me to
see why that should be necessarily the most im-
portant consideration. How much I care about the
way in which my life relates to the life of other
people seems to me subject to some kind of
decision or choice on my part, or at least it may
be. I may not have any choice because I may be
so naturally disposed in one direction or another
that I have no freedom here, but it doesn’t seem
to me that there is any rational necessity or con-
ceptual necessity in grounding all personal
decisions ultimately in a judgement concerning
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 27
___________________________________
how this affects the lives of other people. You
may hope that people make their decisions in that
way and react to them on the basis of whether or
not they do, but I don’t see that there’s anything
other than contingency that determines how that
decision is to be made.
Smeyers: Would you say that the other, the
concrete other, comes in as well? You started by
saying that one of the problems is our isolation
and that we long for not being on our own and
for being with particular kinds of people rather
than with others. In your example, don’t you
invoke this relationship to the concrete other
again?
Frankfurt: Yes, but first of all I think that this
loneliness, as I think I said, is a variable: some
people feel it more intensely than others, some
people need to overcome it more than others, and
what I found appealing about the quotations from
Noddings that you provided here was that he
doesn’t construe what he calls morality in terms
of a universalization of this. I don’t see that the
need to avoid loneliness requires that I establish
relationships with all of mankind. I may be
interested only in a few people, and from that
point of view I may not be very moral at all. The
morality of my life may consist only in how I
relate to these people. I may be quite vicious and
indifferent or callous and harsh in my relation-
ships to all others, and by conventional standards
wouldn’t be regarded as being a moral person at
all.
Verhack: In the beginning you said something
strange — maybe I misunderstood it — namely
that moral relations are based on being afraid of
loneliness. Well, immediately I have an example:
my grandfather is an old man who doesn’t want
to be alone, and at this moment his ideal of life is
to be surrounded every moment by everybody,
and he puts claims on everybody, without any
value considerations. Is that moral?
Frankfurt: No, it’s the distortion of the motive
that leads to morality. But it seems to me that,
although the fear of loneliness is what leads to
___________________________________
morality, it seems to me it can lead to other
things too. My fear of loneliness leads me to
want you to accept me, leads me to want you to
allow me to enter into congenial relationships
with you, and that generates a recognition on my
part that I have to behave in certain ways in order
to win your sympathy and benevolence. Your
grandfather presumably has sufficient power over
people around him so that he doesn’t have to
behave well in order to get his way.
Verhack: But that would mean that to end
with good relations is based on another approach
than the approach of feeling. Other considerations
should enter our speaking about relations.
Frankfurt: Other considerations enter because
insofar as I don’t know you and insofar as you
don’t owe me anything and have no interest in
me, the only way in which I can reasonably
expect you to take me seriously is if I show you
some respect and treat you in ways that you
would like to be treated. Your grandfather pre-
sumably has, as I said a moment ago, other ways
of controlling the behaviour of the people around
him: they care about him, or they feel they owe
him something or they take pity on him or whate-
ver, so he doesn’t have to behave well in order to
achieve this. It’s all very vague, I agree, but let
me add one more thing that will give you sort of
an idea of what leads me to think in this way.
We know, I think, that people are capable of
behaving in the most terrible ways towards those
whom they don’t regard as fully human. Or to
put it the other way: you can get people to
behave towards others in a very vicious and harsh
manner by convincing them that the people to
whom they’re behaving are not fully human. So,
the pilot in the bomber who has no difficulty in
dropping bombs on the population below him,
doesn’t think of them as individuals. He doesn’t
think of them as people; they have only a kind of
abstract reality and he has no real sense of the
immediacy of their lives. That same person would
find it impossible to be vicious or act harmfully
to someone who is standing right in front of him,
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 28
___________________________________
whose humanity he could immediately perceive.
Insofar as we can think of people as outside the
scope of our own lives, as not belonging to the
same community that we belong to, or as belong-
ing to populations with whom we have no con-
tact, the problem of loneliness doesn’t arise,
because they don’t exist for us, they have no
reality for us; and since they have no reality for
us, it doesn’t make any difference to us how we
affect them, because they won’t respond to us.
It’s often said that Christianity brings a universal-
izing quality to moral thought in putting so much
emphasis on the principle of loving thy neigh-
bour, but of course not everybody is one’s
neighbour. It’s not a universal principle at all:
your neighbour is only the person with whom
you have relationships, with whom you have
some kind of immediate contact. People outside,
the people who are not your neighbours, you
don’t have to love. In fact it’s very difficult to
love them, it’s very difficult to take them serious-
ly at all. Perhaps loneliness is not the best word,
but I think in my own experience I find that what
motivates me most vividly to take seriously the
moral claims of other people is that I am afraid
that if I don’t do so they will reject me, they will
have nothing to do with me, they’ll treat me as if
I’m outside the scope of their responsiveness. I
think if you look at little children, you see some-
thing very similar. So, although it is rather vague
and I don’t have a lot of very powerful evidence
and it’s very difficult to deal with all the
complexities and the variations and the distortions
like the case of your grandfather, I still think that
the fear of loneliness is a very powerful human
motive and that it does account a great deal for
the ways in which we think it important to design
and shape our relationships with other people, so
as to avoid the pain of rejection and loneliness,
and of being excluded and of not being taken
seriously, and of not being regarded as having
genuine reality.
Verhack: But still, does the question just asked
then not imply that the fear of loneliness is only
___________________________________
a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the
motivation to take seriously the moral claims of
other people?
Frankfurt: Sure, the other condition as neces-
sary is a recognition of what kind of behaviour is
necessary for me in order to avoid loneliness.
Decorte: I was just thinking of Whitehead’s
definition of religion as solitariness. Does that
mean that a person can choose between being
moral and not religious or being religious and not
moral?
Frankfurt: I don’t know really what
Whitehead has in mind when he talks about relig-
ion as being a matter of solitariness. Perhaps
what he has in mind — I mean, the most natural
thing to think of — is the fact that an individual’s
conduct and his conception of himself and of the
world is integrated within himself and that he’s
not directed always in the formation of his
thoughts towards what other people think. And I
suppose that morality and religion are different
approaches to the problems of life. My inclination
is to think that morality as such cannot stand by
itself, it has no inherently compelling character.
Everything depends on how much you care about
it. I was saying a moment ago that one thing that
makes people care about morality is loneliness. It
may be that there are other routes or other
avenues that lead to it, and it may be that some
sort of conception of God, some sort of concep-
tion of the relationship of human life to the uni-
verse and cosmic considerations may be an other
route. My general sense is that the philosophical
attempt to justify morality from within reason, or
from within the resources that morality itself
provides, is a failure. It has never succeeded and
can’t succeed. It has to come from somewhere
else. I was suggesting that it comes from a psy-
chological, subjective consideration and perhaps
Whitehead has some bases for saying that it can
come also from religious or cosmic con-
siderations.
