In Praise of Desire

337 Pages·2013·1.3 MB·English

by  Nomy Arpaly

In Praise of Desire
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OXFORD MORAL THEORY
Series Editor
David Copp, University of California, Davis
Drawing Morals: Essays in Ethical Theory
Thomas Hurka
Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality
Douglas W. Portmore
Against Absolute Goodness
Richard Kraut
The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty: A Study of Thick Concepts in Ethics
Pekka Väyrynen
In Praise of Desire
Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder
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In Praise of Desire
Nomy Arpaly
Timothy Schroeder
1
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arpaly, Nomy.
In praise of desire / Nomy Arpaly, Timothy Schroeder.
pages cm.—(Oxford moral theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–934816–9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Desire (Philosophy) 2. Ethics.
3. Virtue. 4. Virtues. I. Title.
B105.D44A77 2014
171'.2—dc23
2013019576

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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{ CONTENTS }
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I.1 . Moral Psychology 1
I.2 . Reason and Appetite 2
I.3 . Intrinsic, Instrumental, and Realizer Desires 6
I.4 . The Many Guises of the Good 14
I.5 . The Work to Be Done 16
PART I Reason
1. Deliberation 19
1.1 . The Nature of Deliberation 21
1.2 . The Rationality of Acts of Deliberation 26
1.3 . Deliberation and Regress 29
1.4 . Other Objections 33
1.5 . Deliberative Exceptionalism 36
1.6 . Is There an Ambiguity? 37
1.7 . If Not Deliberation, Then Representation? 40
1.8 . Thinking and Acting for Reasons without Deliberation 42
2. How Deliberation Works 43
2.1 . The Role of Deliberation 43
2.2 . How Deliberation Works 47
2.3 . The Moral of the Story 50
3. Thinking and Acting for Reasons 53
3.1 . Objective Reasons and Rationalizing Reasons 53
3.2 . Physical Properties, Contents, and Reasons 56
3.3 . Because of Reasons 61
3.4 . Reasons, Causes, and Mountain Climbers 67
3.5 . Acting for Bad Reasons 72
3.6 . Thinking and Acting for Multiple Reasons and Nonreasons 75
3.7 . Habit and Inaction 80
3.8 . Acting for Moral Reasons 86
PART II Desire
4. Love and Care 93
4.1 . Love 93
4.2 . Care 104
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vi Contents
5. What Desires Are Not 110
5.1 . Action Is Not the Essence of Desire 111
5.2 . Feeling Is Not the Essence of Desire 116
6. What Desires Are 126
6.1 . The Reward and Punishment Systems 127
6.2 . The Reward System Causes What Desires Cause 137
6.3 . Intrinsic Desires are a Natural Kind 143
6.4 . Solutions and Promissory Notes 146
PART III Virtue
7. Credit and Blame 159
7.1 . Attributability and Accountability 159
7.2 . Good Will and Ill Will 162
7.3 . A Theory of Praise- and Blameworthiness 169
7.4 . Side Constraints 171
7.5 . Conceptualization 176
7.6 . Too Much Credit, Too Much Blame 187
7.7 . Partial Good and Ill Will 194
8. Virtue 200
8.1 . A Theory of Virtue 202
8.2 . The Theory Applied 203
8.3 . Virtues and Their Effects 206
8.4 . Virtue and Involuntary Attitudes: Two Alternative Views 215
8.5 . Virtuous Irrationality 219
8.6 . The Unity of the Virtues 221
9. Virtue and Cognition 225
9.1 . Familiar Cognitive Effects of Desire 226
9.2 . The Effects of Good Will on Cognition 231
9.3 . The Vice of Being Prejudiced 233
9.4 . The Vice of Being Close-Minded 239
9.5 . The Virtue of Being Open-Minded 241
9.6 . Modesty and Immodesty 245
9.7 . Vicious Dreams 250
P ART IV Puzzles
10. Inner Struggle 259
10.1 . Akrasia 259
10.2 . The Experience of Inner Struggle 261
10.3 . Inner Struggle Explained 265
11. Addiction 274
11.1 . The Puzzle 274
11.2 . The Science of Addiction 276
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Contents vii
11.3 . The Philosophy of Addiction 285
11.4 . The Blameworthiness of Addicts 287
11.5 . Addiction in Moral Psychology 289
Conclusion 290
C.1 . Taking Stock 290
C.2 . Looking Forward 292
Works Cited   299
Example Index 309
Subject Index 313
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{ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS }
We owe at least the following people acknowledgments for their generous
help on parts or all of this work: Nicolas Bommarito, John Broome, Sarah
Buss, Ben Caplan, David Christensen, Rachel Cohon, Justin D’Arms, Stephen
Darwall, John Doris, James Dreier, Julia Driver, David Estlund, Thomas Fisher,
John Hurst, Christa Johnson, Jaegwon Kim, Niko Kolodny, Han Li, Danny
Pearlberg, Philip Pettit, Peter Railton, Richard Samuels, Valerie Tiberius,
Vladimir Vlaovic, and Jeremy Weiss.
Julia Driver, Julia Markovits, and Peter Railton were our referees for Oxford
University Press, and they provided us with a wealth of valuable feedback in
that capacity.
This work also greatly benefi ted from pieces of it (better: versions of pieces
of it) being presented to the philosophers at the Chapel Hill Colloquium,
Davidson College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Moral
Psychology Research Group, the Practical Reason and Metaethics Conference
at the University of Nebraska, Ohio State University, the Ohio Philosophical
Association, the St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality, the
Society for the Theory of Ethics and Politics, the Stanford ethics reading group
(2012–2013), the State University of New York at Albany, the University of
California–Davis, the University of Western Kentucky, and the Workshop on
Moral Expertise.
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford pro-
vided fi nancial support and a wonderful environment for Tim Schroeder to do
fi nal revisions.
Much of chapters 1 and 2 is drawn from our 2012 paper, “Deliberation and
Acting for Reasons,” Philosophical Review 121, 209–239. Copyright, 2012,
Cornell University. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of Duke
University Press.
Chapter 6 is drawn from our paper, “The Neuroscience of Desire,” to appear
in D. Jacobson and J. D’Arms (eds.) Moral Psychology and Human Agency .
New York: Oxford University Press. Appearing here by kind permission of
Oxford University Press.
Much of chapter  9 is drawn from Nomy Arpaly’s 2011 paper,
“Open-Mindedness as a Moral Virtue,” A merican Philosophical Quarterly 48,
75–85. Copyright, 2011, A merican Philosophical Quarterly .
Chapter 11 is drawn from our paper, “Addiction and Blameworthiness,”
to appear in Neil Levy (ed.) A ddiction and Self-Control . New York: Oxford
University Press. Appearing here by kind permission of Oxford University Press.
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