Desire is commonly spoken of as a state in which the desired object seems good, which apparently ascribes an evaluative element to desire. I offer a new defence of this old idea. As traditionally conceived, this view faces serious objections related to its way of characterizing desire's evaluative content. I develop an alternative conception of evaluative mental content which is plausible in its own right, allows the evaluative desire theorist to avoid the standard objections, and sheds interesting new light on (...) the idea of evaluative experience. (shrink)

One way to defend humane animal agriculture is to insist that the deaths of animals aren’t bad for them. Christopher Belshaw has argued for this position in the most detail, maintaining that death is only bad when it frustrates categorical desires, which he thinks animals lack. We are prepared to grant his account of the badness of death, but we are skeptical of the claim that animals don’t have categorical desires. We contend that Belshaw’s argument against the badness (...) of animal death relies on overly simplistic thought experiments and isn’t sufficiently careful in how it attributes mental states to animals. We present some cases of animal behavior from recent work on animal cognition that are most plausibly understood as spurred by categorical desires and we show how an independently plausible account of mental content—Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics—supports our attribution of categorical desires in those cases. We end by arguing that even if you’re wary of our reliance on teleosemantics, you should still accept it due to considerations about moral risk. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: An Authentic Self College, the Place to Feel Inadequate about Sex The Look The Nature of College Sex Bad Faith or True Desire.

Kant’s claim that virtue has nothing to do with the content of our desires, but depends only on the strength of will needed to manage our desires, depends on an unattractive conception of inclination that he inherits from Hume. Kantians can replace this with a better view of desire without giving up what is most attractive about the Kantian approach: the claim that reason can motivate, and the associated illuminating account of practical freedom.

In The Imaginary, Sartre provides the foundation upon which the development of his theory of bad faith is built, pointing to a fundamental choice at the level of image consciousness between the unreflective projection of the image and the impure reflection upon that image constitutive of imaginative comprehension, or what he refers to in this text as pure comprehension. Pure comprehension can be seen as Sartre's early formulation of pure reflection in which thought is characterised by movement rather than the (...) reification of thought indicative of impure reflection and imaginative comprehension. This will prove to have consequences for the interpretation of Sartre's conceptualizations of desire and bad faith and consequently for Sartrean ontology, psychoanalysis and ethics. (shrink)

Desire satisfaction theories of well-being and deprivationism about the badness of death face similar problems: desire satisfaction theories have trouble locating the time when the satisfaction of a future or past-directed desire benefits a person; deprivationism has trouble locating a time when death is bad for a person. I argue that desire satisfaction theorists and deprivation theorists can address their respective timing problems by accepting fusionism, the view that some events benefit or harm individuals only at fusions of moments in (...) time. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the timing problem for deprivationism because it locates death’s badness at the same time as both the victim of death and death itself, and it accounts for all of the ways that death is bad for a person. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the problem of temporally locating the benefit of future and past-directed desires because it respects several attractive principles, including the view that the intrinsic value of a time for someone is determined solely by states of affairs that obtain at that time and the view that intrinsically beneficial events benefit a person when they occur. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Bad Desire Ignorant Desire Knowledgeable Desire Further Reading.

Despite Diotima’s irresistible virtues and attractiveness across the millennia, she spells trouble for philosophy. It is not her fault that she has been misunderstood, nor is it Plato’s. Rather, I suspect, each era has made of Diotima what it desired her to be. Her malleability is related to the assumption that Plato invented her, that she is a mere literary fiction, licensing the imagination to do what it will. In the first part of my paper, I argue against three contemporary (...) ‘majority views’ about Diotima that I regard as false. The first is that we can be certain she is fictional;1 a second is that Diotima is our best evidence for Plato’s feminism; the third, that she is Plato’s mouthpiece for the higher mysteries in the Symposium. After I have set aside what I regard as false, I proceed in the second half of my paper to develop Diotima’s positive contribution to philosophical psychology, her naturalistic account of the psyche as mortal, unified, and developmental. Whether the view Plato assigns to her is one that he held I do not pretend to know; but it is a powerful, defensible, and coherent view that inspired positive aspects of Freudian psychology in the twentieth century. Freud’s insight, in fact, makes clear how erōs can be developed in relation to the bad as well as the good. (shrink)

Mirroring the set of questions explored in the special report in which this essay appears and through a critical Cree standpoint, this essay poses three provocations intended to upend habits of thought relative to notions of goodness, biocitizenship, and the democratization of scientific pursuit. Styled as foreplay, the essay warms the reader up to the desirable possibility of being a bad biocitizen. I briefly establish the colonial conditions under which the fields of genomic science, biomedical research, and bioethics have been (...) made possible. I then offer Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society as an alternative project aimed at disturbing the territorial, political, and morally inflected claims of nation‐states and their citizens, research institutions and their researchers, and bioeconomies and their consumers to continue to possess Indigenous territories and to study Indigenous bodies while controlling the bioethical principles, protocols, and policies for doing so. The work of Indigenous STS seeks to break down the bounded knowledges of disciplinary reason and map the networked interrelations of problems inhibiting and solutions strengthening the empowerment of Indigenous peoplehoods. (shrink)