Verhack: What kind of loneliness do you have
in mind? Is it the psychological feeling or is it
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 29
___________________________________
the metaphysical feeling, because this is different.
One can feel alone when others do not pay attent-
ion, but it is a metaphysical feeling of loneliness
not to belong to a universality. They are different.
Frankfurt: The metaphysical feeling of lone-
liness, I think, is not so much a matter of not
belonging to a universality — I don’t know exact-
ly what you have in mind by that — but of being
uncertain of my own reality. Because I find that
my sense of my own reality is very much de-
pendent upon being taken seriously by other
people. Now that again, I think, is a variable,
because I think that some people are much less
dependent upon the responsiveness of others to
provide the solidity of their own sense of them-
selves. I don’t know why you bring in universal-
ity though. What do you have in mind?
Verhack: The fact that we are all brothers in
the same family for instance, that we are not
alone, that we are not the only persons.
Frankfurt: But I don’t think that, in order not
to be alone, I need to bring in everybody else in
the world; just a few people are enough. So that’s
what I resist: the notion of universality is playing
some essential metaphysical role.
Burms: I’d like to come back to your claim
that morality need not necessarily be the domina-
ting concern and sometimes you make a contrast
between a moral concern based on obligation and
the willingness to care, for instance about a speci-
fic person. I think that it’s all right to make a
distinction, but would you not say that a rather
narrow conception of morality is involved. It is
interesting to see that the boundary between
morality and other forms of caring is not very
sharp. Confronted with a mother who does not
care very much about her children, we would
perhaps feel a tendency to criticize her. We
would make some sort of negative judgement,
and it’s not so clear to me that this negative
judgement is absolutely different from a moral
negative judgement. So although Kant made a
distinction there, I don’t know whether it is so
sharp.
___________________________________
Frankfurt: Well you’re certainly right in this
sense that morality can be construed in a variety
of ways and in some ways it’s much less limited
than the way in which I use it. My justification
for construing morality in a fairly narrow way as
concerning impersonal principles of obligation
and of duty, is because I think that it’s important
for us to recognize that there are a variety of
ways of being a bad person and that one is not
always a bad person in quite the same way. I
agree with you that the mother is subject to some
sort of adverse judgement, some judgement un-
favorable to her. But to say then ‘she’s morally
bad’ already stops us from looking more closely
at just what kind of adverse judgment it is. It’s
not the same kind of adverse judgement that we
would make of someone who commits a crime or
behaves in ways that are directly injurious to
another person. There are all sorts of ways of
being a good human being and being a bad
human being and to subsume them all under the
category of morality — although you can construe
morality in a way that justifies that — removes, I
think, the motivation from seeing the distinctions
that it would be interesting and important to de-
lineate. And there are other good things to do
with one’s life, there are other important values
besides moral values. A person might say, “look,
I’m just not terribly interested in other people;
I’m interested in spiritual depth; I want to
increase my understanding of myself and of the
world; I want to develop my capacity to respond
to the meanings of human existence (or such
things) and I just don’t care very much about
how I get along with other people and maybe I
won’t be such a good person.” I think that’s a
possibility.
IV
Responsibility in
Autonomy Undermining Circumstances
Maureen Sie
In 1969 Prof. Frankfurt has introduced a famous
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 30
___________________________________
class of counterexamples to the Principle of
Alternate Possibilities.10 The principle that states
that a person x is only responsible for an action
y, if she could have done otherwise than y. In
these examples a so called ‘counterfactual inter-
vener’ figures that pre-empts all alternate pos-
sibilities counterfactually, that is, without actually
intervening. Because this counterfactual inter-
vener only looms passively in the background,
x’s moral responsibility for y is not affected,
whereas at the same time — by stipulation — x
couldn’t have done otherwise than y. Hence, the
Principle of Alternate Possibilities must be false.
Let me, for those that are not introduced to
the subject, elaborate shortly on the Principle of
Alternate Possibilities and the Counterfactual
Intervener. The Principle of Alternate Possibilities
owes its plausibility to the fact that we tend to
excuse all people who are in the position to claim
that they ‘could not have acted otherwise than
they in fact did’. People who are locked into a
room; people who are threatened or forced into
something; people who panic or people who are
literally overwhelmed by passion, are not respon-
sible (or less) for what they do due to their situa-
tion. All these different cases seem to be gov-
erned by one and the same principle, the principle
that someone is only morally responsible for y, if
she could have done something else.
The examples that Frankfurt develops to un-
dermine the initial plausibility of this principle
go, more or less, as follows: suppose someone
forces Jones with threats to stay put in her house
and to ignore cries for help that she hears outside
on the street. The threats impress her and would
certainly have forced her to obey, had she not
already decided to stay in her house ‘no matter
what happens’. If this is the case two things seem
to be equally true: (1) Jones doesn’t have any real
alternate possibilities, because the threat would
have made her stay inside the house even if she
had decided otherwise; and (2) Jones is still
morally responsible for her action, for the threat
didn’t exert any force on her whatsoever.
___________________________________
One could object to this interpretation of the
‘inability to do otherwise’. For, although, Jones
would have succumbed to the threat if she had
not already decided to do what she was about to
be coerced to do, it is not literally true that she
‘couldn’t have done otherwise’. She was not, for
instance, paralyzed. Frankfurt anticipates this
objection by developing a second example around
a jack-of-all-trades called ‘Black’. Black is able
to take sufficient measures to pre-empt all alter-
nate possibilities of Jones doing x. For instance,
by installing a mechanism into the brains of
Jones that registers the decisions Jones is about to
make and that interferes if Jones makes up her
mind to take decisions contrary to what Black
wishes her to decide and do. Again two things
seem to be true if Jones does all the nice or nasty
things Black wants her to perform without
Black’s actual intervention: (1) Black’s non-inter-
vening presence secures the absence of all real
alternate possibilities and (2) Jones is morally
responsible for all the nice or nasty things she
does.
These ‘Frankfurt-style counterexamples’, as
van Inwagen has called them, initiated an elabo-
rate discussion that goes on until this very day.
This is no wonder. If one issue dominated dis-
cussions on responsibility for centuries it is the
issue of its compatibility with the thesis of
determinism, the thesis that excludes the exis-
tence of all alternate possibilities. If Frankfurt’s
examples are valid, the principle of alternate
possibilities is false. If the principle of alternate
possibilities is false, the question of the compati-
bility of responsibility with the thesis of
determinism is rendered obsolete. One of the
things that is debated with regard to the
Frankfurt-style counterexamples is whether they
are really devoid of every ‘flicker of freedom’. I
want to concentrate on an objection that accepts
the validity of the counterexamples in this
respect, but that endorses a kind of ‘open ques-
tion argument’.
