The difference between doing what you want and having free will
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt argued that free will is not just doing what you want, but wanting what you want. He distinguished first-order desires (a craving to smoke) from second-order desires (the reflective desire to not want that craving). An unwilling addict who desperately wants to quit still acts on their addiction, but lacks free will because their first-order urge overpowers their second-order volition. True autonomy requires alignment between your reflective self and your desires.
The Limits of Classical Freedom
For centuries, classical compatibilist thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume described human freedom in straightforward terms: freedom of action means having the power or ability to do what one decides to do without external physical restraint. If you want to leave a room and the door is unlocked, you walk out freely. If the door is locked from the outside, your liberty is obstructed. Under this simple model, freedom is entirely a matter of whether your outer movements can execute your inner desires.
While this framework captures physical liberty, it struggles to account for internal psychological compulsions. A person suffering from severe addiction, obsessive-compulsive impulses, or acute phobias might be completely free from handcuffs, locked doors, or state coercion. Yet, intuitively, such an individual is not acting as a fully free agent. They may walk to the store and purchase a substance without anyone physically forcing them, while simultaneously feeling entirely enslaved by the impulse moving them to act. Classical compatibilism could not easily differentiate between a voluntary choice and an unfree, compulsive urge.
First-Order Desires and Second-Order Volitions
In his seminal 1971 paper, philosopher Harry Frankfurt addressed this gap by introducing a hierarchical model of human desire. Frankfurt observed that human psychology is not a flat landscape of competing urges where the strongest urge simply wins. Instead, humans possess the distinctive capacity for reflective self-evaluation: we can think about our desires and form preferences about them. Frankfurt termed basic appetites and motivations—such as the urge to eat, sleep, work, or smoke—first-order desires.
Beyond first-order desires, humans can form second-order desires, which are desires about desires. For example, a physician treating patients might wish they felt more sympathy, wanting to have a desire to comfort others. Frankfurt drew a crucial distinction between merely wanting to experience a particular desire and wanting that desire to become one's actual will—the desire that effectively moves the person all the way to action. He called this specific subset of higher-order desires second-order volitions.
Frankfurt argued that having second-order volitions is essential to the concept of personhood. Non-human animals and human agents acting without reflective concern—whom Frankfurt classified as 'wantons'—may have first-order desires that drive their behavior, but they do not care about which desires move them. A wanton simply acts on whichever urge happens to be strongest. A person, by contrast, cares about their own will and forms judgments about which desires they wish to endorse.
The Unwilling Addict and Internal Alienation
Frankfurt illustrated the mechanism of free will using the famous thought experiment of the unwilling addict. Imagine an individual who experiences an overwhelming first-order physiological craving for a narcotic, but who simultaneously possesses a clear second-order volition: they reflectively desire that this craving not be their will. When the craving inevitably overpowers their resolve, the unwilling addict consumes the drug. Although they act in accordance with a first-order desire, they lack freedom of the will because their effective will diverges from their second-order volition.
To highlight the distinction, Frankfurt contrasted the unwilling addict with a willing addict. The willing addict has the same physiological dependence and first-order craving, but upon reflection, fully endorses it. They want their craving to be their effective will; if the craving subsided, they would actively seek to rekindle it. When the willing addict takes the drug, their effective desire matches their higher-order volition. For Frankfurt, the willing addict exercises free will in a way the unwilling addict cannot, because their action stems from a desire with which they wholeheartedly identify.
In Frankfurt's model, free will is not merely the ability to do what one wants, but the structural alignment between one's second-order volitions and the first-order desires that guide behavior. When an agent successfully secures the will they want to have, they possess freedom of the will. When an internal compulsion prevents this alignment, the agent is alienated from their own actions.
Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility
Frankfurt's analysis of the will deeply influenced debates over moral responsibility. A long-standing assumption in philosophy, known as the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, held that a person is morally responsible for an action only if they could have done otherwise. In a famous 1969 paper, Frankfurt challenged this principle using hypothetical scenarios where an agent is unable to avoid performing an action, yet remains morally responsible for it.
In standard Frankfurt-style cases, an agent decides on their own to commit an act for their own reasons. Unknown to them, a third party with monitoring capabilities stands ready to intervene and force the act if the agent shows any sign of hesitating. Because the agent proceeds entirely on their own internal volition, the intervener never steps in. Frankfurt pointed out that although the agent could not actually have done otherwise, their responsibility remains intact because their internal reasons, rather than the hidden constraint, brought about the choice.
This insight detached moral responsibility from the necessity of alternate open paths. It reinforced Frankfurt’s hierarchical framework: what matters for agency is not the presence of metaphysical alternatives, but the internal mesh between an agent's reflective endorsements and the desires that genuinely produce their conduct.
The Regress Problem and External Manipulation
Frankfurt's hierarchical theory, while widely influential, provoked substantial philosophical challenges. One primary criticism is the problem of infinite regress. Critics asked: if a first-order desire requires endorsement by a second-order volition to count as free, what makes the second-order volition authoritative? Does it not require a third-order desire to endorse it, and a fourth-order desire to validate that one? Frankfurt attempted to solve this by appealing to 'wholeheartedness' and decisive commitment, where reflection terminates naturally without further doubt, but critics argued this felt ad hoc.
Another influential critique came from philosopher Gary Watson, who argued that Frankfurt merely posited higher levels of desire without explaining why higher-order desires represent the 'true self.' Watson suggested that desires at any level are still just appetites, and proposed instead that free agency requires alignment between an agent's desires and their evaluative judgments or value systems—what they judge to be good or right, rather than just what they desire.
Additionally, compatibilist theories face the challenge of manipulation. If a neuroscientist or an authoritarian regime secretly brainwashes an individual so that their second-order volitions perfectly endorse their implanted first-order urges, the internal hierarchy appears aligned. Yet most would hesitate to call such a manipulated agent free. This led subsequent philosophers to argue that a complete account of autonomy must examine not only the internal structure of desires, but also the historical process by which those desires were acquired.
The Legacy of Frankfurt’s Mesh Theory
Despite these debates, Frankfurt's work fundamentally reshaped compatibilism by shifting the focus from physical liberty to psychological architecture. His approach gave rise to a family of contemporary views often called 'mesh theories,' which define free agency by the internal harmony among an agent’s cognitive elements—whether between desires and higher-order desires, or between desires and evaluative judgments.
The hierarchical model also provided a valuable vocabulary for practical disciplines outside pure philosophy. In psychology, psychiatry, and bioethics, Frankfurt’s distinction clarifies how individuals can feel estranged from their own impulses during severe psychological distress. By showing that agency involves reflectively endorsing the motives behind one's actions, Frankfurt demonstrated that freedom is fundamentally a question of self-governance and internal coherence.
Key takeaways
•Classical compatibilism defined freedom merely as acting without external physical restraint, failing to explain internal compulsions like addiction or phobias.
•Harry Frankfurt introduced a hierarchical model distinguishing first-order desires (basic urges) from second-order volitions (reflectively wanting a desire to be one's effective will).
•An unwilling addict lacks free will because their overpowering first-order craving contradicts their second-order volition, causing alienation from their own actions.
•Frankfurt's framework challenged the assumption that moral responsibility requires alternate possibilities, arguing instead that internal alignment and endorsement are what matter.