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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 51 unmotivated and motivated desires (discussed in Chapter VI.2.3, below), i.e. to encapsulate both the commonsensical notion of desire as an empirical event, and also those modifications of it that attempt to accommodate the demands of a theoretical first principle.3 So the Humean conception of the self vacillates between two interpretations of what a desire is. On one view, desires are events in the world with causal power. Call this the orthodox view. The orthodox view admits of competing beliefs about the content of a desire, of the sort that might separate the Freudian from the Adlerian. It accepts the possibility of disagreement about what desire one has; but broaches none about the presupposition that we are in fact moved by real events called "desires." In this respect, desires are as ontologically basic as furniture or plane crashes: they occur. Although they intend otherwise, Brandt and Kim's account of desire in fact conforms to the orthodox interpretation. The other view withholds the ascription of ontological irreducibility, in order to extend the scope of application of the term "desire" to cover the large variety of motives - e.g. greed, compassion, self-interest, duty - we commonly assume to exist. Call this the revisionist view. The idea of the revisionist view is that belief-desire talk supplies us with a kind of "theoretical construct" in terms of which all intentional behavior can be retrospectively described. Thus we ascribe to an agent a desire to achieve the end her behavior seems to us most clearly designed to achieve, and the belief that the action she actually performed was the most efficient way at her disposal for achieving it. These ascriptions enable us to preserve the assumption of the agent's instrumental rationality, by treating desires as ubiquitous in the sense that Nagel's motivated desires are: Whatever the agent does is assumed to promote the satisfaction of some desire she has as efficiently as she can, given the information and resources at her disposal. Brandt and Kim's account aspires to conform to the revisionist interpretation, although in fact it does not. In the following chapter I elaborate at greater length on some of the problems with this view of desires as theoretically ubiquitous. Here merely note the resulting tension between the orthodox and the revisionist views. The credibility of the claim that desires are ubiquitous diminishes in inverse proportion to the extent to which we are required to construe "desire" as denoting an actual event or state of affairs in the world. For to that extent, it seems self-evident that on any nonvacuous interpretation of the word "desire," desires are neither necessary nor precipitating causes of many of the actions we perform.4 In the course of this project I examine several cases in which one performs actions intentionally, not because one desires their ends, Ibid. W. D. Falk also makes this point in "'Ought' and Motivation," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, NLVIII (1954-58). See especially pp. 115-117. 3 4 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
