Autonomy under threat: a revised Frankfurtian account

Abstract

In the early 1970s Harry Frankfurt argued that so-called ‘coercive threats’ cause a violation of their victim's autonomy, thereby excluding him from moral responsibility. A person is therefore not responsible for doing what he is forced to do. Although this seems correct on an intuitive level, I will use Frankfurt's later vocabulary of ‘care’ and ‘love’ in order to show that threats essentially involve an abuse of a person's autonomy instead of an infringement or violation thereof. Still, if we want to understand the sense of reluctance that is involved in acting under threat, as well as the sense of responsibility that befalls both the victim as well as the perpetrator, then we have to move beyond the Frankfurtian framework.

Keywords:

• threats
• autonomy
• responsibility

Notes

See, for example, Hetherington (1999), Altman (1996), and Benditt (1977). Frankfurt also starts his discussion with the distinction between threats and offers and he takes Robert Nozick's position as a point of departure (Nozick, 1969). It seems indeed that, between the two of them, the concept of a ‘coercive offer’ is the most elusive. How can an offer truly be coercive without collapsing into the logic of a threat?

Frankfurt's example is slightly different: the starting point is just an action that a person intends to perform (e.g. to go to the hairdresser's) and then somebody makes him an offer he can't refuse and, in the new situation, he is moved by the bonus and not by his original intention (e.g. not because he thinks his hair is too long, but because he will get a Porsche if he gets a haircut). The difference with my example is that the original action is not something the victim of a coercive offer particularly fancies or dreams about.

Offers you can't refuse are actually coercive threats in disguise: you incur a severe penalty if you reject the proposal.

Of course, it is difficult to say when a threat actually provides a motive for action. In his ‘Moral Responsibility and Alternate Possibilities’ (1988), Frankfurt discusses Jones₁ who had already decided to do X and was then threatened to do X as well, but who remains utterly indifferent to the threat and still acts on his original motive (because he is irrational and single-minded). Jones₂, however, has no intention whatsoever to do X, but is so afraid of the threat that he complies (presumably against his will). Jones₃, and this is where the complication become apparent, is ‘neither indifferent nor stampeded by the threat’. He already wanted to do X, but the threat would also have been sufficient without this prior motive. Frankfurt wavers on the issue of whether Jones₃ is subjected to coercion, but he points out that we would hold him responsible whether or not he is in fact the victim of coercion. In this paper, I am not concerned with the question whether people who had already decided to do X and are subsequently threatened to do X, are autonomous and/or morally responsible. The question cannot be solved by asking what the agent would have done if the threat were ‘substracted’. Therefore I think we should focus on Jones₂ – i.e. what I believe is an ordinary case of acting under threat – and see whether it is indeed self-evident that his autonomy is violated and his moral responsibility undermined.

In fact, what Taylor shows is that there is a violation of autonomy even in Type A situations. Consequently, his analysis leaves the moral responsibility of a person intact.

It is important to note that a person's concern for the things he cares about is not instrumental with regard to his own well-being. A person's desire to promote or protect his objects of care cannot be reduced to a selfish desire: these objects take priority over his own well-being.

Shoemaker seems to defend an even stronger claim, i.e. that all volitional necessities are autonomy-conferring, since all volitional necessities can be traced back to something a person cares about. Yet, Shoemaker also recognises that the demands of one's objects of care can conflict.

Content-neutrality implies that any first-order desire, no matter how absurd, vile, selfish, idiotic, insane etc., can be the object of autonomous willings. Within the enlarged account of autonomy this means that a person can care about (or love) anything. What a person cares about is not the object of choice but, to a large extent, a matter of fate. Since caring about something is intrinsically valuable, it seems that Frankfurt endorses the idea ‘Care about what you can’ (Wolf, 2002, pp. 227–244).

For a clear account of Frankfurt's disagreement with Kant, see Frankfurt (1999, pp. 129–141; 2004, pp. 69–101).

‘Nearly everyone cares about staying alive, for instance, and about avoiding severe injury, disease, hunger, and various modes of psychic distress and disorder; they care about their children, about their livelihoods, and about how others think of them’ (Frankfurt, 2004, p. 27). Note that all these objects of care are excellent and fairly common targets of threats.

There is, of course, another way of dealing with this intuition. Nomy Arpaly (2004), for example, has argued that we can hold people responsible for non-autonomous actions. Autonomy and responsibility are not mutually entailing notions. Although I am sympathetic to the idea that the relationship between these two concepts should be revised (as I show in the remainder of this paper), I believe that this analysis does not hold in case of coercive threats (which Arpaly does not consider, I must say): we do not hold them responsible in spite of their autonomy, but because their compliance is rooted in what they care about.

Such judgements of responsibility go beyond the internal perspective of the individual – i.e. the correspondence of hierarchical levels of desires. They are deemed ‘valid’ or ‘right’ within a moral community. Frankfurt, however, wants to avoid what he calls ‘pan-moralism’, in this case, the moralisation of the concept of autonomy. Therefore he is not concerned with this further, substantive question of responsibility, although he could perhaps say that this father is ‘crazy’.

Or if he is indeed swept away by a desire he considers to be alien. Note that I do recognise that such autonomy-undermining threats may exist. I just don't believe that these (i.e. Bee Man and Sophie's Choice examples) are typical cases.

‘The relation between cares and affective states is extremely tight … I believe that, for mature adults, emotional reactions are sufficient [to indicate the presence of a care], and the reason is that our experiencing of emotions makes sense only under an interpretation involving reference to our cares … An emotional reaction … must be a reaction to events affecting something that matters; otherwise, it cannot be an emotional reaction’ (Shoemaker, 2003, p. 93).

See Oshana (2002) and Waller (2003). According to Mariana Oshana, autonomy requires a ‘thin’ kind of (instrumental) rationality while responsibility is essentially a ‘thick’ concept. Or, as Bruce Waller puts it, the question of autonomy can be settled on a descriptive level whereas the question of responsibility demands a normative answer.