The objection goes as follows. Suppose that
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 31
___________________________________
we accept that someone is superficially respon-
sible for an event, state of affairs or action ‘y’ if
she is ‘correctly related’ to y. That is, we accept
the moral of Frankfurt’s counterexamples that
someone is responsible for y, if she did y because
she wanted to, regardless of whether she had any
alternatives to y. The only thing we need to know
to determine x’s responsibility for y is whether x
is ‘correctly related’ to y; that she is not forced to
do y, or did y only accidentally but that she did y
‘freely and willingly’. That she did y because she
‘really wanted to do y’ or because she ‘decisively
identified with y’. The latter one, ‘decisive iden-
tification’, is Frankfurt’s own account of the
correct relation between x and y.11 Even if we
accept this — so the objection runs — there is still
a sense in which we can ask whether x is really
responsible for y. Or, as for instance Susan Wolf
has put it, whether x is also in a deeper sense
responsible for y.12 I call this an ‘open-question
argument’, because it accepts that we call some-
one ‘responsible for y’ if she is related to y in a
certain manner, but insists that we can still pose
the question: whether this so-called responsible
person is also really responsible for y; whether
we can really morally blame or praise x for y or
whether she really deserves to be morally blamed
for y, and so on.
According to some people (among which such
different thinkers as Susan Wolf, Jay Wallace and
Robert Kane) someone does not really deserve to
be blamed or praised for y (or deserves to be
blamed or praised for y, but less) if the correct
relation to y came into existence in an autonomy
undermining way or under autonomy undermin-
ing circumstances. Autonomy undermining cir-
cumstances are for instance circumstances of
‘covert non-constraining control’, such as mani-
pulation or physical influences that we are not
aware of. Other possible autonomy undermining
circumstances are, for instance, manipulation or
physical influences that, although we believe the
opposite, we do not control. Also often believed
to be autonomy undermining circumstances are,
___________________________________
for instance, severe and exceptional personal
circumstances.
Let me give an example. Suppose Jones is
living some fifty years ago and suffers from a
very light form of asthma. Her doctor advises her
to smoke a cigarette and she, unaware of the
addictive effects of nicotine, keeps on smoking
them for years. In first instance she just keeps on
smoking because she likes it and because she
believes it helps relieve her asthma. After her
husband and children start complaining about the
smoke and the bad smell of smoking, she reflects
carefully about the pro’s and con’s of smoking.
She is still unaware of the addictive effects of
nicotine but she knows now that it does not
relieve her asthma, but in fact makes it even
worse. Nevertheless, she likes smoking very very
much and she cannot imagine herself without her
cigarettes and so on. Hence, she decides that she
really is a smoker. Now if Jones’ identification
was in fact largely determined by her actual ad-
diction to nicotine, she seems less responsible for
smoking than if her identification was not influ-
enced by her addiction at all. Compare this with
Wallace, who distinguishes two ways in which
the ‘willing addict’ can become a willing
addict.13 Likewise, if Jones’ had been aware of
the addictive effects of nicotine she would be
more responsible, than she is in this case. In all
cases Jones is superficially responsible for smok-
ing in as far as she decisively identifies with
being a smoker. In the first case, though, she is
not really to blame for smoking because she
could not have known better, nor could she have
acted better than she did. At least, that is my
strong intuition.
My question to Frankfurt now is, whether he
believes or not that ‘decisive identification’ can
come about in an autonomy undermining way or
under autonomy undermining circumstances.
(a) If he believes that decisive identification can
come about under autonomy undermining cir-
cumstances, would he then also argue that these
people are as deeply responsible for their actions
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 32
___________________________________
as others (which seems to me counterintuitive)?
(b) If he does not believe that decisive identifica-
tion can come about under autonomy undermin-
ing circumstances, the next question is, of course,
what the (objective) criterion is to distinguish
between decisive identification and the mere
‘experience’ of an identification?
As may be clear, I think (a) is the only viable
option and, as is probably also clear, I am skep-
tical about the possibility of such a criterion
without it leading to a reintroduction of
something very much like the Principle of Alter-
nate Possibilities — albeit in a much more sophis-
ticated version than the one that is refuted in his
counterexamples.
Frankfurt: My general response to criticisms of
this kind is that the only thing that really counts
is what condition I am in. How I got into that
condition is another matter. If I’m in the condi-
tion where I’m doing what I want to do and I
really want to do it, i.e., I decisively identify with
my action, then I think I’m responsible for it. It
makes no difference how it came about that that
is the case. If it is the case, then it follows that I
am fully responsible. There may be other things
however for which I am not fully responsible. I
may not be fully responsible for having got into
that condition, and you can’t blame me for that.
So there are many points, I think, at which one
can raise the question of whether the person is
responsible and at each point the only question is:
is the person’s condition a condition that that
person freely and fully chose? If you ask why
they freely and fully chose it, you may find out
things such as those that Maureen described. And
that may lead you to say that there are certain
other things which they are not responsible for,
but I don’t think it’s a transitive matter. I don’t
think that if I’m not responsible for A and B
follows from A, it follows that I’m not respon-
sible for B. So, my general response is a rather
hardlined one, which I understand is difficult for
many people, including myself, to believe. But
___________________________________
the necessities of disinterested rational thought re-
quire that I adopt this conclusion that the his-
torical considerations are not relevant to the
evaluation of moral responsibility and the only
thing that’s relevant is the actual state of affairs
at the time of whatever action or condition it is
that’s at issue.
Sie: So that’s option (a): you believe that the
smoker is responsible, even if she doesn’t know
about the addictive effects of nicotine.
Frankfurt: She’s not responsible for having
become an addict, but she is responsible now for
what she is doing.
Sie: Regardless of whether she knows or not
what the effects of nicotine are?
Frankfurt: Well, perhaps this depends on the
details of the example. Of course ignorance is
always an excusing condition, an excusing cir-
cumstance: if I don’t know what I’m doing, then
you can’t hold me fully responsible for doing it
— although you might be able to hold me respon-
sible for not knowing. In this case, her unaware-
ness of the addiction was in the past. It’s not a
present consideration.
Sie: It is present. It’s still not clear that nic-
otine is addictive, for instance.
Frankfurt: And what is she doing now?
Sie: She decides that she really is a smoker
because she likes the cigarettes very much. This
can be regardless of whether you realize that you
are addicted or not. But if you say that ignorance
excuses, I can live with that, but I would say that
it’s a historic condition.
Frankfurt: No, because it’s her present igno-
rance, not her past ignorance.
Sie: Her present ignorance of her addiction?
Frankfurt: Her ignorance now, that she is now
addicted, is relevant. What she knew in the past
is not relevant.
Sie: So she isn’t really responsible then for
smoking.
Frankfurt: Perhaps not, as we’re now begin-
ning to describe.
Sie: Would you say that this allows a sort of
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 33
___________________________________
freedom condition into determining someone’s
moral responsibility? Her ignorance is an excuse
because she couldn’t do otherwise, and because
she couldn’t decide otherwise, her situation is not
transparent for her.
