Freedom as Alignment of Will

Frankfurt's account of freedom departs from every familiar political and philosophical definition. Freedom is not the absence of external constraint. It is not the range of available options. It is not the capacity to have done otherwise. Freedom is a feature of the will's internal architecture — a relationship between first-order and second-order desires within a single person. A person is free when the desire that actually moves them to action is the desire they endorse at the second-order level. The will is aligned. The action is fully their own — not because no one prevented it, but because the person stands behind it at every level of their motivational structure.