When a mother kills her child, we call her a bad mother, but, as this book shows, even mothers who intend to do their children harm are not easily categorized as "mad" or "bad." Maternal love is a complex emotion rich with contradictory impulses and desires, and motherhood is a conflicted state in which women constantly renegotiate the needs mother and child, the self and the other. Applying care ethics philosophy and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and (...) Simone de Beauvoir to real-world experiences of motherhood, Sarah LaChance Adams throws the inherent tensions of motherhood into sharp relief, drawing a more nuanced portrait of the mother and child relationship than previously conceived. The maternal example is particularly instructive for ethical theory, highlighting the dynamics of human interdependence while also affirming separate interests. LaChance Adams particularly focuses on maternal ambivalence and its morally productive role in reinforcing the divergence between oneself and others, helping to recognize the particularities of situation, and negotiating the difference between one's own needs and the desires of others. She ultimately argues maternal filicide is a social problem requiring a collective solution that ethical philosophy and philosophies of care can inform. (shrink)

Breaking Bad, hailed by Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, and many others as the best of all TV dramas, tells the story of a man whose life changes because of the medical death sentence of an advanced cancer diagnosis. The show depicts his metamorphosis from inoffensive chemistry teacher to feared drug lord and remorseless killer. Driven at first by the desire to save his family from destitution, he risks losing his family altogether because of his new life of crime. In defiance (...) of the tradition that viewers demand a TV character who never changes, Breaking Bad is all about the process of change, with each scene carrying forward the morphing of Walter White into the terrible Heisenberg. Can a person be transformed as the result of a few key life choices? Does everyone have the potential to be a ruthless criminal? How will we respond to the knowledge that we will be dead in six months? Is human life subject to laws as remorseless as chemical equations? When does injustice validate brutal retaliation? Why are drug addicts unsuitable for operating the illegal drug business? How can TV viewers remain loyal to a series where the hero becomes the villain? Does Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty rule our destinies? In Breaking Bad and Philosophy, a hand-picked squad of professional thinkers investigate the crimes of Walter White, showing how this story relates to the major themes of philosophy and the major life decisions facing all of us. (shrink)

In his thoughtful defence of very modest moral enhancement, David DeGrazia1 makes the following assumption: ‘Behavioural improvement is highly desirable in the interest of making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’. Later in the paper, he gives a list of some psychological characteristics that ‘all reasonable people can agree … represent moral defects’. I think I am a reasonable person, and I agree that most if not all items on the (...) lists do represent moral defects—I certainly would regard them as such in a close family member or friend. But if I were in the business of ‘making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’, I would hesitate to prescribe moral enhancement for everyone with these acknowledged defects. A lot of good work, from removing tumours to negotiating treaties, may be best done by people with serious moral defects.For a simple consequentialist, a moral defect is just a trait that tends to make the world a worse place. Not being a consequentialist, I think that moral defects should be identified independently of their tendency to produce worse outcomes. For this reason, I think it's necessary to qualify DeGrazia's starting assumption—I think behavioural improvement may sometimes be undesirable if our goal is to make the world a better place. My reasons will be familiar to readers of Bernard Williams.As …. (shrink)

Is Utilitarianism Bad for Women? Philosophers and policy-makers concerned with the ethics, economics, and politics of development argue that the phenomenon of ‘adaptive preference’ makes preference-utilitarian measures of well-being untenable. Poor women in the Global South, they suggest, adapt to deprivation and oppression and may come to prefer states of affairs that are not conducive to flourishing. This critique, however, assumes a questionable understanding of preference utilitarianism and, more fundamentally, of the concept of preference that figures in such accounts. If (...) well-being is understood as preference-satisfaction it is easy to see why poor women in the Global South are badly off: even if they do not desire more favorable conditions they nevertheless prefer them, and that preference is not satisfied. Preferentism provides a rationale for improving economic conditions and dismantling the unjust institutions that prevent them from climbing higher on their preference-rankings. Utilitarianism, therefore, insofar as utility is understood as preference satisfaction, is good for women. (shrink)

