Harry Frankfurt — Free Will, Second-Order Volitions, Bullshit, and the Sufficiency of Enough (1929–2023)

Harry Frankfurt was an American moral philosopher who spent five decades producing some of the most elegant, most technically precise, and most practically illuminating work in analytic philosophy — and who, at the age of seventy-six, became an unlikely bestseller when Princeton University Press published as a book a thirty-year-old essay on bullshit that turned out to explain something essential about the age we were living in.

A professor at Rockefeller, Yale, and finally Princeton, whose major areas were moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and seventeenth-century rationalism, he was the kind of philosopher who worked at high technical levels while never losing sight of the questions that actually mattered to ordinary people — about freedom, responsibility, love, and truth.

His central concern, across the whole of his career: the structure of human agency — what it means to have a will, to care about something, to act freely, to be responsible for what one does — and the conditions under which these achievements are possible or are undermined.

Frankfurt Cases — Against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities

Frankfurt's most technically influential contribution to philosophy came in a 1969 paper that challenged an assumption so deeply embedded in the literature on free will that it had barely been questioned: the principle that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise.

Frankfurt described a class of thought experiments — now called Frankfurt cases — in which a person makes a choice entirely of their own accord, but an observer with the ability to intervene has arranged things so that if the person had been about to choose differently, the observer would have stepped in and ensured the original choice was made anyway. In such a case, the person could not have done otherwise — the alternative was blocked — and yet it seems clear that they are fully responsible for what they actually did, since the observer never needed to intervene.

The conclusion Frankfurt drew was that moral responsibility depended not on whether one could have done otherwise but on the actual causal and motivational history of the action — on whether one acted from one's own reasons and desires, not under external compulsion or manipulation. This shifted the free will debate in ways that are still being worked out — providing compatibilists with a powerful argument that determinism, even if true, would not threaten the kind of freedom that responsibility requires.

"What we are morally responsible for is not determined by what we could have done, but by what we actually did and the reasons for which we did it."

Second-Order Volitions — Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person

Frankfurt's 1971 paper "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" developed one of the most influential accounts of personal agency in the history of analytic philosophy — one that distinguished persons from mere wantons through the structure of their will.

Wantons, on Frankfurt's account, have desires — they want things and act on those wants — but they do not have desires about their desires. They do not care which of their desires moves them to action. Persons, by contrast, have second-order volitions — they not only have desires but have views about which desires they want to be effective, about which desires they want to constitute their will. A person who wants to stop smoking has a first-order desire (to smoke) and a second-order volition (to not be moved by that desire). Their freedom consists in the alignment or misalignment between their will as it actually is and their will as they want it to be.

This framework gave analytic philosophy a way of talking about authenticity and self-determination that was both philosophically precise and humanly resonant — capturing what it means to feel alienated from one's own desires, or to feel that one's actions do not truly express who one is.

"It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will."

On Bullshit — The Greater Enemy of Truth

Frankfurt's most famous work began as an essay written for a faculty group at Yale University in the 1980s — a philosophical analysis of a concept that everyone recognized and nobody had rigorously examined. Published in a journal in 1986, republished as a book in 2005, it became a number one New York Times bestseller and brought Frankfurt to "The Daily Show," "60 Minutes," and a degree of public attention that no academic philosopher had received in decades.

The argument was deceptively simple and genuinely important. Bullshit, Frankfurt argued, is not the same as lying. The liar knows the truth and deliberately misrepresents it — lying at least acknowledges that the truth matters. The bullshitter operates differently: they are not concerned with whether what they say is true or false. They are concerned with creating an impression — of themselves, of a situation, of their knowledge — and the truth or falsity of their claims is simply irrelevant to that project. This is why bullshit is more corrosive to truth than lying: the liar is in some sense still oriented toward the truth, even if only to conceal it; the bullshitter has abandoned that orientation entirely.

The book appeared at a moment when this distinction was becoming urgently relevant — as political speech, advertising, and public discourse increasingly consisted of statements whose relationship to truth was simply not the point. Frankfurt's philosophical analysis gave a precise name to a phenomenon that had been visible for years but had lacked conceptual clarity.

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted."

On Inequality — Sufficiency, Not Equality

Frankfurt's 2015 book challenged one of the most widely held assumptions of contemporary progressive politics — that economic equality was a fundamental moral requirement, and that reducing inequality was therefore a central obligation of justice.

Frankfurt argued that this was wrong — and that the intuitions driving it were confused. What matters morally is not that people have equal amounts but that everyone has enough — sufficient resources to live a decent human life. The poor suffer not because others have more but because they don't have enough. Reducing inequality by making the wealthy less wealthy does nothing for the poor unless it results in the poor having more. And the preoccupation with equality as such distracts from the genuine moral imperative, which is the elimination of poverty.

This was a provocation aimed equally at left and right — challenging the left's instinctive egalitarianism while insisting that the moral urgency of poverty was not reducible to libertarian property rights. Frankfurt's position — sufficiency rather than equality — had implications that cut across conventional political categories and forced a more careful analysis of what distributive justice actually required.

"The poor suffer because they don't have enough — not because others have more. Our moral obligation is to eliminate poverty, not to achieve equality."

The Reasons of Love — Caring and Value

Frankfurt's later philosophical work turned increasingly to the phenomenon of love and caring — arguing that these were not merely emotions but structural features of the will that had deep implications for how we understood value.

He argued that what we care about is constitutive of who we are — that personal identity is grounded not in metaphysical facts about bodily or psychological continuity but in the structure of what one loves and what one cares about. Love, on his account, was not primarily a response to antecedently perceived value — it was not that we love people because they are valuable. Rather, caring about something is what confers value on it — what one loves becomes important because one loves it, not the reverse.

This was a radical position — one that many found liberating and others found troubling — but it connected his later ethical philosophy to his earlier work on second-order volitions and the structure of personal agency. The person who has second-order volitions is precisely the person who cares about what they care about — and the philosophical exploration of love was the completion of a project begun in free will theory.

"Love is not a response to the value of the beloved — it is the source of the value the beloved has for the lover. We do not love people because they are important; they become important because we love them."

Legacy — The Philosopher Who Made Philosophy Useful

Frankfurt died in 2023 at ninety-four, having remained intellectually active into very old age — a life that embodied the commitment to philosophical seriousness that his work described. He was remembered by colleagues and students as a man of "gentle spirit" who combined technical rigor with genuine warmth and deep curiosity about human life.

His legacy is unusual in analytic philosophy: deeply technical contributions to the philosophy of action — Frankfurt cases, second-order volitions — that have shaped the field for fifty years, alongside popular works that reached millions of readers with genuinely important philosophical ideas presented with clarity, wit, and precision. He demonstrated that analytic philosophy could be simultaneously rigorous and accessible — that the choice between technical depth and public relevance was a false one.

On CivSim he belongs alongside McMahan and Dworkin — philosophers who did serious technical work on questions of fundamental human importance and who communicated those results without condescension. His sufficiency principle connects directly to Universal Humanism's commitment to necessity for all — the moral imperative is not equality as such but ensuring that every person has what they need to live a genuinely human life. That Frankfurt arrived at this from moral philosophy rather than political theory makes the convergence more rather than less significant.

"Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are — the liar at least acknowledges that truth matters. The bullshitter has abandoned that acknowledgment entirely."