Mesh, Reasons-Responsive, Leeway Theories 213desire, and a judgment that any further deliberation would be unnecessary (1987,
as reprinted in 1988: 168–9). Later, Frankfurt appealed to the distinction between
activity and passivity (1992b as reprinted in 1999: 87). When a person is active,
she determines what her will shall be, thereby rendering pertinent desires
internal. When her will is being acted on by desires, those desires are external to
her and she is passive with respect to them (1994 as reprinted in 1999: 132–3).
On yet another proposal, satisfaction does the work (1992a as reprinted in 1999:
105). Satisfaction requires,
no adoption of any cognitive, attitudinal, affective, or intentional stance. It
does not require the performance of a particular act; and it also does not
require any deliberate abstention. Satisfaction is a state of the entire psychic
system—a state constituted by the absence of any tendency or inclination to
alter its condition. (104)In this passage, Frankfurt clearly departs from his earlier (1987) judgment
requirement. Satisfaction, it seems, is to be understood merely negatively in rela-
tion to a person, construed as a “psychic system.”^7
Frankfurt’s reliance on satisfaction offers a reply to another objection to his
notion of identification closely related to Watson’s. In his treatment of Frank-
furt’s earlier work, David Velleman (1992) contends that a person, if she is to be
the agent of her actions, must stand in the right kind of relation to her desires.
Otherwise, she is merely a passive witness to their place in the causal nexus of
her psychic life. Many libertarians appeal to the notion of agent causation at this
point, which they conceive as involving causation fundamentally by the agent as
a substance, in a way that precludes reduction to event causation (see Chapter
10 ). Velleman, like Frankfurt, wants to avoid such a move. But, in keeping with
Watson’s challenge to Frankfurt, Velleman objects that invoking the notion of
identification in the absence of further clarification is merely a label for the
problem of accounting for an agent’s involvement in the efficacy of her desires
in the right way, which is the very problem that needs to be solved (1992: 474).
Velleman himself proposes that we functionally identify the agent with a master-
desire or motive, in particular, the desire to act in accord with the best reasons
(1992: 478–80). Frankfurt, however, as revealed in the above quotation, opts for
a different strategy. An agent is not to be identified with any element within a
psychic system, such as a master desire; the agent is the system. When, on
Frankfurt’s view, is the system properly functioning as an agent? This is to be
answered exclusively in terms of the negative condition of satisfaction: when
there is an absence of any tendency or inclination to alter its condition.
Much rides on Frankfurt’s notion of identification. Without it, he arguably
has no reply to Watson’s original challenge. With it, he cements his real self
view; it is the very basis by which the agent, qua real self, gets into the act, as
Velleman would require. It thus seems unsatisfying for Frankfurt to offer
no more than the assertion of a negative condition on an agent as a psychic
system—satisfaction—as the only ingredient beyond the interplay of desires.