In Treatise 2.3.4 Hume provides an explanation of why ‘we naturally desire what is forbid, and take a pleasure in performing actions, merely because they are unlawful’. Hume’s explanation of this phenomenon has barely received any attention so far. But a detailed analysis bears fruit for both Humean scholarship and contemporary moral psychology. After putting the passage in its context, I explain why desiring and taking pleasure in performing certain actions merely because they are unlawful poses a challenge to Hume’s (...) theory of evaluation. Then I propose a solution of the challenge which draws on Hume’s treatment of malice, and highlights the role played by comparison and the self in these apparently paradoxical passions. Finally, I distinguish three views in contemporary discussions of desiring something under the guise of the bad (negationism, parasitism, at-face-valuism), and I argue that Hume’s account stands out as a particularly plausible version of the third view. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that the desire satisfaction theory, arguably the dominant theory of well-being at present, fails to explain why depression is bad for a person. People with clinical depression desire almost nothing, but the few desires they do have are almost all satisfied. So it appears the theory must say these people are relatively well-off. A number of possible responses on behalf of the theory are considered, and I argue that each response either fails outright, or requires modifications (...) to the desire satisfaction theory which make the theory unattractive for other reasons. Advisors: Joseph Mendola and John Brunero. (shrink)

Veronica inhabits a world that's swarming with bad or, at best, morally ambiguous characters, a world that's perhaps more like our own than many of us would care to admit. Most neighborhoods in Neptune are a lot swankier than the simulated prison on the Heart campus; they have ample creature comforts and generally pleasant surroundings. Philosophers have traditionally looked at factors like temperament and personality traits in their search for the causes of human wickedness. In this chapter, the author talks (...) about Zimbardo's study that lends considerable support to the old adage that power corrupts. Serious moral reflection has an annoying habit of getting in the way of other things we want to do, like gratifying our desires and fitting in with others. That's why we have such a strong incentive to ignore the reproaches of conscience or to try to rationalize them away. (shrink)

In Theory Z-style management everybody participates in corporate decision making. This more open process should give us fewer Pintos, Love Canals, and massive international payoffs as executives are forced to expose their reasoning to the moral sensibilities of the whole corporation. So far everything looks good. But we are a long way from showing that only corporations so managed can be fully moral. Yet Dwiggins seems to believe this, putting his faith in the basic goodness of the many while virtually (...) dismissing the managers as mere technicians. This is too slick; even if it describes our average corporation today, there are plenty of less radical changes which can also produce the desired moral corporation. Good leadership which acts on their commitment to improve the company is surely one historically respectable alternative; cynicism about the present crop of leaders should not distract us from investigating this route. Finally, I wonder if Dwiggins can consistently urge us to embrace a full-scale Theory Z organizational structure, given his position on the place of ethics and profitability. (shrink)

Zuko’s plight illuminates the process of aspiration, including common challenges to the aspirant. As Agnes Callard understands it, aspiration typically involves a “deep change in how one sees and feels and thinks.” And this deep change is often intertwined with a change in what contemporary philosopher Christine Korsgaard calls practical identity, a “description under which you value yourself, . . . under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.” But as Zuko (...) shows, practical identities are complex, sometimes unwieldy, and changes in explicit self-conceptions can take work, time, and perhaps some luck to bring about the deep change one aspires to. Even after he explicitly disavows his past actions, Zuko finds himself reverting to past behaviors, doing things that (on some level) he wishes he would not. These actions frustrate him— “Why am I so bad at being good?”— but they are not mere lapses in judgment. They come naturally and express an identity that Zuko had long embraced and cultivated but is now trying to leave behind. The arc of Zuko’s transformation illustrates the interplay between two dimensions of practical identity. On the one hand, as Korsgaard’s account emphasizes, our explicit self-conceptions and values matter. They guide our actions and shape how we see the world. But Zuko’s struggles suggest that such self-conceptions and aspirations are only part of the story. According to Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, our practical identity depends more on our existential engagement with the world than on our explicit self-conceptions. And these different dimensions of practical identity do not always align. As William Blattner writes, “Some of the most challenging conflicts in our lives arise when who we are existentially engaged in being stands in tension with who we think of ourselves as being.” Zuko is frustrated because, despite consciously trying to change, his being-in-the-world conflicts with his Korsgaardian practical identity. His world is still shaped (residually) by an identity he wants to shed. The way Zuko’s world and actions continue to be shaped by an identity he is trying to leave behind highlights a key difficulty of transformation. Zuko’s desire to prove his worth to his father and his rage have so thoroughly permeated his being-in-the-world that they are second nature. They shape his orientation toward the world and fuel his firebending. For better and worse, his spontaneous actions do not always fall in step with his conscious commitments. The same skills and dispositions Zuko previously cultivated as central to his identity now lead to unwanted actions and keep him from aspired-to actions. To become good in the way he wants, Zuko must not only cultivate the dispositions that will allow his aspired-to identity to become part and parcel of his being-in-the-world, but he must clear out or modify the residual influence of his past identity and related dispositions and values. -/- . (shrink)

