Desirism: Resolving Conflicting Desires

In my last post I discussed a simple conflict of desires. In it I drew a contrast between an evaluation made by one of the two agents inside the simplified world in which conflict exists, and an evaluation made by us outside the world.

In this post, I am going to make things more complicated. I will take a conflict in the current world and point out how one would approach that issue using desirism.

My purpose in this post is not to draw a specific conclusion on the issue selected. My purpose is to identify the types of claims that would be relevant in drawing a conclusion.

The conflict that I will use can be expressed as follows: "If a person who opposes homosexual acts thwarts the desires of homosexuals, then don't homosexuals thwart the desires of those who oppose homosexual acts?"

What do we do when faced with this kind of conflict?

Step 1: Remove the clutter - reasons for action that do not exist.

We are applying desirism to this question. This means that the first thing we are going to do is remove all of the clutter that will get in the way of a conclusion that is true in the real world. We are going to throw out all claims based on the idea of a god and divine commands – because there is no god and his alleged commands are actually the prejudices of people who died thousands of years ago.

We are going to throw out all appeals to what is "natural" - since these claims assume that "natural" has some type of intrinsic merit, and intrinsic merit does not exist.

We are going to throw out any appeals to individual sentiment of the form, "It seems right to me; therefore, it is right." Personal sentiment tells us an agent’s current likes and dislikes – it does not tell us what likes and dislikes people in general have many and strong reasons to promote.

We are going to toss out any claims based on a "moral sense" – a faculty in the brain that allows us to perceive moral qualities by contemplating the situation in which it arose. We have no "moral sense". What some people call "moral sense" is simply their personal opinions and prejudices.

The only thing we are going to allow are appeals to reasons for action that exist – which is to say, appeals to desires. Desires provide the only reasons for praising or condemning certain attitudes – the only thing in the real world that will allow us to determine if people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an attitude or inhibit it.

Step 2: Removing desires that cannot be objectively satisfied.

After we have removed reasons that do not exist from the calculation, we are going to remove reasons that exist but cannot be objectively satisfied.

A person may have an aversion to a state in which God is offended. He may believe that a state in which people engage in homosexual acts is a state in which God is offended.

His aversion is real. As such, it is a reason for action that exists.

However, the state that this person is averse to – a state in which their god is offended – can never be realized regardless of the number of homosexual acts that take place. No actual homosexual act will offend a god, because there is no god to be offended. This agent may believe that he has a reason to condemn the desires that motivate people to engage in homosexual acts, but he does not.

Desirism looks at reasons for action that exist – not reasons for action that people wrongly believe exists.

People with an aversion to acts that are intrinsically wrong are in this same situation. No homosexual act is intrinsically wrong, so an aversion to intrinsically wrong acts is not a reason to oppose any actual real-world homosexual act. This is true even if one falsely believes that homosexual acts are intrinsically wrong.

On the other hand, a person might simply have an aversion to a state of affairs in which homosexual acts take place. If this is the case, then this person has a reason for action that exists – and it is a reason for acting in ways that reduce or eliminate states of affairs in which homosexual acts take place. This means that he has a reason to condemn those desires that would tend to cause people to engage in homosexual acts.

These reasons count. These are reasons for action that exist.

Step 3: Measure the effect that a desire has on objectively satisfying or thwarting other desires.

Let us take this aversion to states in which homosexual acts exist and the desires that motivate agents to engage in homosexual acts and evaluate them according to actual reasons for action that exist.

We already know that each thwarts the other. However, we need to ask about how strong and how common those desires are. How many people have an aversion that homosexual acts take place, and how many people have desires that motivate them to engage in homosexual acts?

Remember, we are counting aversions that homosexual acts take place. We are not counting aversions to intrinsically bad acts taking place. We are not counting aversions to states in which some god is offended. We are only counting aversions that homosexual acts take place.

We are also not talking about an aversion to engaging in homosexual acts. An agent might find the idea of having sex with somebody of the same gender repulsive. However, the response to this is for that agent not to have sex with somebody of the same gender. It is not a reason to prevent others from having sex with people of the same gender.

One of the mistakes that people often make is to take their own attitudes towards a particular state as evidence of an intrinsic property. From this they infer that all other properly functioning humans should respond as they do.

An agent with an aversion to having sex with somebody of the same gender may make the mistake of thinking that he is responding to a badness intrinsic to those acts. From this, he concludes that others who do not perceive this truth about homosexual acts and responds as he does are defective (sick, perverse). This mistaken belief is actually not a reason to condemn desires that motivate people to engage in homosexual acts. It is a reason for the agent to come to a better understanding of his own response.

So, we are counting the people with actual desires that are fulfilled by engaging in homosexual acts, versus people with an actual aversion to states in which homosexual acts are taking place.

The next thing we look at is the strengths of those desires. How strongly do people with a desire to engage in homosexual acts value those acts? How important are they? And how strong is the aversion to homosexual acts taking place?

Many and stronger desires trump fewer and weaker desires. We are, after all, looking at what there is more and stronger reason to condemn.

Then, we need to figure out the effects of each of these desires on fulfilling or thwarting other desires.

We may discover that people with homosexual desires tend to abuse children, in which case the desires thwarted by this child abuse would be a reason to condemn homosexual desires.