Frankfurt: Well I don’t say that it follows
from that that she couldn’t do otherwise; it just
means that she didn’t know what she was doing.
So you can’t hold her responsible for an action
she did not knowingly perform, although you
could hold her responsible for her ignorance if
she should have taken steps to correct her igno-
rance. See, my basic intuition about all this is that
what really counts is what the person wants to
do. That’s Hobbes’s and also Hume’s point. I
take it one step further and say it’s not only
necessary that persons do what they want to do,
but that the desire that leads them to do it is one
that they want to have. So they can’t say: “well,
it’s true that I had a desire to do this but the
desire was out of my control and I couldn’t help
myself and although I tried very hard to resist
nonetheless the impulse was too strong.” I want
to eliminate that possibility too. I want the person
to be wholehearted. If the person is wholehearted
in the action, let us say performs the action
because he wants to perform it and the desire to
perform it is a desire that he really wants to have
and there’s no reservation, there’s no imposition,
no passivity: the person is completely, fully,
wholeheartedly identified with what’s going on.
What more could there be? What more could you
want? That’s all the freedom that’s possible for
human beings to have, in my opinion. If they’re
not responsible then, they’re not responsible at
all. How they got into that condition, is another
matter. There are causes for everything. It’s not
only that your becoming addicted is caused, your
becoming unaddicted is also caused. Everything,
I suppose, has its causally sufficient conditions.
I’m inclined to think that as soon as you open the
door to this, you’re back in the classical dilemma
of determinism versus freedom, but I want to
avoid that.
___________________________________
Sie: And are you prepared to give up on the
intuition that someone who decisively identifies
in a situation that we would describe as ‘auto-
nomy undermining’ is as responsible as someone
who decides decisively in a normal situation?
Frankfurt: I do, with the provision that, as I
say, that person may be responsible for something
else; or may not be responsible — there may be
something else which the person is not respon-
sible for. I think that for criminal behaviour of a
certain kind, for example, we do not hold the
person responsible because, after all, they grew
up in terrible conditions and they were deprived
and abused as children and they were poor and
all that sort of thing. It seems to me that if those
conditions turned them into a monster, then they
are a monster, and you treat monsters in the way
monsters are to be treated. I don’t hold the person
responsible for becoming a monster: that was due
to circumstances that they didn’t choose, that they
perhaps would have wished to avoid.
Sie: So you would say: ‘he is a moral
monster’, but not ‘he’s morally responsible’.
Frankfurt: He’s not responsible for producing
a monster, he’s responsible for committing these
crimes. The people responsible for producing the
monster are those who produced the conditions
that led to the deformation of his character, and
all that. I agree that this is difficult because we
do have the very strong intuition: if you tell a
story about how badly this person was treated as
a child and all that sort of thing, that he is not
then responsible any more.
Let me put it a little bit differently: suppose I
have somebody who is a terrible person, just
awful, does terrible things and has terrible atti-
tudes, doesn’t just do them inadvertently or neg-
ligently, but deliberated. So we have a terrible,
harsh evaluation of this person. Then somebody
comes along and says: yes, but you shouldn’t be
so hard on this person, because if you knew
about what kind of life he’s had, you would
understand that it was inevitable and it’s
understandable and you would have come out the
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 34
___________________________________
same way. He was badly treated, he never had
any love, he was always punished for the most
trivial things and deprived in every sort of way
and therefore this makes the difference. My
thought is that the reason why we feel that this
makes a difference is because we have the idea
that this person doesn’t really want to be the way
he is, that he’s behaving in these ways and think-
ing in these ways and feeling in these ways, that
he doesn’t really identify fully with them, but
somehow circumstances have provided a powerful
impulse, an impulse that drives him in this direc-
tion against his will. So long as there is any
reason to think that it is against his will, I’m
prepared to say that he’s not fully responsible.
But I’m stipulating here that there is no such
reservation, I’m stipulating complete wholeheart-
edness: the person not only has these attitudes,
but wants to have these attitudes, thinks it’s a
wonderful thing to have these attitudes, has no
reservations at all, in no way does this person
feel that he’s being made to behave in ways that
he wishes he didn’t. He doesn’t say to himself: “I
know I’m a terrible person, but I can’t help
myself, I wish I could, but if you knew the kind
of life I’ve had, you would understand that de-
spite my best efforts I can’t resist the impulse to
behave in these despicable ways.” If I can say
that about him, then I can say: “yes, he’s not
fully responsible because he’s passive with
respect to this; he’s being forced to behave in
these ways; he’s not doing it because he really
wants to, but because he can’t help himself”. But
if we stipulate complete wholeheartedness —
which is a present condition and has nothing to
do with the past, it’s how he feels now — then
what accounts for the fact that he’s completely
wholehearted is no longer relevant. The only
important consideration is that he is doing exactly
what he wants to do and he’s totally satisfied
with doing this, he has no reservations at all:
there’s no basis for regarding him as wishing he
could help himself, wishing that he could do
something else, holding back and being forced.
___________________________________
Burms: I think that the difficulty which arises
from these examples, and other similar examples,
may have something to do with the difficulty of
making wholeheartedness absolutely precise. I do
not mean that the concept is vague, but that
wholeheartedness is a matter of degree. In that
sense it is very different from agent causality or
contra-causal freedom. Contra-causal freedom is
an all or nothing affair: the decision I made either
originated in contra-causal freedom or it did not
— there is no in-between. But there are degrees in
the way I identify myself with my decisions —
this is a matter of degree, and it is also a matter
of context. From things we learn about a person,
we will sometimes conclude that he was not
genuinely wholehearted in what he did. There
seems to be no end to this kind of investigation.
Frankfurt: Absolutely. People are extremely
complicated and elusive and deceptive. And it’s
almost impossible — perhaps it is impossible —
to know everything that a person wants or
whether the apparent wholeheartedness is genu-
ine. The person himself may think he’s
wholehearted about something and yet not know
for certain. So I agree entirely. If this were a
question of public policy, if we were trying to
decide how to conduct our judicial system or our
system of rewards and punishments, it would
really not be terribly useful to talk about
wholeheartedness because, as you said, we’d
never know; but as a philosophical matter it
seems to me that this is the relevant concept,
although the secrets of the human heart are very
difficult to uncover. What follows from this, I
think, is that one should be very reluctant to
attribute merit or the lack of merit of people,
because we don’t really know what’s going on
with them. Although my claim that the only thing
that counts is what happens now, what’s going on
now and the past is not relevant, may seem very
harsh, its harshness is mitigated by my conces-
sion of ignorance — that we don’t really know
how to apply these notions.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 35
___________________________________
Verhack: I sympathize with your argument
that in fact moral responsibility has to do with
what I would call ‘consent’. But there is a prob-
lem with so-called moral monsters, because it is
known that most of the time they lack moral
sense. But if they lack moral sense, that means
that they do not understand moral responsibility.