The clinical ethicist met with Ms. H to clarify what information she wants and does not want to know. First, she wants to receive any treatment that could prolong her life, regardless of how the treatment affects her ability to engage in activities of daily living. Second, she wants to be included in the decision‐making process as much as possible, as long as clinicians use only “positive” language. Ms. H considers the words “dying,” “chemotherapy,” “radiation,” and “cancer” to be “bad (...) words.” For conversations in which these words cannot be avoided, she wants her clinicians to talk to her son. Her desired engagement includes hearing about risks, benefits, and alternatives to treatments if clinicians use only “positive” language. Finally, she says that she rarely sees doctors and that she is “very scared” of hospitals, despite exhibiting a comfortable demeanor.Should clinicians honor Ms. H's waiver of specified information and, if so, to what degree? (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham catalogued a wide variety of uses for dead bodies in what was likely his last essay, ‘Auto-Icon’. Dead bodies could be preserved and transformed into statues and used, among other ways, as theatrical props, commemorative statues, and building materials. Auto-Iconism would eliminate the need for coffins and graveyards – as well as funeral rituals, clerics to preside over the funerals, and, arguably, the entire religious establishment. This essay offers a reading of ‘Auto-Icon’ as a bad joke: impolite, unrefined, (...) and in bad taste. The thought is that ‘Auto-Icon’ makes fun of the religious desire for immortality – continuing Bentham’s attacks on the religious establishment in this regard – as well as Bentham’s own pretensions to immortality, and of pretensions to good taste generally. As a bad joke, ‘Auto-Icon’ is an exercise both in the liberty of opinion and in the liberty of taste. (shrink)

The desire-satisfaction theory of welfare says, roughly, that one's life goes well to the extent that one's desires are satisfied. On standard 'actualist' versions of the theory, it doesn't matter what you desire. So long as you are getting what you actually want – whatever it is – things are going well for you. There is widespread agreement that these standard versions are incorrect, because we can desire things that are bad for us -– in other words, because there (...) are 'defective desires'. The aim of this paper is to defend the actualist desire-satisfaction theory against the problem of defective desires. I aim to show how the theory can accommodate the obvious fact that we can desire things that are bad for us. Admittedly, there are kinds of allegedly defective desire the theory cannot accommodate, but these desires, I argue, turn out not to be defective in the relevant way. (shrink)

A recent slew of arguments, if sound, would demonstrate that realism about value involves a kind of paradox-I call it the BAD paradox.More precisely, they show that if there are genuine propositions about the good, then one could maintain harmony between one’s desires and one’s beliefs about the good only on pain of violating fundamental principles of decision theory. I show. however, the BAD paradox turns out to be a version of Newcomb’s problem, and that the cognitivist about value (...) can avoid the paradox by embracing casual decision theory. (shrink)

This paper explores the different ways in which conditionals can be carriers of good and bad news. I suggest a general measure of the desirability of conditionals, and use it to explore the different ways in which conditionals can have news value. I conclude by arguing that the desirability of a counterfactual conditional cannot be reduced to the desirability of factual propositions.

This paper considers a puzzling conflict between two positions that are each compelling: it is irrational for an agent to pay to avoid `free' evidence before making a decision, and rational agents may have imprecise beliefs and/or desires. Indeed, we show that Good's theorem concerning the invariable choice-worthiness of free evidence does not generalise to the imprecise realm, given the plausible existing decision theories for handling imprecision. A key ingredient in the analysis, and a potential source of controversy, is (...) the general approach taken for resolving sequential decision problems { we make explicit what the key alternatives are and defend our own approach. Furthermore, we endorse a resolution of the aforementioned puzzle { we privilege decision theories that merely permit avoiding free evidence over decision theories for which avoiding free evidence is uniquely admissible. Finally, we situate this particular result about free evidence within the broader `dynamic-coherence' literature. (shrink)

People ordinarily make sense of their own behavior and that of others by invoking concepts like belief, desire, and intention. Philosophers refer to this network of concepts and related principles as 'folk psychology.' The prevailing view of folk psychology among philosophers of mind and psychologists is that it is a proto-scientific theory whose function is to explain and predict behavior.

Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism — and certain minority group rights in particular — make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there fundamental conflicts between our commitment to gender equity (...) and our increasing desire to respect the customs of minority cultures or religions? In this book, the eminent feminist Susan Moller Okin and fifteen of the world’s leading thinkers about feminism and multiculturalism explore these unsettling questions in a provocative, passionate, and illuminating debate. Okin opens by arguing that some group rights can, in fact, endanger women. She points, for example, to the French government’s giving thousands of male immigrants special permission to bring multiple wives into the country, despite French laws against polygamy and the wives’ own bitter opposition to the practice. Okin argues that if we agree that women should not be disadvantaged because of their sex, we should not accept group rights that permit oppressive practices on the grounds that they are fundamental to minority cultures whose existence may otherwise be threatened. In reply, some respondents reject Okin’s position outright, contending that her views are rooted in a moral universalism that is blind to cultural difference. Others quarrel with Okin’s focus on gender, or argue that we should be careful about which group rights we permit, but not reject the category of group rights altogether. Okin concludes with a rebuttal, clarifying, adjusting, and extending her original position. These incisive and accessible essays — expanded from their original publication in Boston Review and including four new contributions — are indispensable reading for anyone interested in one of the most contentious social and political issues today. The diverse contributors, in addition to Okin, are Azizah al-Hibri, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Homi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Janet Halley, Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, Martha Nussbaum, Bhikhu Parekh, Katha Pollitt, Robert Post, Joseph Raz, Saskia Sassen, Cass Sunstein, and Yael Tamir. (shrink)

