Freedom and Weakness of Will

Can absolute freedom of will be defended by arguing that apparent cases of diminished freedom when we act out of passion are cases of weakness of will? Rogers Albritton thought so. What is intriguing about Albritton’s view is that he thought when we act from desire we are making choices, yet our desires are not functioning as reasons for those choices. So our desires must be influencing our choices in some other unspecified way that does not diminish our freedom. I challenge the coherence of this position. My strategy is to examine the views of leading theorists of the will – Descartes, Aquinas and Reid – to argue that the only clear way in which passions can influence our choices so that we can accurately be described as weak-willed and yet nevertheless free is that our passions influence our choices by providing reasons for them. In defending what he took to be Descartes’s view that we have absolute freedom of will, Rogers Albritton in his 1985 APA Presidential Address seemed to suggest that the most troubling sorts of cases for him are those in which our behavior is ‘from desire, out of fear, on impulse and so on.’ In other words, what Descartes called the passions of the soul are what Albritton took to be the biggest threat to the thesis that we have absolute freedom of will. How could our will remain absolutely free when we act out of fear? Albritton’s first step in defending the view that even the passions do not diminish the will’s absolute freedom was to distinguish between acting from one’s desires and acting in view of one’s desires. When we act in view of one of our passions, the passion is playing the role of providing us with a reason for acting in the same way someone else’s desires might give us a reason for acting. Albritton argued that since reasons don’t have the power 1 See Rogers Albritton, ‘Freedom of the Will and Freedom of Action’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 59 (1985) p. 248: ‘I don’t see unfreedom of will even in this most promising part of the forest.’ 2 Ibid. © 2008 The Author Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Ratio (new series) XXI 1 March 2008 0034–0006 to diminish our freedom of will, when we act in view of one of our passions our freedom of will is not diminished. But he thought it is rare that passions are playing only the role of providing reasons for action. Usually when passions play a role in our behavior, we are acting from passion. What happens when we act from passion? One possibility Albritton considered is that we are not really acting at all. Acting from passion is like a seizure or like being thrown violently into bed or being chained up. The idea here, as I understand it, is that the will is bypassed. We aren’t making a choice. But Albritton apparently believed that this possibility does not explain all or even perhaps most of the instances when we act from passion. He seemed to think instead that in most cases, or at least in the cases most troubling for the thesis that we have absolute freedom of will, when we act from passion we are making a choice. The passion is not bypassing the will but rather, and this is my language not his, operating through the will. After introducing the notion of acting ‘from desire, out of fear, on impulse, and so on’ and mentioning the possibility that such cases are like seizures in which we are not acting, Albritton proceeded to consider cases, focusing primarily on alcoholism, that he said were neither like seizures nor fully automatic. So these are cases in which the will is not bypassed, yet also apparently cases in which the agent is not acting merely in view of her desire. Albritton did not explicitly state that the three cases he mentioned – addiction, alcoholism, and child molesting – are cases of acting from passion, but the flow of the discussion strongly suggests that he thought they were. However, even if he would have denied that addiction, alcoholism, and child molesting are cases of acting from passion, the main point is that he thought they are cases in 3 Ibid., pp. 246–248. 4 Ibid., p. 248: ‘Acting from desire is quite another and commoner thing. Indeed pure cases of acting in consideration of a (felt) desire must be rare at best.’ 5 Ibid. 6 This is something I had misunderstood before. I claimed in ‘Strength and Freedom of Will: Descartes and Albritton’, Philosophical Studies, 77 (1995), pp. 249–250, that Albritton thought all cases of acting from passion were cases in which choice is bypasssed. 7 Albritton, p. 249. 8 My earlier failure to recognize that Albritton thought that when we act from passion we are often making a choice was based on my failure to see that his discussion of alcoholism is a continuation of his discussion of acting from passion. I thought before that he was bringing up the cases of addiction, alcoholism, and child molesting as a different set of cases. FREEDOM AND WEAKNESS OF WILL 43