Desires 2008: Summary 02: S. Doring and B. Eker

Doring, Sabine A. and Eker, Bahadir, (2017). “Desires Without Guises: Why We Need Not Value What We Want," In Deonna J. & Lauria F. (eds). The Nature of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Thesis:

Doring and Eker make three main claims:

(D1) Necessarily, for any agent a, any proposition p, any time t, and any act type φ, if, at t, a desires that p, then a is disposed at t to φ in circumstances where a takes her φ-ing to be conducive to p’s being the case.

Alternatively:

(D1*) Necessarily, for any agent a, any proposition p, any time t, and any act type φ, if, at t, a desires that p, then, if, at t, a took her φ-ing to be conducive to p’s being the case, a would φ, ceteris paribus.

Also:

(D2) Necessarily, for any agent a, any proposition p, any time t, if, at t, a desires that p, then there is at least one act type φ such that, at t, a does not think her φ-ing not to be conducive to p’s being the case.

(D3) Necessarily, for any agent a, any proposition p, any time t, if, at t, a desires that p, then, at t, a does not think p already to be the case.

Questions:

Actually, the first thing that I want to say is not a question. It is a comment.

D3 seems false.

Assume that I am cuddling with my wife. According to D3, I can only want to cuddle with my wife if I do not think that I am already cuddling with her. I cannot want to cuddle with her and cuddle with her at the same time.

To me, this makes no sense. Of course I can want to cuddle with my wife while I am cuddling with her.
The argument against the possibility of wanting to cuddle with my wife while I am cuddling with her says that I cannot “take my φ-ing to be conducive to p’s being the case” if p is already the case. So, if I had a desire to cuddle with my wife while I was cuddling with my wife, this would be a counter-example to D1. It would be a case in which I had a desire (to cuddle with my wife) when it would not make sense for me to “take my φ-ing to be conducive to p’s being the case.”

As I see it, this set of counter-examples simply defeat D1.

To handle this type of move, the response is to say that I would not have a desire to cuddle with my wife while cuddling with her. Instead, I would have a different desire – a desire to continue to cuddle with her. Even as I cuddle with her, I can “take my φ-ing to be conducive to my continuing to cuddle with her being the case.”

Yet, there is something odd with this answer. Rather than postulating a desire that I am cuddling with my wife – a desire that motivates me to seek an opportunity to cuddle with her while it is not the case, and to keep cuddling with her once it is the case – this thesis says that there are two separate and distinct desires. There is a desire to cuddle with my wife that exists until I am cuddling with my wife. Then, at that instant, the desire to cuddle with my wife ceases to exist, and a different desire that I continue to cuddle with my wife suddenly pops into existence.

It simply makes more sense to say that the desire that I have to cuddle with my wife when I get home from work, and the desire to continue cuddling with my wife as we sit on the couch watching television, is the same desire.

I can draw some support for this view of desire from the biology of desire.

Let us look at hunger. When the stomach is empty, it secretes a hormone called ghrelin. This is associated with the desire to eat. When the agent starts to eat and the stomach begins to fill up, secretions of ghrelin decrease, and so does the desire to (continue) eating.

There is no desire to eat that disappears the instant one puts the first fork full of food in one’s mouth, and a separate desire to continue eating that emerges instantly at the same time one starts eating. There is a single desire – a desire “that I am eating” that motivates the agent to find food, and then to eat the food once it is found, until the agent is full.

Besides, an agent cannot have a desire that p continues unless, at the same time, one thinks that p is already the case. The idea that “p should continue” and “p is not currently the case” are quite incompatible ideas.

This way of looking at the issue seems more friendly to the evaluativist view than to the dispositionist view. It can be explained by the fact that the agent sees a certain amount of value in cuddling with his wife or in eating, a value that motivates him to realize such a state until it is made to exist, and to preserve that state once it exists – because it is important (to the agent).

My second question is: what about the strength of the desire?

This question is attached to a related issue: doesn’t the dispositional account get extremely complicated very quickly when there is more than one desire?

If we are talking about an agent with just one desire, a desire that p, then we may be able to make sense of a dispositional account whereby the agent is disposed to make it the case that p, if possible.

However, once we add a second desire, we have to add a number of conditions that describe how these desires are weighed against each other – a set of counterfactuals that explain the conditions under which the agent is disposed to act in accordance to one desire as opposed to another.

Now, add a third desire. What are the conditions when the agent faces a choice between fulfilling D1, but thwarting both D2 and D3, or must choose between fulfilling Desire 1 and Desire 2 or Desire 3 alone? Add a fourth, fifth, and sixth desire, and things get very complicated very fast.

One way to tame this complexity is to give each desire a weight or strength – to attach a value to each object of desire specifying the importance it has for the agent. This gives us a way of weighing different concerns, to rank some as more important and others as less important.

There is nothing in D1 that handles the concept of a strength of a desire or the importance of its object. That requires attributing a value to the object, and that suggests an evaluativist theory rather than a dispositional theory.