So what would be the consequence of that for
your argument?
Frankfurt: Yes, but it is the same condition
that accounts for the fact that animals don’t have
moral responsibility.
Verhack: But the problem isn’t there: there is
no consent, there is no wholeheartedness in the
case of the monster.
Frankfurt: But your description of him was
that he consented completely?
Verhack: Yes, but the monster is lacking what
we call moral conscience.
Frankfurt: I don’t see why that mitigates my
condemnation of him as morally responsible for
what he did. He has alternatives: he didn’t have
to do this. He just didn’t see any good reason not
to do it. It seems to me that somebody who
doesn’t see anything wrong with killing people
and who thinks that it’s perfectly all right not to
see anything wrong with killing people merits
condemnation. I don’t see why his lack of moral
sense has anything to do with it. That seems to
me to be giving him too much credit, as if he’s
some sort of cripple. He’s making his choices, he
fails to respond to aspects of human life that we
take seriously, he’s a bad person.
Verhack: Yes, but that means that in the past
the condition of his personality plays a role in the
moment of decision-making. To me the moment
of decision-making is important, that we should
have more understanding for these people.
Frankfurt: That is like somebody saying:
“don’t blame me for what I did because I’m
naturally a vicious person”. That’s not a very
good excuse.
___________________________________
V
Frankfurt on Care, Autonomy and the Self
Willem Lemmens
In his moral psychology, Prof. Frankfurt pays
special attention to two strongly related issues
which should be given pride of place in every
genuine account of human action and behaviour:
these issues are the problem of personal auton-
omy and what I would like to call the problem of
self-constitution. The first concerns the question
what it means to be a fully human, rational (or
reasonable) agent, i.e., someone who is account-
able for and in one way or another conscious of
what he does and desires; the second concerns the
question how human beings become selves or
persons with a particular identity, i.e., somebody
who is not only accountable for and conscious of
his or her own deeds, desires and preferences at a
given time, but also able to identify with his or
her personal life-history, as a through time related
structure of deeds, beliefs, volitions, preferences
and desires.
In the following, I shall first of all formulate a
rather free interpretation of the important and
penetrating reflections of Prof. Frankfurt on the
concept of care, which, as I understand it,
accounts for the interdependence of autonomy
and self-constitution. I shall then formulate a
critical reflection and some related questions,
more or less inspired by Charles Taylor’s inves-
tigations of the constitution of the self and the
problem of rational autonomy. As is well known,
Taylor has been partly influenced by Frankfurt’s
writings on these issues, but of course — and
that’s what my questions will be about — I leave
it to Prof. Frankfurt to determine how well
Taylor’s suggestive account of the constitution of
the authentic self fits the Frankfurtian descriptive
metaphysics of human mind and action.14
(1)In his various articles, Frankfurt has clearly
pointed out that the problem of personal auton-
omy is not the sort of problem we sometimes —
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 36
___________________________________
unhappily influenced by rationalistic philosophi-
cal traditions — think it to be. In conceiving of
the autonomy of a person or self he radically
challenges the traditional Cartesian and Kantian
picture of the free, rational agent. In Frankfurt’s
vision autonomy is not a function of contra-
causal freedom, but of what he calls ’volitional
necessity’. The autonomy of a person or self
depends, in other words, not at all on the devel-
opment — within the mental history of the self —
of a capacity for sovereign self-control and a
capability to act in accordance with self-imposed
decisions, inspired by some sort of all-en-
compassing ideal of rationality (be it the categori-
cal imperative or some maximization procedure
of rational choice theory). According to
Frankfurt, to become an autonomous person,
rather, means that one is able to internalize a
certain standard of reasonableness and to act in
accordance with this standard. This standard is
itself dependent on the hierarchization and struc-
turation of a person’s desires, passions, beliefs
and attitudes. The rational autonomy
(reasonableness) of a person then becomes a
function of the unity of what one could call a
person’s character:15 the reasonableness and ac-
countability of the self depends, in other words,
on the possibility to relate its actions to its inter-
nal volitional make-up.
I think there is a certain evolution in
Frankfurt’s conception of ‘volitional necessity’,
whereby the concept of care gradually replaces
and refines the characterization of volitional
necessity in terms of first-order and second-order
desires. The analysis of care integrates the
problem of autonomy and of self-constitution in
the following way.
In order to be an autonomous, rational self (in
the sense of ’reasonable’), it is not sufficient that
one is able to order one’s preferences and desires
by a more or less consciously induced process of
hierarchization and identification: one must also
develop a genuine identification with a set of
objects (values, persons, ideals), for which one
___________________________________
cares, i.e., which have for oneself an importance,
beyond the mere fact that they merely affect
one’s desires and feelings on some occasions. In
other words, it is only when the human being
sees himself as a self in relation to what he cares
about that this human being will be able to act in
a reasonable, i.e., accountable way, and in that
sense become a more or less autonomous person
or self.
Frankfurt describes accurately some main
conditions for genuine care. To care about ’x’
presupposes: agency and self-consciousness; a
certain degree of identification with ’x’; a certain
endurance of care through time (one cannot, in
normal circumstances, really care only for a cer-
tain moment, or quiet one’s care by decision);
genuine care for ’x’ relies on the capacity to care
for one’s caring, the object of care should have
some importance, etc.16
It seems then obvious how, in the Frankfurtian
moral psychology, the issue of autonomy
becomes related to that of self-constitution
through the analysis of care. For to be an autono-
mous, reasonable person one should be a self,
with a certain identifiable character, life-history
and volitional make-up. Autonomy presupposes
selfhood, and vice versa. The self who genuinly
cares — and acts, desires and believes in accord-
ance with its care — is a reasonable self. Insofar
as the self is reasonable, it identifies with its
volitional make-up as a more or less integrated
structure of beliefs, desires and attitudes. And in
the fluctuating circumstances of life, the self will
form desires, preferences and beliefs which in
one way or another are related to, and can only
be understood against the background of its
being-a-self.
(2) This somewhat sketchy and reconstructive
overview of what I understand to be Frankfurt’s
conception of the interdependence between the
issues of personal autonomy and self-constitution
brings me to my Taylor-inspired reflection and
questions.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 37
___________________________________
My reflection concerns the normative implica-
tions of Frankfurt’s view of the relation between
care and personal autonomy. As Frankfurt strong-
ly emphasizes, the constitutive role of care for
our lives as human beings is such that it often
“require[s] a person to submit to something which
is beyond his voluntary control and which may
be indifferent to his desires.”17
The person then becomes, in Frankfurt’s own
terms, somehow captivated by the object of his
care and concern. At the same time, however,
Frankfurt seems to suggest that a necessary con-
dition of this sense of ‘being captivated’ is the
very strength or power of our care as such. There
seems to be, then, a clear circularity in the struc-
ture of care, in so far as the importance of the
object of care (our values, ideals, personal com-
mitments) depends on the purely internal iden-
tification of the self with the various ‘objects’ of
care, while, at the same time, these objects should
have some value, independent of the very act of
identification to be of genuine importance.
