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Irrational desires

Philosophical Studies 62 (1):23 - 44 (1991)

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  1. Is the desire for life rational?Christophe de Ray - forthcoming - Religious Studies:1-19.
    The question of the meaning of life has long been thought to be closely intertwined with that of the existence of God. I offer a new theistic, anti-naturalist argument from the meaning of life. It is argued that the desire for life is irrational on naturalism, since there would be no good reason to believe that life is worthwhile on the whole if naturalism were true. As I show, the same cannot be argued of theism. Since it is clear that (...)
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  • Desire-Based Theories of Reasons and the Guise of the Good.Kael McCormack - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (47):1288-1321.
    I propose an account of desire that reconciles two apparently conflicting intuitions about practical agency. I do so by exploring a certain intuitive datum. The intuitive datum is that often when an agent desires P she will seem to immediately and conclusively know that there is a reason to bring P about. Desire-based theories of reasons seem uniquely placed to explain this intuitive datum. On this view, desires are the source of an agent’s practical reasons. A desire for P grounds (...)
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  • On the Individuation of Choice Options.Roberto Fumagalli - 2020 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (4):338-365.
    Decision theorists have attempted to accommodate several violations of decision theory’s axiomatic requirements by modifying how agents’ choice options are individuated and formally represented. In recent years, prominent authors have worried that these modifications threaten to trivialize decision theory, make the theory unfalsifiable, impose overdemanding requirements on decision theorists, and hamper decision theory’s internal coherence. In this paper, I draw on leading descriptive and normative works in contemporary decision theory to address these prominent concerns. In doing so, I articulate and (...)
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  • Frustrating Absences.André J. Abath - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (53):45-62.
    Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked (...)
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  • “Yes, the theory is abstemious, but...”: A Critique of Yehezkel.Regan Lance Reitsma - 2017 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 13 (1):59-79.
    This article is a critique of Gal Yehezkel’s attempt to refute subjectivism about normative practical reasons, a school of thought inspired by Hume. Yehezkel believes reason, far from being, as Hume puts it, “the slave of the passions,” has the normative authority to be a critic of basic desires and argues that subjectivism lacks the theoretical resources both to acknowledge this alleged truth and to analyze the distinction between wanting an outcome and intending to pursue it. I contend his refutation (...)
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  • Affective Experience, Desire, and Reasons for Action.Declan Smithies & Jeremy Weiss - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (1):27-54.
    What is the role of affective experience in explaining how our desires provide us with reasons for action? When we desire that p, we are thereby disposed to feel attracted to the prospect that p, or to feel averse to the prospect that not-p. In this paper, we argue that affective experiences – including feelings of attraction and aversion – provide us with reasons for action in virtue of their phenomenal character. Moreover, we argue that desires provide us with reasons (...)
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  • How a Modern-day Hume Can Reject a Desire Categorically: A Perplexity and a Theoretically Modest Proposal.Regan Lance Reitsma - 2014 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 9 (2):48-66.
    We often treat our basic, unmotivated desires as reason-giving: you’re thirsty and take yourself to have a reason to walk to the drinking fountain; you care intrinsically about your young daughter and take yourself to have a reason to feed and clothe her. We think these desires generate normative practical reasons. But are there basic desires that don’t? It might seem so, for we sometimes find ourselves impelled to do some very strange, and some very awful, things. For example, would (...)
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  • A Foundation for the Conception of Law as Practical Reason.Stefano Bertea - 2015 - Law and Philosophy 34 (1):55-88.
    This essay discusses a foundation of the connection argued to exist between law and practical reason that has proved to be highly influential and debated in contemporary legal philosophy – Alexy’s. After reconstructing Alexy’s conception of practical reason as well as its foundation, I criticise the weak transcendental-pragmatic argument Alexy uses to ground the authority of practical reason. This argument, I argue, can only show why occasionally, as opposed to necessarily, we ought to follow the guidance of practical reason, and (...)
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  • Rational preference: Decision theory as a theory of practical rationality.James Dreier - 1996 - Theory and Decision 40 (3):249-276.
