Desire And Human
Desires are states of mind that are expressed by terms like “wanting”, “wishing”, “longing” or “craving”. A great variety of features is commonly associated with desires. They are seen as propositional attitudes towards conceivable states of affairs. They aim to change the world by representing how the world should be, unlike beliefs, which aim to represent how the world is. Desires are closely related to agency: they motivate the agent to realize them. For this to be possible, a desire has to be combined with a belief about which action would realize it. Desires present their objects in a favourable light, as something that appears to be good. Their fulfilment is normally experienced as pleasurable in contrast to the negative experience of failing to do so. Conscious desires are usually accompanied by some form of emotional response. While many researchers roughly agree on these general features, there is significant disagreement about how to define desires, i.e. which of these features are essential and which ones are merely accidental. Action-based theories define desires as structures that incline us toward actions. Pleasure-based theories focus on the tendency of desires to cause pleasure when fulfilled. Value-based theories identify desires with attitudes toward values, like judging or having an appearance that something is good.
It is often taken for granted that our desires can contribute to what it is rational for us to do. This paper examines an account of desire—the ‘guise of the good’— that promises an explanation of this datum. I argue that extant guise-of-the-good accounts fail to provide an adequate explanation of how a class of desires—basic desires—contributes to practical rationality. I develop an alternative guise-of-the-good account on which basic desires attune us to our reasons for action in virtue of their biological function. This account emphasizes the role of desire as part of our competence to recognise and respond to normative reasons.
Desire is a quite fundamental concept. As such, it is relevant for many different fields. Various definitions and theories of other concepts have been expressed in terms of desires. Actions depend on desires and moral praiseworthiness is sometimes defined in terms of being motivated by the right desire. A popular contemporary approach defines value as that which is fitting to desire. Desire-satisfaction theories of well-being state that a person’s well-being is determined by whether that person’s desires are satisfied. It has been suggested that to prefer one thing to another is just to have a stronger desire for the former thing. An influential theory of personhood holds that only entities with higher-order desires can be persons.
Personhood is what people have. There are various theories about what constitutes personhood. Most agree that being a person has to do with having certain mental abilities and is connected to having a certain moral and legal status. An influential theory of persons is due by Harry Frankfurt. He defines persons in terms of higher-order desires. Many of the desires we have, like the desire to have ice cream or to take a vacation, are first-order desires. Higher-order desires, on the other hand, are desires about other desires. They are most prominent in cases where a person has a desire he does not want to have. A recovering addict, for example, may have both a first-order desire to take drugs and a second-order desire not to follow this first-order desire. Or a religious ascetic may still have sexual desires while at the same time wanting to be free of these desires. According to Frankfurt, having second-order volitions, i.e. second-order desires about which first-order desires are followed, is the mark of personhood. It is a form of caring about oneself, of being concerned with who one is and what one does. Not all entities with a mind have higher-order volitions. Frankfurt terms them “wantons’ ‘ in contrast to “persons”. In his view, animals and maybe also some human beings are wontons.
Both psychology and philosophy are interested in where desires come from or how they form. An important distinction for this investigation is between intrinsic desires, i.e. what the subject wants for its own sake, and instrumental desires, i.e. what the subject wants for the sake of something else. Instrumental desires depend on their formation and existence on other desires. For example, Segun has a desire to find a charging station at the airport. This desire is instrumental because it is based on another desire: to keep her mobile phone from dying. Without the latter desire, the former would not have come into existence. As an additional requirement, a possibly unconscious belief or judgment is necessary to the effect that the fulfillment of the instrumental desire would somehow contribute to the fulfillment of the desire it is based on. Instrumental desires usually pass away after the desires they are based on ceasing to exist. But defective cases are possible where, often due to absentmindedness, the instrumental desire remains. Such cases are sometimes termed “motivational inertia”. Something like this might be the case when the agent finds himself with a desire to go to the kitchen, only to realize upon arriving that he does not know what he wants there.
Desires play a central role in actions as what motivates them. It is usually held that a desire by itself is not sufficient: it has to be combined with a belief that the action in question would contribute to the fulfillment of the desire. The notion of practical reasons is closely related to motivation and desire. Some philosophers, often from a Humean tradition, simply identify an agent’s desires with the practical reasons he has. A closely related view holds that desires are not reasons themselves but present reasons to the agent. A strength of these positions is that they can give a straightforward explanation of how practical reasons can act as motivation. But an important objection is that we may have reasons to do things without a desire to do them. This is especially relevant in the field of morality. Peter Singer, for example, suggests that most people living in developed countries have a moral obligation to donate a significant portion of their income to charities. Such an obligation would constitute a practical reason to act accordingly even for people who feel no desire to do so.
