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The Nature of Desire and the Debate over Internal and External Reasons: A New Way

Forward?

Peter RailtonUniversity of Oslo

May 2009

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• Napoleon:

Imagination rules the world.

• Wittgenstein:

Don’t make it a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictions give us pleasure, occupy our minds.

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A critical diagnosis

• At the middle of the 20th century, two philosophers, W.K. Frankena and W.D. Falk independently offered a diagnosis of the most basic dispute underlying contemporary meta-ethics: the connection between normative judgments and motivation.

• They pointed out that this underlies the split between cognitivists (Moore, Ross, Prichard) and non-cognitivists (Ayer, Stevenson, Hare).

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What is this connection?

• According to the non-cognitivists, there is a necessary, semantic connection between making a moral judgment and having some degree of motivation to act in accordance with this judgment.

• Thus, necessarily, anyone making a sincere moral judgment of the form: A ought to Fis expressing a state of mind that has positive

motivational force for A toward doing F, encouraging others to do F, etc. A pro-attitude toward F-ing.

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Why this connection?

• This connection offers a seemingly straightforward explanation of a number of facts about moral discourse and practice:– Why it is seen as a matter of insincerity to make a

moral judgment but not show any tendency to act in accord with it.

– Why it would seem to be a failure to grasp moral concepts to fail to see this.

– How moral thought and language could be, by their nature, practical, i.e., could “influence the will”.

– Why moral conflicts seemed to be conflicts in attitude, not resolvable by a simple appeal to the facts.

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Every benefit has its costs

• If the state of mind expressed by sincere moral judgment is, necessarily, motivating for the speaker, then we cannot treat this state of mind as a belief.

• Why not?• Beliefs have representational content, and are true

just in case their propositional objects are true. – But no proposition semantically entails

motivation – otherwise, it could not have orthodox truth conditions.

• As a result, moral judgments could not be assigned orthodox truth conditions.– But we ordinarily do speak of moral judgments as

true or false, use them in logical inference, etc.

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Frankena and Falk were right

• The next half-century in meta-ethics were taken up trying to sort this out.– Could a non-propositional account of the

content of moral judgments capture the logical behavior of moral judgments? Or explain how they come to be seen as true or false?

– Could a propositional account of the content of moral judgments capture the connection between moral judgment and motivation? Or explain why morality has the dynamical personal and social functions it does in shaping conduct?

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The current terrain, deadlocked

• Several dominant and seemingly stable, but conflicting, views have emerged, among them:– Motivational judgment internalism – the original,

conceptual connection between moral judgment and motivation

– Moral-reasons internalism – the idea that the relation between moral judgments and motivation is normative not semantic, i.e., if one makes a moral judgment and is rational, one will be motivated

– Motivational judgment externalism – the connection between moral judgment and motivation is essentially contingent, though perhaps highly regular and typical of almost all agents in virtue of highly general facts about human psychology.

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Some favorite examples

• The sensible knave and “inverted commas” usages:

– a normative kind theorist … should not be a hard-line, metaethical "externalist", who thinks that a "sensible knave" or "irrationalist" might fully share our normative concepts but not at all be guided in terms of them. …  Anyone who "doesn't give a damn", for whom no question of action, actual or hypothetical, hinges on the classification, can't join into the conversation as full-fledged participant.  His use of this kind of language can only be parasitic on the usage of those who care.  Would a serenade be harassing as well as quaint?  The sensible cad might predict how people will classify serenades, or role-play at entering the discussion.  But it is puzzling what he is doing if he earnestly tries to take sides.  There is no such intelligible thing as pure theoretical curiosity in these matters. [Gibbard 2003]

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Some favorite examples

• The depressive• The amoralist

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Which kind of internalism?

• At the same time, however, a quite different debate over internalism and externalism has arisen, starting with a classic essay by Bernard Williams, “Internal and External Reasons”

• Williams was concerned with so-called external reason attributions – attribution to someone of a reason to act that had no resonance in that individual’s “subjective motivational set”.

• It struck him that such attributions were mere “bluff”, they could not identify a reason for him, since they could not make this action, goal, etc. intelligible to him as an extension of what he cares about, values, or could come to care about or value through a “sound deliberative route”.

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This is a fundamentally different kind of internalism

• This sort of “internalism about reasons” makes the following sort of claim as a matter of metaphysical necessity:– Necessarily, if B has a reason to F, then it is in principle possible for

B to be led by a sound deliberative route to be motivated favorably toward F-ing

• Therefore, necessarily, if A judges that B has a reason to F, and no such connection to B’s motivations can be made, A’s claim is false.

