Deseos distinguidos
Authors: Platts Mark 
Published: March 2020

1. In the paper "Distinguished Desires”, Mark Platts examines three basic, widely spread opinions about desires:

(i) Desires are not susceptible of a reasonable evaluation nor can be a product of reason.

(ii) Desires are active powers, internal forces which prompt the agents to act.

(iii) Desires are not propositional attitudes.

2. Adopting the first opinion has carried along several consequences in all realms of our life, particularly in the socio-political one. But Platts fights that conception of desire as something immune to reasonings: he thinks that there are ways of reasonably supporting judgements about desires. Take the desire of power for example; we can come to notice that in order to satisfy such a desire it is necessary to adopt a "political way of life”, and that this in turn seems to require a lack of sensibility towards genuine moral concerns and a disposition to give up one’sown convictions. These considerations, Platts suggests, might be taken as a support —and indeed a reasonable one— for some judgement about the desire of power. A reasonable evaluation about the desire of power can thus take place. Whether thoseconsiderations could possibly have some bearing on the actions of a person who has the desire is another matter.

3. In order to combat the extended view of desires as active powers, Platts endorses Thomas Reid’s critique of several ideas related to this conception in its philosophical expression. First, Reid notices that one who adopts the view that every intentional action is prompted by a desire —a motive, in Reid’s terms—, and that when there are "contrary motives” the strongest must be the one which determines the agent to act, is comparing motives and actions with ordinary causes and effects. A seriousdifficulty with such a comparison is that, on Reid’s own words, "nothing is left to the agent, but to be acted upon by the motives”. Secondly, he sees that this model of human action is in need of some notion of the comparative intensity of desires,in the light of which the thesis that "when there are contrary motives, the strongest must prevail” is either trivial or empirically false. Thirdly, Reid detects a difficulty with those cases in which there is no motive on the other side and the only one available must dictate the action: this, he claims, would lead us to deny "such thing as willfulness, caprice or obstinacy among mankind”.

4. Platts examines the rejection of the thesis that holds that desires are propositional attitudes. Hume is traditionally interpreted (Kenny is the best example) as maintaining this third conception of desires, for he writes that a passion or desire is "an original existence” which "contains not any representativequality”, and that this is why passions cannot be opposed by reason, since the objects of reason are "ideas, consider’d as copies, with those objects, which they represent”. The targets of our desires, on the other hand, are not any "real relations of ideas” nor "real existences”. As Platts reads Hume, this is so because our desires are directed to the world of realities, even though they do not purport to represent it but to modify it.

Nevertheless, Platts does not conclude, as Kenny does, that Hume denies the propositional character of desires. Rather, in Hume’s theory, the object of the attitude of desire shall be, indeed, some "idea” or proposition, whereas the objective of the state of desire shall never be some "real existence”. It may now be inferred (although not in a straightforward way) that Hume should agree with the thesis that desires are isolated from reason. "Given Hume’s ideas on causal relations and rational relations —Platts writes— Hume cannot have any coherent idea of reasonable causation (of the relation of giving rise to).” It will be impossible for him to reconcile the causal role of mental states with the rationalization role of the propositional contents of those states. Thus, Hume has to render as senseless the idea of a process of reasoning taking place within the natural world; consequently, for him there cannot be a process of reasoning directed to evaluate or modify the desires, "original existences”, one happens to have.

5. The last philosopher that Platts takes into consideration is the Bertrand Russell of The Analysis of Mind, who does maintain a non-propositional theory of desires. First of all, Platts considers it convenient to take a look at Russell’s ideas on beliefs. In his analysis, a belief has three elements: the attitude of believing, "an actual experienced feeling”; the content of the belief, which consists in "present occurrences in the believer”; and the objective of the belief, "the particular fact that makes a given belief true or false”. Now, the contents of the beliefs, Russell claims, might be identified with propositions, although from this he does not derive that the objects of desires are not propositions. His argument against the conception of desires as propositional attitudes (which he supposes to be a "common sense” opinion) is of another kind: he invokes the existence of two phenomena which challenge that conception, to wit, the frequency with which human beings act upon unconscious desires, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fact that non-human animals act from mere "impulsion[s] from behind”, not from "attraction[s] from the future”; and if non-human animals do not have purposes, why should we believe, in spite of Darwin, that human beings do have them?

Russell thinks that our faith in rationality is inspired by the fact that humans usually have beliefs about their own desires, about which objects would satisfy such desires. He then sketches a theory that tries to prove that attributing a desire does not require attributing beliefs about that same desire (unconscious desires are, by definition, desires lacking any kinds of beliefs about them). Those beliefs are to be separated from the desire itself, which therefore proves to be non-propositional. Even though beliefs about desires do not seem to represent a problem for Russell’s theory, Platts finds that practical deliberation poses a serious difficulty for it. Take the concepts of a reason to act and of an intentional action: if desires do not have objects, the contents of an agent’s belief could never link with the inexistent contents of that agent’s desires. A belief could not give rise to an intentional action directed to satisfy some given desire in the absence of another specific desire with some specific content, i.e., the desire to have the first desire satisfied. Russell is cautious and avoids the use of such problematic concepts, but the truth is that the concept of intentional action is not so easily dispensable.

[Laura Lecuona]