Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

 
7.4. 
Free will and free action
7.4.1. Introduction 
In response to the God Machine thought experiment, as well as Savulescu and 
Persson’s proposals for MB via emotion modulation, Harris raised concerns about 
the negative impact of MB on freedom. Harris writes: ‘[t]he space between 
knowing the good and doing the good is a region entirely inhabited by freedom. 
Knowledge of the good is sufficiency to have stood, but freedom to fall is all. 
Without the freedom to fall, good cannot be a choice; and freedom disappears and 
along with it virtue.’ (2011, p. 104).
In the following two sections I am going to argue for the modest claim that 
‘freedom to fall,’ in the sense of free will and action is not 
all
that is important 
about freedom as it is relevant to moral responsibility. Firstly, I will apply the 
Frankfurtian distinction between free will, free action and free will of one’s own to 
the analysis of the God Machine and similar cases. I suggest that the God Machine 
undermines something very important – the ability to form a will of our own. It 
may also undermine free will and freedom of action, but those impacts are 
secondary and follow from the ‘upstream’ intervention.
7.4.2. Frankfurt on free will and free action
Let us first draw upon Frankfurt’s distinction between acting freely and freedom to 
do otherwise. An agent acts freely, according to Frankfurt, when her action issues 
from her own (properly functioning) volitions unimpeded by external impacts. 
‘Will,’ according to Frankfurt, refers to the first order desires that are 

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motivationally effective
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, that is, desires that have motivated, are motivating, or 
will motivate an agent to act and are followed:
‘To identify an agent’s will is either to identify the desire (or desires) by 
which he is motivated in some action he performs or to identify the desire (or 
desires) by which he will or would be motivated when or if he acts.’ 
(Frankfurt, 1971, p. 325)
Further, Frankfurt proposes 
that what matters for ‘free 
will’, are not second-order 
desires 
but 
second-order 
volitions. 
Second 
order 
volition refers to what first 
order desire an agent wants to 
make motivationally effective, 
that is a will to make a certain 
desire be an actual motivating 
force for a subsequent action. 
In his 
Free Will and the Concept of Person
, he develops the concept of a 
wanton
. 
Wantons are creatures that have first order desires, and may even have second-order 
desires (desires to have or not to have certain first order desires), however, they 
lack second order volitions. Wantons are indifferent as to which first order desire 
will move them to act, they have a will (the effective first order desire) that is their 
own and if nothing comes in the way of their action, they may act freely on their 
own will. They do not, however, have ‘free will’.
In contrast, persons have second-order volitions. They may be able to make their 
second order volition have the effect of making some desires motivationally 
effective. In those cases and when the second order volition arises in an appropriate 
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Frankfurt uses the idea of making desires ‘effective’ in the sense of their giving rise to a 
motivation that will move an agent to act. The actions themselves may be effective or not 
in the sense of being able to effectively change the outside world to have the desire 
satisfied. To avoid confusion I will use the term ‘internally effective’ where Frankfurt uses 
the term ‘effective’.

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way, the person can be said to have their 
own free will
. However, we can bring up 
many examples when peoples’ second order volitions do not translate into which 
one of their first order desires is motivationally effective (e.g. an unwilling addict). 
Those cases can be described as an instance of weakness of the will or akrasia 
(Davidson, 1970, pp. 21-42).