The Passivity of Self-Satisfaction: A Critical Re-appraisal of Harry Frankfurt’s Normatively Thin Ontology of Autonomy

This chapter attempts to “re-boot” the discussion of Harry Frankfurt’s
approach to autonomy, in the service of a new diagnosis of the strengths and weak-
nesses of his satisfaction-based ontology of the will. Criticisms of Frankfurt’s work
have tended to focus on a lack of normative foundations, often missing Frankfurt’s
aim of shifting discussions of autonomy towards a focus on avoiding passivity in
how one cares about what one cares about, while still acknowledging the central
role of volitional necessity and, especially, self-satisfaction in autonomous agency.
Although this approach provides Frankfurt with interesting ways of deflecting criti-
cisms that are ethical in character, the lack of attention to the hermeneutic and lin-
guistic dimensions of our inner life, leaves his approach with insufficient grounds
for identifying the passivity of those who are unable or unwilling to engage in genu-
ine self-interpretation.