This observation makes one wonder whether
Frankfurt’s description of the role of care for the
constitution of personal autonomy is complete.
More precisely, whether he should not give an
account of the conditions and structural context
that make it possible for the self to evaluate the
objects of its care in function of some ideal of
personal autonomy that is conceivable more or
less independently of the actual volitional make-
up and commitments of the self.
In this perspective Charles Taylor has clarified
in his moral psychology how the constitution of
the autonomous self relies on the following struc-
tural conditions. First of all, the self always is
situated in a web of strong evaluations, which it
shares with a socio-cultural community and which
functions as a sort of horizon of significance.
These strong evaluations ‘create’, so to speak, the
values, ideals and beliefs which together
constitute an external normative background for
the reciprocal recognition by the self and the
other of the value, importance or significance of
___________________________________
their life projects, commitments and engagements.
This condition explains, secondly, why the self
always, and necessarily, relies on its community
and social context to learn and explore gradually
what it can and should care for as being valuable,
captivating, significant. This explains, thirdly,
why the constitution of the autonomous self can
never be conceived of purely in terms of its inter-
nal volitional make-up. This socio-constructive
view of the self explains why Taylor prefers to
speak of authenticity as a sort of ideal of self-
constitution, for according to him the concept of
autonomy reminds us still too much of the Kan-
tian or Cartesian concept of rational agency and
practical rationality.
I have, then, three rather obvious and general
questions for Prof. Frankfurt.
1. How far can you agree with the idea that in
order to explain how the self develops its care
and commitment in a genuine way, one should
take into consideration the role of social interac-
tion and of culturally developed ‘horizons of
significance’ in the constitution of this care?
2. If Taylor rightly emphasizes that the authen-
ticity or autonomy of the self necessarily depends
on the socio-cultural constitution of the capacity
to care, can one still develop a notion of rational-
ity or reasonableness that is culture-free and inde-
pendent of the horizon(s) of significance towards
which the self always has some orientation?
3. Is, according to you, your conceptual analy-
sis of the issues of personal autonomy and self-
constitution compatible with Taylor’s more
hermeneutical approach to these issues? If so,
could you explain in which way?
Frankfurt: I may say that I am actually going to
be discussing some of these matters in the talk
that I’m planning to give later today, but let me
nonetheless try to say something about them now.
I think that the most fundamental condition that
has to be satisfied by any object of care, is that
the person must be capable of caring about it.
And so one of the things that we consider, and
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 38
___________________________________
must consider, in evaluating the appropriateness
or the desirability of caring for something, is
whether it will in fact be possible for us to care
about it. This possibility in turn depends upon a
variety of considerations. What I am capable of
caring about, will depend partly on my own in-
herent nature, but also partly upon my responses
or dispositions to respond to other circumstances.
To care about something is quite risky: it
involves a self-definition and a commitment and
orientation, which makes one vulnerable in cer-
tain ways. If you take one of the paradigm cases
of caring — love — then it’s a matter of common
knowledge that to love someone, or to love some-
thing, is to make oneself vulnerable to various
kinds of disappointment and anxiety and other
forms of harm. So, in evaluating possible objects
of care, we want to take into account what harm
may come to us if we care for them. Part of the
harm may be in the attitudes of other people, who
see us caring about whatever it is. And in this
way, social and cultural norms play a role in
determining, or in conditioning at least, our
evaluation of possible objects of care. I would be
inclined to say that the most important con-
sideration is the first one I mentioned — what it’s
possible for us to care about — and that the other
kinds of things — the attitudes, how other people
are going to behave towards us, what people will
think of us, how we will be treated in the society
— are only important insofar as they bear upon
our capacity to care and to continue caring about
whatever the object is.
There’s another major dimension or parameter
here: not all caring is the same. Caring about one
thing may be quite different than caring about an
other. Some caring is rather shallow, superficial,
limited in its importance in our lives. Caring
about other things is complex and mobilizes a
variety of aspects of our nature. So we want, I
think, in choosing — insofar as we have any
choice of what to care about — and in evaluating
the objects of care, to determine not only what
we are capable of caring about but what we are
___________________________________
capable of caring about in such a way as to bring
out the best in us, where by ‘the best in us’ I
don’t mean what is morally best in us, but what
is most invigorating, what makes our lives most
full of vitality and satisfaction.
You noticed that I have been emphasizing as
the considerations that bear upon the evaluation
of the object — the considerations that I’ve been
mentioning — have nothing much to do with the
inherent character of the object. It’s not the value
of the object that’s at issue here. It’s the value of
the caring that I am evaluating. The judgement
that I’m making is: what will it be like to care
about this? That, it seems to me, is the basic
question: we’re choosing really a way of living,
and the characteristics of the object are relevant
to us only insofar as they bear upon that, rather
than relevant in their own right, independently of
what effect it will have on us to make one choice
rather than another.
Lemmens: But then wouldn’t Taylor respond
that in fact we don’t really choose, we don’t
always have very much choice in what we care
about? I mean, you give us a picture of the self
which is after all in some ways still Cartesian.
For example, you say that before we start to care,
we consider if it’s not too risky to care about
someone or some value.
Frankfurt: I think we have some choice or
some influence. To go back to the example I used
earlier this morning: if you consider an adoles-
cent, who is trying to evaluate various ways of
life, various careers, various ideals. Generally, at
some stage he’s still capable of exercising a cer-
tain amount of control over which way he goes.
He may be swept off his feet by some marvelous
image that sort of compels his devotion, but that
doesn’t happen all the time, and even in matters
of love for another person, there’s usually a cer-
tain stage at the beginning of a relationship where
you have a certain amount of control over
whether you want to allow it to go further or
whether you want to encourage it or whether you
want to discourage it and take steps to see to it
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 39
___________________________________
that it doesn’t develop. So although I don’t think
it’s a matter of free choice, I think we do have or
may have a certain degree of influence over what
we care about.
Lemmens: Well, one should certainly distin-
guish different sorts of care. If I understood Tay-
lor well, there are some modalities of care which
are so basic for the constitution of the self that
we can’t think of them in terms of decisions or
choices. They constitute who we are, and in that
constitution we depend on the social cultural
context which in fact induces in us these objects
of care. And it’s only when there is a sort of
objective order outside our capacity to decide and
to make choices that the self gets constituted.
Without such a more or less objective order
standing outside us, there wouldn’t be care at all,
because there wouldn’t be a really constituted
self. And my question is in how far your analysis
of care emphasizes enough this interconnection
between the constitution of the self as a real, full
person and care.