• Note that this is a third-personal requirement, not a first-personal requirement on the sincerity of the speaker’s claim that A has a reason to F.– It is a matter of B’s “subjective motivational set”, not the speaker’s

• And it is entirely consistent with reasons judgments possessing orthodox truth conditions of a perspective-independent kind.

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“Existence internalism” – Some motivations

• Since it is a position on the existence conditions for reasons to act, this view is called motivational existence internalism.

• It can be defended on at least three grounds:– Reasons attributions have an explanatory role– Reasons attributions ought to be justifiable to

the agent – Ought implies can

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A conflict?

• But existence internalism pulls us in quite a different direction from the original judgment internalism.

• Consider the supposed truism:– Necessarily, if A morally ought to F, then F has a

reason to F • The reason must at least be important, perhaps

overriding. It certainly must be A’s reason – so that A would be acting contrary to reason if A failed to F.

• On some views, this is the core of morality – it is a form of pure practical rationality.

• But this constrains moral judgment by a 3rd-personal motivational condition, not guaranteed by the 1st-personal.

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Methodological consideration

• We should be doubtful about philosophical claims with very sweeping implications when we cannot identify a stable conception of what the claim is.

• This seems to be the case with the connection between morality and motivation.

• So how to go forward?• Today I will be focusing on the question, how to go

forward in the debate on internal vs. external reasons.

• There might be time for a hint at the end about the debate over judgment vs. existence internalims.

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Look under the hood

• I will be claiming that forward movement is obstructed by a failure to go deeply enough into the nature of the supposed mental states involved – e.g., belief and desire.

• This has unnecessarily restricted our options.• Some presuppositions of the debate:

– Beliefs are “inert representations” – Desires lack representational content – Desires cannot be more or less rational

• I believe all of these claims are false.

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Where we are

• On Wednesday, I introduced a model of belief as affect-involving in a way that showed why beliefs are not inert representations.

• In this I rejected the “[neo]-Humean theory of motivation” and returned to Hume’s original view:

– … in philosophy we can go no farther, than assert, that [belief] is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination. It gives them more force and influence; makes them appear of greater importance; infixes them in the mind; and renders them the governing principles of all our actions. [Treatise of Human Nature]

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Belief

be • lief

be- + leafa

about + trust, faith, love

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Credence

cre • dence

kerd-

heart

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Confidence

con • fidence

kom- + bheidh-

with + trust, faith

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True, Trust

• dreu-

firm, steady

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Belief

• Belief that R: • A degree of confidence (trust) in a representation

R functions to regulate a degree of expectation that things are or will be as R portrays them; and this degree of confidence in turn is modulated by whether in subsequent experience this expectation is met or violated.

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New school: “Dual Process” psychology – affect “upstream” from perceptual belief,

directly productive of behavior

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What of Desire?Return to the functionalist

starting point• Belief and desire … are correlative dispositional

states of a potentially rational agent. To desire that P is to be disposed to act in ways that would tend to bring it about that P in a world in which one’s beliefs, whatever they are, were true. To believe that P is to be disposed to act in ways that would tend to satisfy one’s desires, whatever they are, in a world in which P (together with one’s other beliefs) were true. [Stalnaker, 1984]

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de • sire

dē- + sider- apart, away + star

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Kant on the good will

• Even if it should happen that, owing to special disfavour of fortune, or the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing, and there should remain only the good will (not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself. [Groundwork, 394]

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Incentive

in ● centive

in- + canere

into + song

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Kant on desire, life, and will

Desire and life:“The faculty of desire is the faculty to be, by

means of one’s representations, the cause of the objects of those representations. The faculty of being able to act in accordance with its representations is called life.”

[Metaphysics of Morals 6:211]

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Marx on humanity

“The operations carried out by a spider resemble those of a weaver, and many a human architect is put to shame by the bee in the construction of its wax cells. However, the poorest architect is categorically distinguished from the best of bees by the fact that before he builds a cell in wax, he has built it in his head.” (Marx, Capital)

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Desire

• Desire that R:• A degree of positive affect toward a

representation R functions to regulate a degree of positive motivation toward bringing about the state of affairs that R portrays; and this degree of affect is subsequently modulated by whether actual experience of moving toward or realizing R is better, worse, or in conformity with expectations arising from the affective representation.

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Some of desire’s features

• Desire, when conscious, typically involves a “desirability feature”

• Desire comes in degrees of strength, and has two senses – two “naïve” notions of wanting, which can come apart, which are normally coupled in a regulative way. [Two psychologically more primitive states; physiological evidence.]