    In general, the technical apparatus of decision theory is well developed. It has loads of theorems, and they can be proved from axioms. Many of the theorems are interesting, and useful both from a philosophical and a practical perspective. But decision theory does not have a well agreed upon interpretation. Its technical terms, in particular, ‘utility’ and ‘preference’ do not have a single clear and uncontroversial meaning. How to interpret these terms depends, of course, on what purposes in pursuit of (...)
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  • The Hume Literature, 1986-1993.William E. Morris - 1994 - Hume Studies 20 (2):299-326.
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  • Moral Rationalism and the Normative Status of Desiderative Coherence.Patricia Marino - 2010 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 7 (2):227-252.
    This paper concerns the normative status of coherence of desires, in the context of moral rationalism. I argue that 'desiderative coherence' is not tied to rationality, but is rather of pragmatic, instrumental, and sometimes moral value. This means that desire-based views cannot rely on coherence to support non-agent-relative accounts of moral reasons. For example, on Michael Smith's neo-rationalist view, you have 'normative reason' to do whatever your maximally coherent and fully informed self would want you to do, whether you want (...)
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  • Misinformation, subjectivism, and the rational criticizability of desire.Jay Jian - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):845-866.
    Orthodox Humeans about normative reasons for action believe that there are no rational principles governing the substantive content of desire. But they also believe that desires with misinformed content should be rejected and cannot be the proper subjective sources of normative reasons for action. These two ideas, I argue, in fact stand in tension with each other: The Humean rejection of misinformed desire actually has to invoke a feasibility principle for desire, a semi-substantive rational principle that is already built into (...)
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  • (1 other version)Norms for pure desire.Victor M. Verdejo - 2020 - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 35:95-112.
    According to a widespread, broadly Humean consensus, desires and other conative attitudes seem as such to be free from any normative constraints of rationality. However, rational subjects are also required to be attitude-coherent in ways that prima facie hold sway for desire. I here examine the plausibility of this idea by proposing several principlesfor coherent desire. These principles parallel principles for coherent belief and can be used to make a case for a kind of purely conative normativity. I consider several (...)
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  • Coherentism and Foundationalism in the Practical Domain.Stefano Bertea - 2016 - Jurisprudence 7 (2):365-375.
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  • (1 other version)Moral Coherence and Principle Pluralism.Patricia Marino - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (6):727-749.
    This paper develops and defends a conception of moral coherence that is suitable for use in contexts of principle pluralism. I argue that, as they are traditionally understood, coherence methods stack the deck against pluralist theories, by incorporating norms such as systematicity—that the principles of a theory should be as few and as simple as possible. I develop and defend an alternative, minimal, conception of coherence that focuses instead on consistency. It has been suggested that consistency in this context should (...)
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  • A Defence of a Rationalist Conception of Practical Reason.Gal Yehezkel - 2017 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 13 (1):39-57.
    In this paper I attempt to refute the instrumental conception of practical reason, and thus defend a rationalist conception of practical reason. I argue that, far from merely playing an instrumental role, reason can be used by an agent to evaluate, that is, to approve or reject, final ends, which might be suggested by desires, and further to determine final ends independently of any desires, whether actual or potential, that the agent might have. My argument relies on an analysis of (...)
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  • Motivation and practical reasons.John J. Tilley - 1997 - Erkenntnis 47 (1):105-127.
    In discussions of practical reason we often encounter the view that a fact is a reason for an agent to act only if the fact is capable of moving the agent to act. This view figures centrally in many philosophical controversies, and while taken for granted by some, it is vigorously disputed by others. In this essay I show that if the disputed position is correctly interpreted, it is well armored against stock objections and implied by a premise that is (...)
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  • A Disjunctive Account of Desire.Kael McCormack - 2022 - Dissertation, University of New South Wales
    This thesis motivates a novel account of desire as the best explanation of an intuitive datum. The intuitive datum is that often when an agent desires P she will immediately, outright know that she has a reason to bring P about. Existing explanations of the intuitive datum cannot simultaneously satisfy two desiderata. We want to explain how desires enable outright knowledge of reasons and also explain the fallibility of desires. Existing views satisfy the first desideratum at the expense of the (...)
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  • Justificatory Reasons for Action.Georg Spielthenner - 2012 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 8 (2):56-72.
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