Frankfurt: I guess I am less inclined than
Taylor to put so much emphasis on the social
determinants of the self. I certainly wouldn’t deny
that they play an important role, but it seems to
me that the most fundamental aspects of self-
constitution have to do with what I might even
call the metaphysical necessities that characterize
human life. These are rather independent of social
and cultural conditions like the desire for self-
preservation and various characteristics of human
nature which are not generated by social and
cultural conditions. But as I said in another con-
text: people vary in the extent to which they are
constituted by their social environments. Perhaps
most people are almost to a very considerable
degree inescapably shaped; others somehow are
freer and can shape themselves or allow themsel-
ves to be shaped by other considerations. So for
this reason I think it’s partly a matter of interest,
not a matter of disagreement exactly. For this
reason I’m less interested in the social and cul-
tural determinants than I am in more universal
___________________________________
and metaphysical aspects of the formation of
human identity.
Desmond: Suppose that our interest in the
relation to the other wasn’t just to find it as a
cultural characteristic. Suppose that things that we
come to care for are things that already have been
cared for by others and our care in some way
only takes shape because we already exist in a
community of care, so that it’s impossible to
think of our care as apart from evaluations of
others.
Frankfurt: Why do you say it’s impossible?
Desmond: Because we couldn’t be the kind of
beings we are without already being given to
ourselves in some way by our relation with
others. We become ourselves only because we are
already enabled to be ourselves with others.
Frankfurt: I see that as more contingent.
Desmond: I can’t see how it could be other-
wise: it’s a necessity. If it were contingent, we
somehow could be ourselves without our being in
relation to others.
Frankfurt: Well we can’t be ourselves without
being in relation to something. But is it really
inconceivable as a matter of conceptual imagina-
tion, that a person should grow in isolation from
others and nevertheless develop, in the course of
his encounters with the world and his efforts to
stay alive, some sort of identity? Is that concep-
tually ruled out? Is it really only by social
interaction that this can possibly happen? I don’t
see that. That is, of course, not only the normal
way but almost, probably, the universal way; but
it seems to me to be a contingent fact that this is
the way it happens, because we do grow up in
societies and we couldn’t in fact survive without
it because we need our parents, we need others to
feed us and to take care of us and so forth. But it
seems to me that one can conceive it happening
in another way, that this is not a necessary fact.
Desmond: It strikes me that we would be in a
totally different universe and even that we would
be the universe, if that was the case. I mean we
might be the wolf child on the one hand, or
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 40
___________________________________
Robinson Crusoe on the other hand; but like
Robinson Crusoe, we’re not absolutely solitary,
because when we arrive on the desert island, we
already have the cares of previous lives with us
and hence our caring alone will not be caring
alone. If we’re wolf children, we are in between
being animals and the promise of being human —
a promise which is precisely not redeemed
because what we care about has not been shown
to us by the cares of others.
Frankfurt: It’s certainly true that we are taught
how to care and we are taught what to care
about, but I still don’t see that this is a metaphys-
ical necessity. And I’m not really interested in
doing sociology or that sort of thing. I really am
interested in the metaphysical aspects of human
nature and I just don’t see that the fact that we
are taught how to care and what to care for is a
metaphysically necessary fact.
Desmond: Well if you put it this way: suppose
that it is a metaphysical necessity that for us to
be related to ourselves in a certain way, we must
already be in relation to others.
Frankfurt: To other people?
Desmond: As it turns out, yes.
Frankfurt: What do you mean: ‘as it turns
out’? You’re making it sound contingent.
Desmond: Well, I think it’s all contingent in
one sense; it’s all happening.
Frankfurt: I agree that people would be very
different if they grew up in isolation.
Lemmens: But would they still care? I don’t
think Taylor is just putting forward a sort of
sociology of self-constitution. I think for him
there is a sort of metaphysical necessity in caring,
that it is constituted by, let’s say, the relation to
the other.
Frankfurt: You know, I resist this partly
because of what I said earlier today: I am deeply
suspicious of the overmoralization of metaphys-
ics, and this seems to me to be coming from that
direction. You want to build social relationships
into the nature of man so that you can prove that
we have to take other people seriously, and we
___________________________________
have to learn how to get along with them.
Lemmens: I don’t think you should interpret
that in a moral way, necessarily. For example,
you can imagine somebody becoming fascinated
and captivated by the image of let’s say a crimi-
nal — I mean, someone who is appealed by, let’s
say, the image of Al Capone.
Frankfurt: But there seems to be an assump-
tion that it’s only relationships to human others
that can do this job. I certainly agree that it is
essential that we have relationships to others, to
something other than ourselves. We have to come
up against reality, we have to come up against
something that’s not subject to our will, some-
thing that we encounter as resistent, and people
do provide that, no question about that. But I
don’t see that it’s only people who provide it. I
don’t see that it’s a necessary truth.
Desmond: I don’t think it’s only people, but if
there weren’t people we wouldn’t be able to
really care about other things, it seems to me.
Frankfurt: And what is the basis for saying
that?
Desmond: Well, it’s perhaps a different moral
psychology, if you want to put it that way. I
don’t think that we should moralize what it
means to be a self. It’s really a question of the
nature of what it means to be a self. Are we
selves through ourselves alone? Does it even
make sense to us, a question like that? It seems
to me it doesn’t really make sense to ask a ques-
tion like that, which doesn’t mean we can’t be in
some relative sense self-defined. But the character
of a wrong self-definition seems to be inseparable
from very complex forms of relativity to others.
These others can be natural others in a non-
human sense or they can be human others, but I
think that in fact the human other plays a signifi-
cance which is more fundamental than natural
others, in this sense that we couldn’t fully relate
to natural others unless human others in some
sense mediate that relation. You can think here of
the wolf child: a human other in one sense medi-
ates the promise of language that the human
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 41
___________________________________
being possesses but which won’t be fully realized
without speech with an other. Hence, the speech
with the other allows the child to name things in
a manner that is impossible if it’s company con-
sists only of wolves.
Frankfurt: Well you say it’s impossible, I
don’t know if it’s impossible. I’m not sure that
speech is possible only when other people are
talking to or other people are listening to the
child. In any case, that’s an empirical claim. I
don’t see that it is in any way conceptually or
metaphysically necessary that human beings
develop language only in connection with other
human beings. Maybe they would start talking to
themselves.
I thought that we were going to agree at one
point, because you said “the other doesn’t have to
be human”, and then I thought “well, that’s all I
want you to say”, but then you said that the rela-
tionship to the non-human other is only possible
through the human other. It’s at that point that I
begin to feel that you’re making claims which,
although they are undoubtedly true as a matter of
empirical fact, don’t reveal the metaphysical
necessities of human identity.
Desmond: Let me put it this way: a human
relation to the non-human other seems to be
mediated by the relation between a human and
another human. There are relations between us
and non-human others, but those relations, if they
do not in some way pass through our relation to
other humans, remain the same as the animals.
Almost everything that you said actually presup-
poses that mediation through the human other,
but we conveniently forget it, because we have
become ourselves already.