This article argues that Epictetus employs the terms orexis and hormê in the same manner as the older Stoics. It then shows, on the basis of this claim, that the older Stoics recognized a distinction between dispositional and occurrent forms of motivation. On this account of Stoic theory, intentional action is in each instance the product of two forms of cognition: a value ascription that attributes goodness or badness to some object, conceiving of its possession as beneficial or harmful to (...) the agent, together with a situational judgment about appropriate action. The resulting interpretation suggests that the Stoic theory of motivation as a whole — and not merely the Stoic analysis of the pathê — has the basic shape of a practical syllogism, with more psychological depth than commentators have recognized. (shrink)

Why is pain the opposite of pleasure? Several theories of pleasure and pain have substantial difficulty explaining this basic feature. Theories according to which pleasure and pain are individual sensations or features of sensations have particular difficulty, since it is difficult to understand how pairs of sensations could be opposites. Some philosophers argue that the pain is the opposite of pleasure because pain and pleasure are fundamentally a matter of desire and aversion, and desire and aversion are clear opposites. I (...) argue that the structure of desire and aversion does not correspond to that of pleasure and pain. I propose that pleasure and pain are opposites because pleasure is good and pain is bad, and good and bad are clear opposites. I show that this view explains the structure of opposition of pleasure and pain, and I answer several objections. (shrink)

This chapter examines the connection between value and desire with regard to death. It argues that having categorical desires is a necessary condition for death to be bad for those who die, and that the degree to which death is bad bears a close relation to the number and strength of those desires. The chapter also analyzes the principles espoused by Jeff McMahan in his book “The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life.”.

An argument against the claim that moral realism cannot be sustained because moral beliefs, being affective-conative states, cannot themselves be true or false. In fact moral claims can fail both in terms of a failure of the standard it expresses to be realised by a given agent and also in terms of whatever it commends to be good or bad, right or wrong, in actual fact.

A pertinent concern in the human enhancement debate is that human enhancement technologies (HET) are intrinsically bad and, hence, morally impermissible. This article evaluates the related claims about the intrinsic badness of HET by looking into philosophical theories of intrinsic value. It investigates how well-established conceptions of intrinsic value map onto typical bioconservative arguments about HET's intrinsic badness. Three predominant variants of these arguments are explored and found wanting: (i) HET are intrinsically bad owing to their unnaturalness; (ii) the pursuit (...) of HET reveals intrinsically bad character (“the desire for mastery”); and (iii) HET will necessarily undermine intrinsically valuable things (e.g., human dignity). My analysis shows that the debate on intrinsic value places serious constraints on claims about the intrinsic badness of HET. More specifically, the analysis shows that bioconservative arguments are, for the most part, inconsistent, misconceived, and overly speculative. Enhancement interventions cannot be bearers of intrinsic value on any of its plausible understandings, and, even if we could grant such a possibility, there are no compelling reasons to presume that the intrinsic value of HET would be necessarily negative. As a result, claims regarding their moral impermissibility are unwarranted. (shrink)

Deprivation views of the badness of death are almost universally accepted among those who hold that death can be bad for the person who dies. In their most common form, deprivation views hold that death is bad because (and to the extent that) it deprives people of goods they would have gained had they not died at the time they did. Contrast this with categorical desire views, which hold that death is bad because (and to the extent that) it thwarts (...) people’s categorical desires. Categorical desires are desires that are not conditional upon one being alive; yet provide reason for the agent to continue living to ensure that those very desires are satisfied. I argue that categorical desire views are subject to two serious problems that deprivation views are not. First, categorical desire views entail that it is not bad for someone to not be resuscitated after dying a bad death. Second, categorical desire views cannot account for cases in which it is good to prevent people from coming into existence or cases in which it is good to prevent them from continuing to exist. After considering, and rejecting, various replies on behalf of categorical desire proponents, I conclude that we have good reason to reject categorical desire views in favor of deprivation views. (shrink)

While most people believe the best possible life they could lead would be an immortal one, so‐called “immortality curmudgeons” disagree. Following Bernard Williams, they argue that, at best, we have no prudential reason to live an immortal life, and at worst, an immortal life would necessarily be bad for creatures like us. In this article, we examine Bernard Williams' seminal argument against the desirability of immortality and the subsequent literature it spawned. We first reconstruct and motivate Williams' somewhat cryptic argument (...) in three parts. After that, we elucidate and motivate the three best (and most influential) counterarguments to Williams' seminal argument. Finally, we review, and critically examine, two further distinct arguments in favor of the anti‐immortality position. (shrink)

