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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 69 the highest-order desire for sufficiency and wholeness, i.e. R3 as embedded in (d) and (e), above. This desire terminates the infinite regress of orders of desire because any desire, including this one, is by definition an instantiation of the highest-order desire R3 for sufficiency and wholeness; and because R3 neither instantiates nor leaves open the possibility of any yet higher-order desire. It is a terminating criterion of rationality because, first - to adapt Nagel's criterion of rationality for present purposes, wholeness and sufficiency are ends that can serve as justificatory reasons for actions taken to achieve them; and second, this criterion enables us to evaluate the rationality of any desire - including R3 itself - by asking whether satisfying it does, in fact, restore the agent's sense of sufficiency and wholeness. - That's the good news for the Humean model of motivation. The bad news is that no desire can satisfy this criterion, for the reasons Hobbes was the first modern Western philosopher to note: [T]here is no such ... summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. ... Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is, that the object of man's desire, is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire. ... So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.18 The reason no desire-satisfaction can meet the terminating criterion of rationality - that it restore one's sense of sufficiency and wholeness - is that any desire-satisfaction automatically generates a further desire - i.e. a represented want (or lack or insufficiency) - for the satisfaction to continue; and the satisfaction of this further want in turn generates yet a further want to acquire sufficient power to protect the power one already has to satisfy that one. So although it is true that once I acknowledge my desire for wholeness and sufficiency there is no higher-order desire I can have in terms of which that one can be evaluated, it is also true that that highest-order desire for wholeness and sufficiency itself generates an infinitely proliferating series of lower-order wants: for continuance, and for protection and proliferation of the means for continuance, that "ceaseth only in death;" and so prevents wholeness and sufficiency from being achieved. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Books, 1977), Chapter 11, "Of the Difference of Manners," 80. 18 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
