Harry G. Frankfurt has put the problem of volitional conflict at the center of philosophical attention. If you care fundamentally about your career and your family, but these cares conflict, this conflict undermines the coherency of your decision standard and thereby your ability to choose and act autonomously. The standard response to this problem is to argue that you can overcome volitional conflict by unifying your foundational motivational states. As Frankfurt puts it, the ‘totality of things that an agent cares about’ plus his ‘ordering of how important to him they are effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live’ (The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 23). In this paper, I critically assess the three main reasons given for such a coherency requirement: 1) we can do only one action at a time; 2) our motivational states come with normative pressure towards coherency; and 3) conflicting motivational states provide us with an incoherent decision-making framework. I conclude that these reasons do not ground a coherency requirement for practical deliberation and argue that we can autonomously express ourselves as volitionally conflicted by acting on our conflicting motivational states over the course of multiple actions.

Harry G. Frankfurt 将意志冲突问题置于哲学关注的中心。如果你从根本上关心你的事业和你的家庭，但这些关心发生冲突，这种冲突会破坏你决策标准的一致性，从而破坏你自主选择和行动的能力。对这个问题的标准回应是争辩说，你可以通过统一你的基本动机状态来克服意志冲突。正如法兰克福所说，“代理人关心的事情的总和”加上他“对这些事情对他的重要性的排序，有效地指定了他对如何生活这个问题的答案”（爱的原因（普林斯顿：普林斯顿大学出版社，2004 年），p. 23). 在这篇论文中，我批判性地评估了这种一致性要求的三个主要原因：1）我们一次只能做一个动作；2）我们的动机状态伴随着对一致性的规范压力；3）相互冲突的动机状态为我们提供了一个不连贯的决策框架。我的结论是，这些原因并没有为实际审议提供连贯性要求，并认为我们可以通过在多个行动过程中对我们相互冲突的动机状态采取行动，自主地将自己表达为自愿冲突。