Here, I am considering Gregory's third argument in defense of the thesis, which he calls "DAB",: "To desire to Φ is to believe that you have normative reason to Φ."
If DAB is true, this amounts to the claim that what we ought to do depends on our beliefs about what we have reason to do. It is very plausible that this claim is ambiguous between something true and something false. It is false in the sense that one’s beliefs might be false. But it is true in the sense that what we rationally ought to do does depend on our beliefs about what we have reason to do. So DAB resolves the controversy regarding whether what we ought to do depends on our desires.
(Gregory, Alex, (2017), “Might Desires Be Beliefs about Normative Reasons for Action?” In Deonna J. & Lauria F. (eds). The Nature of Desire. Oxford University Press.)
I am not certain what controversy Gregory is referring to.
I suspect that the controversy he is referring to has to do with cases such as: Jim believes that taking a pill will cure his cancer. Given that he desires to cure his cancer, does he have reason to take the pill? What if the pill is a placebo? Does he still have reason to take it?
Gregory says, "It is false in the sense that one's belief might be false." But what belief is he talking about? A desire, according to Gregory, is a belief about what has reason to do. The agent desires to take the pill, because he believes he has reason to take the pill. He believes that it will cure his cancer. So, he has a desire to take the pill. The belief that the pill will cure his cancer is false. But his belief that he has a reason to take the pill (according to Gregory) is true.
From this, we can say that it is false that he ought to take the pill because it will not cure is cancer. However, it is true that he ought to take the pill because the rational thing for a person with cancer to do if he has a pill that he believes will cure it is to take the pill. To refuse to do so under these circumstances is irrational. The "ought" term is ambiguous.
If this is analysis is correct, then it is relevant to note that we can get the same conclusion without DAB.
Gregory is referring to the so-called desire to take the pill. Taking the pill is desired as a means, not as an end. The end - the final desire - is the desire to cure the cancer. Desires as means, as I have argued in the previous post, is a combination of beliefs and desires-as-ends. It is the beliefs, not the ends, that are sensitive to evidence.
Now, we can have the same ambiguity of ought without Gregory's DAB. The actual desire in this case, the desire to cure the cancer, is not sensitive to evidence. However, the belief that the pill will cure the cancer is subject to evidence. We have the same distinction between what the agent believes will cure the cancer and what will cure the cancer. We have the same two senses of "ought" - the one that relates the action to the desire through the belief, and the one that relates the action to the desire directly - independent of the belief. We have an objective "ought" and a subjective "ought". The objective "ought" says "You ought not take the pill; it will do no good." The subjective "ought" says "You ought to take the pill. It is what a person with a desire to cure cancer and a belief that taking the pill will cure cancer would do."
However, we have gotten this conclusion without interpreting desire - in this case, the desire to cure the cancer - as any type of belief about one has a normative reason to do. The desire is still nothing more than the assignment of a value to a state of affair - an assignment that is not sensitive to evidence.
The summary of these last three posts is that Gregory has given us no reason to favor the idea that a desire is a belief about a normative reason. Where this thesis seems to make sense, Gregory has confused what is desired as a means with what is desired as an end. What is desired as a means is sensitive to evidence and prone to the objective/subjective distinction because it contains a belief within it. That belief is sensitive to evidence and subject to the objective/subjective distinction. The desire-as-end that also makes up the desire-as-means is not. We cannot reduce the desire-as-end to a belief about what one has a normative reason to do unless we can come up with a theory of normative reasons that does not, in turn, refer back to that same desire.
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