• Deire has a “positive front end” – compare the “itch” theory

• Like belief, desire shapes the allocation of attention, thought, and forward-going action

• Like belief, desire creates expectation and leads to learning through feedback

• Like belief, desire’s structure quips it for attunement.

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Some of desire’s dysfunctions

• A number of phenomena we think of as “irrationality in desire” can be understood as dysregulation or dysfunction of this representation-centered, affect-based feedforward-feedback system:– Opaque desires and compulsions – Quinn’s radio

man– Addiction – the reluctant addict– Change without learning when affect is

systematically altered (depression and mania)– Suggestibility and advertising – “spurious desires”

and “miswanting”– “Weakness of will” - Wishing and wanting,

salience and “preference reversals”

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Conditioned response, “affective forecasting”, and error – “learning to

like” and unlearning

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“Value-coded” cognitive mapping – foraging for value

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Desire and acting for reasons

• The “authority of desire”: Like belief, desire is a default, defeasible attitude that orients action – without this, action would seem not to be possible (problems of regress).

• This does not threaten rationality, or acting for a reason. Rather, it permits practical attunement to reasons without leading to regress.

• Why informed desires have more authority, why they can contribute to the rationality of action

• Desire also is part of “affective primacy” – it contributes to evaluative perception or “affordances”.

• It also enables us to “see reasons” and act accordingly, without needing to add any further desire.

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Emotional intelligence and cognitive tuning

• Belief, desire, and emotion all orient and help regulate subsequent thought and action, in part thanks to affective mechanisms– This orientation and regulation reflects the strength

of affect – strength of confidence, liking, or feeling– This orientation involves guidance via

“feedforward” and “feedback”, creating expectation and comparing expectation with experienced outcome

– They also yield “motivated cognition” as well as action tendencies

• They all permit attunement to situations, possibilities, needs, and values, i.e., to reasons to think, feel, and do.

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Kant on choice and liking

“Every determination of choice proceeds from the representation of a possible action to the deed through the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, taking an interest in the action or its effect.” [MM, 6:399]

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An example: Kant on the good, the will, and liking

“… despite all difference between the agreeable and the good, they do agree in this: they are always connected with an interest in their object. This holds not only for the agreeable … but also for what is good absolutely and in every respect, i.e., the moral good … . For the good is the object of the will (a power of desire) determined by reason. But to will something and to have a liking for its existence, i.e., to take an interest in it, are identical.” [CJ 209]

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This is how Kant explained the possibility of action from duty

“[A]ny consciousness of obligation depends upon moral feeling to make us aware of the constraint present in the thought of duty, there can be no duty to have the moral feeling or to acquire it … .” [MM, 6:399-400]

“Respect (reverentia) is, again, something subjective, a feeling of a special kind, not a judgment about an object that it would be a duty to bring about or promote. For, such a duty, regarded as a duty, could be represented to us only through the respect we have for it. A duty to have respect would thus amount to being put under obligations to duties.” [MM, 6:402-403]

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Aristotle on acting for reasons

• “Now the origin of action (the efficient, not the final cause) is choice, and the origin of choice is appetition and purposive reasoning. … [A]n action is an end in itself … and the object of appetition. Hence choice is either appetitive intellect or intellectual appetition; and man is a principle of this kind.” [NE 1139a32-b5]

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Aristotle on action as practical attunement

• “[B]rutes have sensation, but no share in action. Pursuit and avoidance in the sphere of appetition correspond exactly to affirmation and negation in the sphere of intellect … .”

• “[S]ince … choice is deliberative appetition, it follows that if the choice is a good one, both the reasoning must be true and the desire right; and the desire must pursue the same things that the reasoning asserts.”

• “We are here speaking of intellect and truth in a practical sense … the function of practical intellect is to arrive at the truth that corresponds to right appetition.” [NE 1113a20-28]

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Rethinking the debate over internal and external reasons?

• We should reject the neo-Humean account of belief and desire

• Attributing moral action the “belief-desire model” does not destroy the notion of acting “for the right reason, with the right feeling, in the right way, at the right time”

• At the same time, attributing moral action to desire does not require any additional motivational state over respect for the moral law. It does not require “external reasons”.

• Restricting reasons to what is derivable from someone’s existing subjective motivational set ignores the possibility that she might acquire new desires rationally, including respect for others, or for fairness, or for the moral law.

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To Plotinus what we seek is VISION, what wakes when we wake to desire

as the eye to the sun

It is just as if you should fall in love with one of the sparrows which fly by

when we wake to desire

- Frank Bidart, “Desire”