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Show Chapter IX. The Problem of Moral Justification 388 desire. But if actions are identified by intentions and desires identified by the actions taken to satisfy them, and if all actions are caused by desires, then all desires that we act to satisfy, not only the noninclinational ones, are identified ultimately by the intentions behind the actions they cause. But if desires were identified by the intentions behind the actions they caused, it would mean that identifying what I desire depended not, after all, on what I retrospectively did, but rather on what I prospectively intended to bring about: I could be said to desire O only if I intended to bring O about, and not merely if I in fact brought O about. This concept of desire would conflict not only with the theory of revealed preference out of which the Humean model of motivation has gotten so much mileage; but, even worse, with the underlying Freudian variant on which the theory of revealed preference - and so much else in social science explanation - depends. Thus I could have no desires unrecruited into my agenda for future action; no behaviorally manifested desires in which my own behavior first instructed me; no frivolous or innocuous or irrelevant desires; no subliminal or fantasy desires whose existence surprised me after the fact of their satisfaction. Their hedonic buzz would be a mere side-effect of realizing my prior intention to satisfy them. This would be to regard each of my desires with a degree of seriousness not all of them deserve; and - more importantly, to abdicate the central tenet of the Humean belief-desire model that insures its universality. Gewirth might reject the Humean conception of desire on which they are based, according to which desires are identified by the actions they purportedly cause. But without this conception of desire, it is not open to him to declare that every intention - and so every action - implies a pro-attitude toward its purpose. The cost of circumscribing Humean desires by Kantian intentions is the ubiquity of those desires.Desires cannot depend for their identity on intentions because I can identify many of my desires independently of any intention to satisfy them, and can satisfy many of my desires without having intended to. Consider how Gewirth's equation of certain wants with intentions then functions. The inference that we always have a pro-attitude toward the purposes of our actions is invoked to support Gewirth's later argument that we necessarily value our purposes as goods: It is important to have seen the connection presented above between purposiveness and wants or desires. For from this connection stems the fact that the agent necessarily regards his purposes as good, and hence makes an implicit value judgment about them; and from this, in turn, there necessarily follow other judgments, both evaluative and deontic, that finally entail the supreme principle of morality as a principle that every agent is logically committed to accept (41). Now suppose we accept Gewirth's analysis of action. What follows from it? One of its implications is that if we have a pro-attitude towards all of our © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
