Abstract
Some motivational cognitivists believe that there are besires—cognitive mental states (typically moral beliefs) that share the key feature of desire (typically desire’s ‘direction of fit’) in virtue of which they are capable of being directly motivational. Besires have been criticized by Humeans and cognitivists alike as philosophically extravagant, incoherent, ad hoc, and incompatible with folk psychology. I provide a response to these standard objections to besires—one motivated independently of common anti-Humean intuitions about the motivational efficacy of moral judgments. I proceed by examining a hypothesis about the nature of appetitive desires—that these paradigmatic motivational attitudes are a mode of perceptual experience—and argue that this hypothesis is committed to the existence of besires. However, despite its commitment to besires, this hypothesis is not extravagant, incoherent, ad hoc, or incompatible with folk psychology. In other words, the standard complaints about besires all fail. The upshot is that there is nothing bizarre about besires, and motivational cognitivism takes on no additional costs by positing them.
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Notes
The label ‘motivational cognitivism’ has become a standard label for accounts that reject the Humean picture. To avoid a potential confusion, it is worth pointing out that ‘cognitivism’ is also a standard label in metaethics for the claims that moral assertions express beliefs and that moral claims are truth-evaluable. These claims do not entail motivational cognitivism.
The term ‘besire’ is owed to Altham (1986).
Many cognitivists want to reject the basic direction of fit metaphor as unhelpful. However, given that many Humeans accept that this metaphor is getting at some deep truths about the nature of motivational states, there is good dialectical reason for granting this assumption. Moreover, I am interested in clarifying the limits of the direction of fit argument. I want to show that even if we grant this much, the Humean argument nevertheless fails.
As I am using the phrase ‘perceptual experience’, it is not intended to be factive. Whereas a subject can perceive that p only if p, an agent can have a perceptual experience as though p even if it turns out that not-p. (Here I follow William Fish (2010, p. 3), who introduces the phrase ‘visual experience’ to cover cases of veridical visual perception, as well as cases of visual illusions and visual hallucinations.) I would like to thank an anonymous referee for helping me sharpen this point.
Dennis Stampe (1986, pp. 167–169) floats something like this as an account of desires generally. (See also Stampe (1987).) I do not want to defend that more extreme claim here. This is because part of what makes (Needy) compelling depends on facts that are relatively distinctive about appetitive desires.
Schueler (1995, pp. 10–11), for instance, distinguishes hunger and thirst from other paradigmatic cravings (like the craving for chocolate) and from desires that are more difficult to characterize (like a ‘craving to see a Cary Grant movie’ or a ‘desire to see my sister and her family next summer’) in part on this basis.
Schueler (1995, p. 197, n. 1) is hesitant to categorize sexual desires with the desires associated with hunger and thirst, because it is not clear how sexual desires are connected to genuine needs. Wayne Davis (1986, p. 65), in contrast, sees appetitive desires as the broader category, while recognizing a proper subset of these desires (what he calls ‘physical drives’) that includes both those connected to needs as well as other kinds of typical cravings: ‘Some people have physical drives for alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and morphine, and everyone has physical drives for urinating, defecating, sleeping, and sex […] but no one to my knowledge has ever had a physical drive for music.’
Schueler (1995, pp. 10–11, 15) also notes the importance of the phenomenological character in distinguishing different types of desires from one another.
Stampe (1987, pp. 371–376) also draws an analogy between desires, generally, and proprioception.
See e.g. Stampe (1987, pp. 355–359). David Sobel and David Copp (2001, p. 47) make a similar point: ‘Consider the apparent puddles one often sees when driving on a hot dry pavement. An experienced driver [may continue] thinking the road is dry when confronted with such an appearance.’ Mary Clayton Coleman (2008, pp. 130–131) likewise notes that ‘Someone familiar with the [Mueller-Lyon] illusion [might have] no tendency at all to stop believing that […] two lines are the same length, even though it […] appears to her that they are different lengths.’
To avoid a possible confusion, I do not mean to commit myself that humans never need sex—I wish to remain neutral on this issue. If anything, I think we should be open to the possibility that sex counts among human needs. This is for two reasons. First, I find it plausible that in addition to physical needs, humans may also have emotional and social needs. The need for sex might be subsumable under one of those categories. Second, even if we are skeptical of social and emotional needs, it is widely acknowledged that romantic relationships and sexual activity both have significant health benefits. These physical benefits may be sufficient to establish that there is a genuine need for sex. But for my purposes here, I do not wish to commit myself one way or the other. I would like to thank an anonymous referee for drawing me out on these ideas.
I would like to thank Fred Schueler for this example.
Most cognitivists accept this too. However, some cognitivists contend that agents are never directly moved by their desires. See, for instance, Dancy (1993, Chapt. 1–3).
Pace Hume who, in the passage from which this quote is taken uses thirst as an example of something that lacks this type of ‘representative quality.’
This complaint is echoed by, among others, Russ Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 137, n. 11).
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for raising this concern.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of the main argument of this paper appeared as part of the final chapter of my doctoral dissertation for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, entitled Doing without Desiring. Abridged versions of this paper have been presented at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Graduate Student Colloquia, the 2011 meeting of the Minnesota Philosophical Society, and the 2012 Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association; I would like to thank everyone in attendance on those occasions for the enjoyable and challenging discussions. For comments on previous drafts and/or helpful conversations related to the issues in this paper, I would like to thank Patrick Arnold, Aaron Bronfman, John Brunero, David Chavez, Mark Decker, Matt Dee, Janice Dowell, Aaron Elliot, Luke Elwonger, Allison Fritz, Cullen Gatten, Christopher Gibilisco, David Henderson, Clare LaFrance, Tim Loughlin, Joe Mendola, Fred Schueler, Anthony Smith, David Sobel, Adam Thomson, Valerie Tiberius, Mark van Roojen, Preston Werner, Eric Wiland, and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies.
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Swartzer, S. Appetitive besires and the fuss about fit. Philos Stud 165, 975–988 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0006-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0006-5