It is usually assumed to be possible, and sometimes even desirable, for consequentialists to make judgments about both the rightness and the goodness of actions. Whether a particular action is right or wrong is one question addressed by a consequentialist theory such as utilitarianism. Whether the action is good or bad, and how good or bad it is, are two others. I will argue in this paper that consequentialism cannot provide a satisfactory account of the goodness of actions, on the (...) most natural approach to the question. I will also argue that, strictly speaking, a consequentialist cannot judge one action to be better or worse than another action performed at a different time or by a different person. Even if such theories are thought to be primarily concerned with rightness, this would be surprising, but in the light of recent work challenging the place of rightness in consequentialism1, it seems particularly disturbing. If actions are neither right (or wrong) nor good (or bad), what moral judgments do apply to them? Doesn't the rejection of both rightness and goodness, as applied to actions, leave consequentialism unacceptably impoverished? On the contrary, I will argue that consequentialism is actually strengthened by the realization that actions can only be judged as better or worse than possible alternatives. (shrink)

The decision to procreate—to have, raise, and nurture biological children—is almost never subject to moral scrutiny. In fact, most societies implicitly embrace and advance procreation, a view known as pronatalism: procreation is morally desirable, psychologically “normal,” and generally seen as a laudable life choice. Those who cannot procreate are understood to have suffered a severe loss, and having or desiring to have children is considered an important developmental marker of increasing maturity and progression toward adulthood.However, we argue that prospective parents (...) have a defeasible moral obligation to prioritize adoption over procreation as a means of satisfying their desire to become parents. This.. (shrink)

Open access: Philosophers and policy-makers concerned with the ethics, economics, and politics of development argue that the phenomenon of “adaptive preference” makes preference-utilitarian measures of well-being untenable. Poor women in the Global South, they suggest, adapt to deprivation and oppression and may come to prefer states of affairs that are not conducive to flourishing. This critique, however, assumes a questionable understanding of preference utilitarianism and, more fundamentally, of the concept of preference that figures in such accounts. If well-being is understood (...) as preference satisfaction, it is easy to see why poor women in the Global South are badly off: even if they do not desire more favorable conditions, they nevertheless prefer them, and that preference is not satisfied. Preferentism provides a rationale for improving economic conditions and dismantling the unjust institutions that prevent them from climbing higher on their preference rankings. Utilitarianism, therefore, insofar as utility is understood as preference satisfaction, is good for women. (shrink)

Theories of welfare answer the ancient question, What makes a person's life go well? Prominent among these are desire-satisfaction or preferentist theories, according to which welfare has to do ultimately with desire. This dissertation aims to criticize some recent popular arguments against standard desire-satisfaction theories of welfare, to develop and defend a novel version of the desire-satisfaction theory capable of answering the better objections, to defend the thesis that pleasure is reducible to desire, and to demonstrate an interesting link between (...) preferentism and hedonism. The second chapter defends a simple "actualist" desire-satisfaction theory against the contention that such a theory cannot accommodate the fact that we can desire things that are bad for us. All the allegedly defective desires, I attempt to show, are either not genuinely defective or else can be accounted for by the theory. The third chapter criticizes the popular line that standard desire-based theories of welfare are incompatible with the conceptual possibility of self-sacrifice. I show that even the simplest imaginable, completely unrestricted desire theory is compatible with self-sacrifice, so long as it is formulated properly. The fourth chapter presents and defends a theory according to which welfare consists in the perceived satisfaction, or "subjective satisfaction," of desire. I argue that this theory is best suited to deflect the many lines of argument threatening the preferentist program. The fifth chapter defends the view that desire is what unifies the heterogeneous lot of experiences that all count as sensory pleasures. I develop and defend a desire theory of sensory pleasure. The sixth chapter argues that the most plausible form of preferentism is equivalent to the most plausible form of its main rival, hedonism. This is because what the best preferentism says---that welfare consists in subjective desire satisfaction---is the same as what the best hedonism says---that welfare consists in propositional pleasure---given a reduction of pleasure to desire along the lines of that defended above. (shrink)