These effects are relevant – if they are true. Is it the case that, by condemning homosexual acts, we can reduce those desires that contribute to the abuse of children? If it is not true, of course, then preventing the desire-thartings of child abuse do not create real-world reasons to condemn the desires that motivate homosexual acts.

Is it the case that, by condemning heterosexual acts, we can do an even better job of reducing those desires that contribute to the abuse of children? After all, by condemning heterosexual acts, our condemnation will impact a larger audience and, consequently, eliminate even more child abuse.

Heterosexual desires are not our concern in these posts. However, comparing a desire to engage in homosexual acts with a desire to engage in heterosexual acts will help to illustrate the types of concerns that are relevant in evaluating each desire.

In the case of heterosexual acts, we do have reason to condemn those subsets of heterosexual acts that contribute to the spread of disease, cause physical harm, or violate rules of consent. In the case of homosexual acts, we also have reason to condemn those subsets of acts that contribute to the spread of disease, cause physical harm, or violate rules of consent.

However, it makes no sense to argue in one case that these concerns provide reason to condemn only a subset of heterosexual acts, but in the other they provide provide reason to condemn all homosexual acts. In fact, there is an argument against such a distinction - it confuses and makes less effective our condemnation of the subset that has these consequences.

On the issue of thwarting other desires, we may also discover that people with homosexual desires tend to engage in behavior that is self-destructive (thwarting their own future desires) or harmful to others (engaging in violent behavior towards others). If fewer people had those desires that motivate homosexual acts, then fewer people would engage in desire-thwarting self-destructive or anti-social behavior.

However, it may also be the case that if fewer people engaged in the condemnation of homosexual desires –(thus psychologically harming those people, particular children, who cannot escape that condemnation) - that this, too, would reduce the amount of self-destructive and anti-social behavior. In this case, it is not the homosexual desire that we have reason to condemn, but the aversion to homosexual acts and the psychological abuse that this creates.

Step 4: Determine which of these desires can be most easily modified.

This comes after Step 3 because we are going to distinguish between moral evil and a mental illness. After determining that a particular desire is harmful and one that people have many and strong reasons to be rid of, we are going to ask if it can be countered using social forces such as praise and condemnation. If it can, then it is a moral evil and we bring these social forces to bear against it. If not, then it is an illness. It makes no sense for us to condemn such a person – that condemnation does no useful work. However, we still have reason to confine them or to remove the conditions that make them a danger to others.

In this conflict between desires that motivate people to engage in homosexual acts and the aversion to states in which homosexual acts take place, which can be most easily eliminated?

It appears to be the case that the desires that motivate agents to engage in homosexual acts are quite firmly established. On the other hand, the aversion that homosexual acts exist is learned and can be unlearned.

There are biological reasons to suspect that this is the case. As a matter of fact, there is no desire to engage in homosexual acts. There is a desire to engage in sex with a male – embedded in the brain of somebody with a male body. And there a desire to engage in sex with a female in the brain of somebody with a female body. These "desires to engage in sex with a male/female" are likely to be firmly fixed in the brain – regardless of the physical properties of the body that that the brain finds itself in.

On the other hand, evolution has no reason to fix in the brain an aversion to a state in which homosexual acts exist. Evidence suggests that it is acquired through learning - from a childhood of being exposed to people who (and to religious texts that) condemn those engage in homosexual acts. Where it is the case that these social forces are causing the aversion, a change in social forces can eliminate the aversion and, in doing so, eliminate the conflict.

We need to apply these criteria not only to the desires themselves, but to the other desires that are fulfilled or thwarted. The aversion to homosexual acts causes people to condemn those with desires that would motivate homosexual acts. This, in turn, causes people who suffer this condemnation to experience self-hatred, which leads to self-destructive and anti-social behaviors. These self-destructive and anti-social behaviors thwart further desires. Can those further desires be easily modified? Or are they desires that are fixed? If fixed, then this strengthens our reasons for condemning those with an aversion to homosexual acts taking place.

Even if the desires affected can be easily modified, we have to ask whether we have reason to promote those desires or inhibit them. Laws against homosexual acts may, for some, motivate them to act in ways that would thwart a desire to obey the law. The desire to obey the law is learned. Yet, we do not have many and good reasons to toss aside this desire to obey the law - it is important (in a just society). The mere fact that this desire can be modified does not argue that it should be modified.

Conclusion

All of these considerations suggest that the moral calculus may be difficult. However, there is no fault to be found in a theory that reports as true what is in fact true – that on some issues determining the morally right answer is very difficult, or nearly impossible.

This does not change the fact that there are issues where determining the right answer appears easy – such as the value of promoting an aversion to killing aggressors, or lying, or engaging in acts intimately involving others without their consent.

Furthermore, we do not need to compute the effect of every little desire. The movement of an object through space is influenced by every asteroid, star, and galaxy that exists. However, a rocket scientist plotting the course of a probe to Mars does not need to put all of this data in her calculations. She only needs to include those items that have the greatest influence on the final result.

In the case of homosexuality, it would appear that the case can be easily drawn against the aversion to homosexual acts taking place. By reducing incidents of this aversion – which is susceptible to social tools – homosexuals can better fulfill their desires, we can reduce the psychological harms that cause those with these desires to engage in self-destructive and anti-social behaviors, and can give more support to principles that aim at reducing the spread of disease, cause physical harm, or violate rules of consent. There are more reasons to condemn an aversion that homosexual acts exist than to condemn those desires that cause people to engage in homosexual acts.

Or so it seems.