What is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire?The idea that we explain and evaluate actions with essential reference to what people want is compelling, as it speaks to common-sense ideas that our wants lie at the heart of our decision-making. Yet our wants seem to have a competitor: our beliefs about what we ought to do. Such normative beliefsalone may often suffice to explain our actions. To try and resolve this tension, this book defends "desire as belief", the view that desires are just a special subset of our normative beliefs. This view entitles us to accept orthodox models of human motivation and rationality that explain thosethings with reference to desire, while also making room for our normative beliefs to play a role in those domains. This view also tells us to diverge from the orthodox view on which desires themselves can never be right or wrong. Rather, according to desire-as-belief, our desires can themselves beassessed for their accuracy, and they are wrong when they misrepresent normative features of the world. Hume says that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger, but he is wrong: it is foolish to prefer the destruction of the wholeworld to the scratching of your finger, precisely because this preference misrepresents the relative worth of these things. This book mounts an engaging and comprehensive defence of these ideas.
Author(s): Alex Gregory
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 236
City: New York
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction
1 What is Desire-as-Belief?
1.1 Desire and Belief
1.2 Reasons and Reasons Beliefs
1.3 Desire-as-Belief
1.4 Direction of Fit
1.5 Some Broad Attractions of Desire- as-Belief
1.6 Some Broad Defences of Desire- as-Belief
1.7 Reason and Passion
1.8 Summary
2 Desire and Motivation
2.1 Only Desires Motivate
2.2 Why Accept ODM?
2.3 Desires Sometimes Motivate
2.3.1 An Aside: Dispositional vs. Occurrent Desires
2.4 Objections to ODM
2.4.1 Misleading Desire Ascriptions
2.4.2 Nagel
2.4.3 Emotions
2.4.4 Intentions
2.5 Summary
3 Normative Belief and Motivation
3.1 Normative Beliefs Motivate
3.1.1 Motivation Internalism
3.2 The Motivation Argument
3.3 Against Non-Cognitivism
3.3.1 Non-Cognitivism and Conativism
3.3.2 Other-Regarding Attitudes
3.3.3 Objections and Replies
3.4 In Favour of Desire- as-Belief
3.4.1 Extending the Argument
3.5 Summary and Humeanism
4 Desire and Rationality
4.1 Desires Rationalize Actions
4.2 Against the Dispositional Theory of Desire
4.3 In Favour of Desire- as-Belief
4.4 Against Presentationalism
4.5 Summary
5 Irrationality
5.1 Recap
5.2 Desire-as Belief and Failures of Rationality
5.3 Irrationality in Belief
5.4 Misleading Desire Ascriptions, Again
5.5 Failures of Motivation
5.6 Akrasia
5.7 An Aside: Second- Order Desires
5.8 Summary
6 The Guise of the Normative
6.1 Against Besires
6.2 The Guise of the Normative
6.3 Reasons without Goodness
6.4 Correct Variation in Desire
6.5 Wanting, Wishing, Hoping
6.6 Summary
7 Desire and Feeling
7.1 Emotions Causing Desire
7.2 Appetites Causing Desire
7.3 Likings Causing Desire
7.4 Variation in Desire
7.5 Ascetics
7.6 Desires Causing Pleasure
7.7 Summary
8 Uncertainty and Reasoning
8.1 Degrees of Desire
8.1.1 The Certainty Problem
8.1.2 Some Bad Solutions
8.1.3 The Best Solution: Being Unsure About What You Want
8.1.4 Desire Strength and Motivation
8.2 Reasoning
8.2.1 Preliminaries
8.2.2 Instrumentalism
8.2.3 An Aside: Testimony, Intuition, Goodness
8.2.4 Against Instrumentalism
8.3 Summary
9 Representing Reasons
9.1 Conceptual Role Semantics
9.2 Inputs and Outputs of Reasons Beliefs
9.3 How We Represent Reasons
9.4 Animals
9.5 Summary
10 Desires and Reasons
10.1 Two Problems for Subjectivism
10.2 Debunking Subjectivism
10.3 Against Desire- Based Theories of Wellbeing
10.4 Summary
11 Conclusion
APPENDIX A Lewis on Desire- as-Belief
A.1 The Argument
A.2 Reply
Bibliography
Index