Theories of welfare answer the ancient question, What makes a person's life go well? Prominent among these are desire-satisfaction or preferentist theories, according to which welfare has to do ultimately with desire. This dissertation aims to criticize some recent popular arguments against standard desire-satisfaction theories of welfare, to develop and defend a novel version of the desire-satisfaction theory capable of answering the better objections, to defend the thesis that pleasure is reducible to desire, and to demonstrate an interesting link between (...) preferentism and hedonism. The second chapter defends a simple "actualist" desire-satisfaction theory against the contention that such a theory cannot accommodate the fact that we can desire things that are bad for us. All the allegedly defective desires, I attempt to show, are either not genuinely defective or else can be accounted for by the theory. The third chapter criticizes the popular line that standard desire-based theories of welfare are incompatible with the conceptual possibility of self-sacrifice. I show that even the simplest imaginable, completely unrestricted desire theory is compatible with self-sacrifice, so long as it is formulated properly. The fourth chapter presents and defends a theory according to which welfare consists in the perceived satisfaction, or "subjective satisfaction," of desire. I argue that this theory is best suited to deflect the many lines of argument threatening the preferentist program. The fifth chapter defends the view that desire is what unifies the heterogeneous lot of experiences that all count as sensory pleasures. I develop and defend a desire theory of sensory pleasure. The sixth chapter argues that the most plausible form of preferentism is equivalent to the most plausible form of its main rival, hedonism. This is because what the best preferentism says---that welfare consists in subjective desire satisfaction---is the same as what the best hedonism says---that welfare consists in propositional pleasure---given a reduction of pleasure to desire along the lines of that defended above. (shrink)

In Plato's Meno , there is a famous discussion of desire and evil. This paper is not a contribution to Platonic scholarship, but a direct taking up of the issue whether someone can desire evil. One stock interpretation of the putative impossibility of desiring what is evil or bad is the interpretation which emphasizes an internal or conceptual tie between desire and good. This interpretation compares pairs of terms such as ‘fear—danger’, ‘belief—truth’ and ‘desire—good’. To fear something is to regard (...) it as, or believe that it is, dangerous ; to believe something is to regard it as, or believe it to be, true ; to desire something is to regard it as, to believe it to be, good. Since it is obvious that people believe things which are false, it is maintained that it is equally obvious that people may desire what is bad and fear what is harmless or of no danger. Let us call this interpretation of the doctrine that it is impossible to desire evil the weak thesis. The weak thesis allows what seems a plain fact of human reality, that people believe falsehoods, fear things that cannot harm them and desire things which are not good. Equally obviously, it allows that people fail to believe truths, fail to desire goods, and fail to fear things that are dangerous. On this weak interpretation, the manner in which wickedness to others and self-destructiveness are due to ignorance is that people are ignorant about the nature of things and ways of acting, ignorant about what it would be like to possess something or ignorant about what it would be like to do something or other. (shrink)

Many social institutions function with rivalry, whether it is the legal adversarial system, the electoral system, competitive sports or the market. The literature on adversarial ethics (with authors such as Arthur Applbaum, David Luban and Joseph Heath) attempts to clarify what is a good behavior in these situations, but this work does not examine if institutionalized rivalry is desirable given its good and bad aspects. According to Monroe Freedman, for instance, the confrontation between lawyers in a trial may help discover (...) important facts about a case. Most economists believe that competition in the market increases economic efficiency. But institutionalized rivalry can also lead to morally wrong acts such as violence, deception or coercion. The aim of this article is to identify the conditions under which rivalry may be more or less desirable in our social arrangements. First, it will be necessary to clarify what is institutionalized rivalry and what is an adversarial scheme. Then, this article will explain what are the generic advantages and problems of adversarial schemes. Finally, this analysis will be used to outline a series of minimal requirements to consider that an adversarial scheme is desirable. (shrink)

essay on the theory of value. It is among the best defenses of a rational desire/preference theory of the good. Even those not inclined to accept such theories will profit from reading Carson's discussion. Moreover, it would be worthwhile reading for scholars and students in various areas of applied ethics. The book is divided into two parts. The first half of the book addresses firstorder questions about what things are good and bad. The second half discusses various metaethical questions which (...) he takes to be relevant to answering the first order questions. In his first two chapters, Carson presents arguments for and against hedonistic theories of value. This is a thorough and fair discussion of hedonism. He then devotes a chapter each to rational desire theories of value, Nietzsche's views of value and the good life, and Aristotelian theories of value. Each of these is good, but the chapter on rational desire theories is perhaps the most important given the view that Carson ultimately defends. The second half of the book consists of three chapters. Chapter six concerns the concept of goodness. In chapter seven, Carson raises objections to various forms of moral and axiological realism. In the final chapter, entitled "The Concept of Rationality as a Basis for Normative Theories," Carson develops and defends his own views about rational preference and its role in moral and axiological theories. In most of what follows I will focus on Carson's own positive views about value and.. (shrink)

In Good Jew, Bad Jew Steven Friedman argues that the meaning of anti-Semitism favoured by the Israeli government and its allies prioritises loyalty to the Israeli state over identification with the Jewish people. On this view, ‘good Jews’ are those who support the Israeli state, and ‘bad Jews’ are those who criticise Zionism. This framing reflects a discursive transition over decades linked to the desire to make Israel part of Europe politically and culturally. Not only has the Zionist version of (...) anti-Semitism inverted traditional notions of Jewishness but it has transformed ‘Jewishness’ from the ‘other’ to whiteness, to an ally of white supremacists. This racial embrace goes hand in glove with the brutal practice of colonial violence evident in Gaza. Friedman makes his case drawing on the work African scholars such as Biko, Fanon and Mamdani, Southern scholars such as Ashis Nandy, as well as established scholars of the North. (shrink)

