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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 277 Nagel attends to each of the first three premises of the belief-desire model at different points in the text without clearly marking his intentions. He sometimes addresses premise (1), sometimes premise (2), sometimes premise (3), and sometimes neglects to distinguish among them. In working through this complex analysis, it will help to ask the following questions repeatedly: What present, causally effective mental event is in fact being invoked at any particular point to explain the agent's prudential or altruistic action? And if none is, what is being assumed to explain why it occurs precisely when and where it does? 2.3. Motivated versus Unmotivated Desires Nagel argues that premise 2.2.(3) of the belief-desire model, that desire must cause action, is the consequence of a failure to distinguish between motivated and unmotivated desires. An unmotivated desire is one that "just assails us," such as an appetite or emotion. It has causal antecedents, as, for example, the causal antecedent of hunger is lack of food. But an unmotivated desire has no cognitive motivational antecedents, as, for example, a desire to go shopping may be preceded by a pang of hunger plus a belief that there is no food in the house. "The issue," Nagel observes, "is whether another desire always lies behind the motivated one, or whether sometimes the motivation of the initial desire involves no reference to another, unmotivated desire" (29). Nagel thinks it clear that not all actions need include unmotivated desires among their antecedents. But to establish this, he will need to establish an alternative foundation in the requirements of rationality for our temporally extended and impersonal self-conception as one person among many. He will have to show that this self-conception is not just another contingent and transient object of an unmotivated desire that assails us in moments of vulnerability or the need to escape the burden and intensity of our immediate and particular circumstances. Otherwise some other mental events - deliberating, reflecting, considering - that express this self-conception would be little more than the object of such an unmotivated desire - and so would come and go as they do. Nagel defines a motivated desire as one caused by some prior psychological event. The event may be an antecedent unmotivated desire, such as hunger; or an antecedent motivated one, such as the desire for certain recipe ingredients; or it may be a decision or belief or judgment itself arrived at as the conclusion of a process of deliberation; or some combination thereof. Nagel's claim is that the explanation of a motivated desire is identical to the explanation of the action it causes. So, for example, my desire to take the LSATs is explained by my prior desire to go to law school, plus my belief that passing the LSATs is a necessary condition of admission to law school. My desire to take the LSATs is a motivated desire, in that what explains my actual © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