Frankfurt: Although I wouldn’t for a moment
think of denying that what you say is true as a
matter of fact, I don’t see how to derive its
necessity. I don’t see any basis for regarding it as
a philosophical truth rather than a biological
truth.
Desmond: Surely you want to ask: “where do
we find ourselves?” So you have to have a sense
___________________________________
of what actually is happening, and then you ask
yourself: “what are the necessities that define this
happening?” That strikes me as the search for
concrete necessities rather than the envisagement
of potential abstract necessities. You can, perhaps
if you have imagination, envisage some scenarios
of abstract necessity, but it seems to me that in
the case of the human being, we cannot really
think others out of the picture. It cannot be done,
because if you do it, you already presupposed
what you thought out of the picture. In a certain
sense, it’s like the old problem of thinking cre-
ation ex nihilo. You can’t get back to the nihil.
Frankfurt: Since I am in Belgium, I must say
that I see a connection between what you just
said and a wonderful remark by Siger of Brabant,
when he spoke about creation ex nihilo: he said
‘it only happened once, and it was a long time
ago’.
Desmond: I’m wondering from what moment
in the development of a human being would you
say that recognition is not important anymore;
because of course I think you should admit that
for a child love is very important. When this love
is not there, the child is not able to develop nor-
mally, loses self-confidence, basic trust and will
is missing. If you say that there is a certain point
where a human being can exist without recog-
nition of other people, what basic structure of the
human being does this reveal? If you admit that it
is for a child very important, then why would you
suggest that the basic forms of recognition, in
terms of respect, are suddenly not important
anymore for the identity of the human being. My
point is: if it’s so important for a child — and
everyone agrees on that — then why would you
imply that at a certain point the recognition is not
important anymore?
Frankfurt: Well, I can think of an answer that
says the love that the child gets enables the child
to become strong enough to do without it, grows
out of the need. There are other needs that the
child no longer has as an adult, maybe this is one
of them. But it occurred to me, as you were
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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 42
___________________________________
formulating your remarks, that I have a prejudice
that I can’t really defend (although I’m not sure
that people who don’t have the prejudice could
defend that they don’t have it). I grew up, intel-
lectually, in the tradition of radical individualism,
from whose point of view society is a construct,
and the primary reality is the individual and the
individual is fully formed in some sense prior to
his relationships with other individuals, whereas
perhaps you don’t accept the conception of the
individual as a primary reality. For you, primary
reality is something like the individual in society,
or something like that. And that’s really what we
were talking about before and I think that’s what
comes up again in the kind of point that you
were making. I don’t know how to adjudicate
that: I mean we compared intuitions and
imaginations, but it’s very difficult to find a
position from which to judge which is true. I
don’t know whether it is a substantive question or
a methodological issue or even how to confront
it. It’s certainly true that philosophy in recent
years has rejected by force the radical in-
dividualism to which somebody likes Hobbes was
committed. Fully formed, self-sufficient, self-
intelligible individuals confronted with this exter-
nal reality other people have to figure out what to
do with this foreign, alien reality, totally separate
from themselves. Your conception is that that
separation is unreal, that there is no genuine
conception of the individual apart from the social
relationships. Is that right?
Desmond: Well, I have my hesitations about
the more communitarian alternative where the self
is nothing apart from the network of relations
defining it, with others. That tends to be a reac-
tion to individualism’s insistence on the self apart
from social relations. I suspect that we are
singulars in a strong sense but that there is a sort
of formlessness about the self that is shaped in
relation with others. Normally when we are
strong individuals, we forget the network that
supports the shaping of the self.
Frankfurt: It appears to me that I am not only
___________________________________ ___________________________________

in Belgium, but in a Catholic university and that
the kind of view that I had been expressing seems
to me to be much closer to classical religious
conceptions of human life, where, first of all,
God created an individual man. He didn’t create a
society, and, to be sure, he created a second per-
son, but that was just because of the contingent
fact that the first person might be lonely and
might need help and so forth. But the first person
was completely formed: Adam was a man al-
ready, a human being. And the discovery of my
own reality in the religious tradition is the dis-
covery of my reality in relation to the other as
God and the world; it’s not other people par-
ticularly — they are relationships where people
become important only derivatively.

Notes

1. Harry G. FRANKFURT, The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1988, p. viii.
Further references to this volume (Importance) will be given parenthetically.
2. “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking
about.” Importance, p. 132. As is the case in a situation where the interlocutors are not in immediate possession of
all the necessary detail to properly address a difficult philosophical issue. Especially when it is likely that at the end
of the day no such detail may be available in the first place.
3. Harry FRANKFURT, ‘On the Usefulness of Final Ends’ in Iyyun, The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly
41(1992)January 3-19, p. 15-16.
4. Ibid, p. 17.
5. We do encounter the willing addict (e.g. Importance, p. 24) — but, importantly, his addiction is his own business.
6. Harry FRANKFURT, ‘On the Necessity of Ideals’ in Gil G. NOAM and Thomas E. WREN (Eds.), The Moral Self.
Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993, 16-27, p. 26.
7. As reported in a column by Robert Fulford in the Globe and Mail for April 9, 1997.
8. N. NODDINGS, Caring. A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1984, p. 49-50.
9. 1953, II, p. 222.
10. Harry G. FRANKFURT, ‘Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’ in Journal of Philosophy 66(1969)23.
11. Harry G. FRANKFURT, ‘Identification and Externality’ in A. RORTY (ed.), The Identities of Persons, University
of California Press, 1976; Harry G. FRANKFURT, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’ in F.D. SCHOEMAN (ed.),
Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
12. S. WOLF, Freedom within Reason. New York, Oxford University Press, 1990.
13. R.J. WALLACE, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 172-173.
14. For Taylor’s explicit references to Frankfurt, cf. Charles TAYLOR, Philosophical Papers, Volume I. Cambridge,
CUP, 1985. 15-44, p. 66. For a general typology of Taylor’s and Frankfurt’s vision on autonomy and self-constitu-
tion in the perspective of Anglo-American Moral Psychology, cf.: Stefaan CUYPERS. ‘Taylors conceptie van per-
soonlijke autonomie in de morele psychologie’ in Stefaan CUYPERS en Willem LEMMENS (eds.), Charles Taylor.
Een mozaïek van zijn denken. Kapellen - Kampen, Pelckmans - Kok Agora, 1997, p. 67-82.
15. As far as I know, this concept of a character doesn’t get a major role in Frankfurt’s anthropology: but I think it
fits well his hierarchical conception of the will.
16. Cf. H. FRANKFURT, The Importance of What We Care About, Ch. 7. Frankfurt seems to suggest strongly that to
‘care about caring’ is constitutive of the enduring commitments human beings devote themselves to; commitments
which determine, in their turn, the life-history of the self.
17. Ibid., p. 89.

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Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998)1, p. 43