:It has been argued that moral bioenhancement is desirable even if it would make it impossible for us to do what is morally required. Others find this apparent loss of freedom deplorable. However, it is difficult to see how a world in which there is no moral evil can plausibly be regarded as worse than a world in which people are not only free to do evil, but also where they actually do it, which would commit us to the seemingly (...) paradoxical view that, under certain circumstances, the bad can be better than the good. Notwithstanding, this view is defended here. (shrink)

This paper presents a critique of David Benatar’s arguments on the badness of all human lives. I argue that even if Benatar is right that there is an asymmetry between the good and the bad in life so that each “unit” of bad is indeed more effective than each “unit” of good, lives in which there is a lot of good and only little bad are still overall good. Even if there are more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires in life, (...) a distinction should be drawn between desires to fulfill important goals and desires to fulfill trivial ones, and Benatar’s claim is untrue of the former. Benatar’s claim that we cannot really know that the quality of our own lives is good is problematic, but even if it were true, it would not show that we cannot estimate correctly the quality of other people’s lives, which is the point at issue. (shrink)

A central aspect of desire is the alluringness with which the desired object appears to the desirer. But what explains the alluringness of desire? According to the standard view, desire presents its objects with a certain allure because desire involves believing that the desired object is good. However, this cannot explain how those who lack the cognitive sophistication required for evaluative concepts can nonetheless have desires, how nihilists can continue to have desires, nor how we can desire things (...) we believe to be evaluatively neutral or even evaluatively bad. A variation on the standard view ? that desire presents its objects with a certain allure because desire involves being in a belief-like state that represents the desired object to be good ? avoids these problems, but still falsely entails that desire is subject to the norm of truth. Indeed, I argue that ultimately such cognitive accounts of the alluringness of desire have seemed compelling only because of the difficulty of providing an intelligible non-cognitive alternative and I proceed to make such an alternative account of the alluringness of desire explicit in broad outline, arguing that it promises a more faithful understanding of the phenomena. (shrink)

Socrates was not a moral philosopher. Instead he was a theorist who showed how human desire and human knowledge complement one another in the pursuit of human happiness. His theory allowed him to demonstrate that actions and objects have no value other than that which they derive from their employment by individuals who, inevitably, desire their own happiness and have the knowledge to use actions and objects as a means for its attainment. The result is a naturalised, practical, and demystified (...) account of good and bad, and right and wrong. Professor Reshotko presents a freshly envisioned Socratic theory residing at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and ethics. It makes an important contribution to the study of the Platonic dialogues and will also interest all scholars of ethics and moral psychology. (shrink)

It is seemingly bad for animals to have their desires modified in at least some cases, for instance where brainwashing or neurological manipulation takes place. In humans, many argue that such modification interferes with our positive liberty or undermines our autonomy but this explanation is inapplicable in the case of animals as they lack the capacity for autonomy in the relevant sense. As such, the standard view has been that, despite any intuitions to the contrary, the modification of animals’ (...) desires is not harmful (at least not in itself). In this article, I offer a different perspective on this issue, laying the foundations of a novel argument in defence of the view that animals _can_ be harmed by desire modification directly. I suggest that the modification of an animal’s desires (under certain circumstances) is harmful for that animal because it undermines their agency. (shrink)

The implementation of Responsible Research and Innovation is not without its challenges, and one of these is raised when societal desirability is included amongst the RRI principles. We will argue that societal desirability is problematic even though it appears to fit well with the overall ideal. This discord occurs partly because the idea of societal desirability is inherently ambiguous, but more importantly because its scope is unclear. This paper asks: is societal desirability in the spirit of RRI? On von Schomberg’s (...) account, it seems clear that it is, but societal desirability can easily clash with what is ethically permissible; for example, when what is desirable in a particular society is bad for the global community. If that society chose not to do what was desirable for it, the world would be better off than if they did it. Yet our concern here is with a more complex situation, where there is a clash with ethical acceptability, but where the world would not be better off if the society chose not do what was societally desirable for itself. This is the situation where it is argued that someone else will do it if we do not. The first section of the paper gives an outline of what we take technology to be, and the second is a discussion of which criteria should be the basis for choosing research and innovation projects. This will draw on the account of technology outlined in the first section. This will be followed by an examination of a common argument, “If we don’t do it, others will”. This argument is important because it appears to justify acting in morally dubious ways. Finally, it will be argued that societal desirability gives support to the “If we don’t…” argument and that this raises some difficulties for RRI. (shrink)