Desirism Book - Part 0001: Introduction

It is time for me to write a new book on desirism.

I have thought about this quite a bit, and given considerable thought as to how to go about it. I have had a preferred method. However, I had doubts as to the merits of this method.

My preferred method has been to start out with a single person, having a single desire. Using this simplified model, I would use this simplified universe to describe the relevant facts about being a person with a desire. I would then add another person with the potential to have a new desire, and describe the new set of relationships that arise as a result.

My question has been, is this really an appropriate way to go about a project such as this?

My standard defense of this practice has been that this is what I have found in science. When I was first taught the principles of mechanics, I was told to imagine a mass in a universe made up otherwise of massless strings and frictionless pullies. In astronomy class, I was introduced to the concepts of orbits by the idea that I should imagine a universe with one object - a planet or a sun - with another object orbiting around it. No other mass or force, no other source of gravity, existed in this simplified universe.

Consequently, my approach was to start with one person, with one desire, freed of anything else that might confuse or distort things in this universe until we could understand this most basic situation. Then, we can add complications as we approach, more and more closely, what is the case in the real world.

Is this really a good way of starting?

I am more confident now that it is an appropriate way to start.

I was originally bothered by the fact that we were starting with a description if a situation where some assumptions are false. However, this is also true of the physicist who starts with the assumption of frictionless surfaces and massless strings. It is just as true of the astronomer who starts with an assumption that the universe contains only two bodies. This is only an objection if the false assumptions are not removed by the time one gets to discussing the real world.

I was also originally bothered by the fact that we were examining morality in an imaginary world. I will argue in the pages that follow that morality is tuned to fit the real world. In fact, a primary function of morality is to tune behavior so that it produces socially useful results in the universe in which we happen to exist. If one changes certain facts about the world, we can change what is moral or immoral.

This implies that morality is not tuned to deal with situations that are rare or, better yet, never occur at all. A famous set of examples concern the question of whether it is morally permissible - even obligatory - to push an unsuspecting fat man off of a bridge against his will if one believes that his mass will otherwise stop a runaway trolly car that would otherwise kill five other people. My attitude is that we have tuned our morality to direct our behavior in circumstances we actually might confront. Morality is whether or not to take money out of a co-worker's purse or to repay the $20 one borrowed from a neighbor. It is not about pushing fat people in front of trolly cars.

So, can we have anything interesting to say about one person with one desire living alone in the universe?

Well, we are not going to make a claim that because something turns out to be immoral in this imaginary world that it is immoral in our world. Nor am I going to create stories to test our moral intuitions in circumstances that arise only in science fiction. We are going to be talking about morality in science-fiction scenarios. However, the moral claims will be claims true in those scenarios, and potentially false where the assumptions that govern that world become false.

Our purpose, then, is to get a general understanding of desires, the relationships between them, and how these relationships generate morality. We will get an understanding of the implications of changing certain assumptions. Ultimately, we will get something of an understanding of how morality works in the real world.

However, we will start with one person and one desire.

Stay tuned for Desirism Book - Part 0002: One Person, One Desire