Intrinsic desires, on the other hand, do not depend on other desires. Some authors hold that all or at least some intrinsic desires are inborn or innate, for example, desires for pleasure or nutrition. But other authors suggest that even these relatively basic desires may depend to some extent on experience: before we can desire a pleasurable object, we have to learn, through a hedonic experience of this object for example, that it is pleasurable. But it is also conceivable that reason by itself generates intrinsic desires. In this view, reasoning to the conclusion that it would be rational to have a certain intrinsic desire causes the subject to have this desire. It has also been proposed that instrumental desires may be transformed into intrinsic desires under the right conditions. This could be possible through processes of reward-based learning. The idea is that whatever reliably predicts the fulfillment of intrinsic desires may itself become the object of an intrinsic desire. So a baby may initially only instrumentally desire its mother because of the warmth, hugs and milk she provides. But over time, this instrumental desire may become an intrinsic desire.
It is common in axiology to define value about desire. Such approaches fall under the category of fitting-attitude theories. According to them, an object is valuable if it is fitting to desire this object or if we ought to desire it. This is sometimes expressed by saying that the object is desirable, appropriately desired or worthy of desire. Two important aspects of this type of position are that it reduces values to deontic notions, or what we ought to feel and that it makes values dependent on human responses and attitudes. Despite their popularity, fitting-attitude theories of value face various theoretical objections. An often-cited one is the wrong kind of reason problem, which is based on the consideration that facts independent of the value of an object may affect whether this object ought to be desired. In one thought experiment, an evil demon threatens the agent to kill her family unless she desires him. In such a situation, it is fitting for the agent to desire the demon to save her family, even though the demon does not possess positive value.
Slowly, the protective guard around your relationship might start to chip away. The very thing that makes your relationship different to every other relationship in your life slowly stops. You can spend time with other people, laugh, cry, argue, share a meal and go on holidays with them – but sex is something that is only for the two of you, building and nurturing intimacy and connection that is shared between the two of you and nobody else. This is why it deserves attention.
To desire is to be in a particular state of mind. It is a state of mind familiar to everyone who has ever wanted to drink water or desired to know what has happened to an old friend, but its familiarity does not make it easy to give a theory of desire. Controversy immediately breaks out when asking whether wanting water and desiring knowledge is, at the bottom, the same state of mind as others that seem somewhat similar: wishing never to have been born, preferring mangoes to peaches, craving gin, having world conquest as one’s goal, having a purpose in sneaking out to the shed or being inclined to provoke just for the sake of provocation. These varied states of mind have all been grouped under the heading of ‘pro attitudes’, but whether the pro attitudes are fundamentally one mental state or many is disputed.
Despite the disputes, it is nonetheless possible to get a fix on desire itself. Desiring is a state of mind that is commonly associated with several different effects: a person with a desire tends to act in certain ways, feel in certain ways, and think in certain ways.
Well-being is usually considered a special type of value: the well-being of a person is what is ultimately good for this person. Desire-satisfaction theories are among the major theories of well-being. They state that a person’s well-being is determined by whether that person’s desires are satisfied: the higher the number of satisfied desires, the higher the well-being. One problem for some versions of desire theory is that not all desires are good: some desires may even have terrible consequences for the agent. Desire theorists have tried to avoid this objection by holding that what matters are not actual desires but the desires the agent would have if she was fully informed.
It is generally held that desires come on a continuum of strength: desires can be stronger or weaker. The strength of a desire is typically said to be constituted by the desire’s causal power regarding the control of action: for one desire to be stronger than another is for the agent to be disposed to act upon it, rather than the second desire, in a situation in which all else is equal, and the agent believes that each desire is satisfiable by a distinct action, and the agent believes that the desires are not jointly satisfiable. This way of characterizing desire strength is most suited to an action-based theory of desire. But for each theory of desire, there is a corresponding theory of desire strength available. Desire strength could be determined by the amount of pleasure or displeasure apparent satisfaction of the desire would bring, by the degree to which a state of affairs seems good, or by the degree to which one’s attention is drawn to the reasons to bring some state of affairs about, or by the amount of reward-based learning apparent satisfaction of the desire would cause, or by some average of all of these.
Desire feeds physical intimacy which in turn feeds connection, nurturance and the protective guard around relationships. Intimate relationships in which desire has faded can take on the shape of housemates or colleagues. There can still be love and a deep emotional bond in these relationships, and there might even still be sex, but without desire, the way we see ourselves and feel about ourselves changes and will ultimately play out in the relationship. Understanding the nature of desire is key to getting it back.
The intensity of desire in relationships will ebb and flow. Kids, work, life stress, hormonal changes and those ‘but-they’re-just-so-comfy-feel-them’ gray trackies that glue themselves to you in winter have a way of putting out the fire a little, but problems come about when it stays out for too long. Intimacy might fade, the connection might loosen and sex just doesn’t happen anymore.
We need to feel safe and secure in a relationship – we can’t build intimacy and closeness without it. We need to feel as though the relationship has staying power and that the person we love isn’t about to walk out the door. We need a sense of familiarity and predictability. We need to know what happens when we reach out and we need an idea of where the relationship is headed.
But we also need adventure and excitement. As much as we need predictability, we also need mystery and surprise. As much as we need security and safety, we need adventure and risk. It’s how we feel the edges of ourselves and stop ourselves and our relationship from stagnating.
