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Rawls, Brandt, and the Definition of Rational Desires

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert K. Shope
Robert K. Shope*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts at Boston
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Extract

Philosophers, psychiatrists, and social scientists would welcome clarification of the distinction between rational and irrational desires. It may be proper to say that rational desires are those which manifest rationality (or which at least do not conflict with its manifestations). But since this seems a rather unilluminating characterization, philosophers sometimes offer definitions of what constitute such manifestations of rationality. I shall consider definitions provided by John Rawls and Richard Brandt. Their definitions are unsatisfactory mainly because they include subjunctive conditionals. An alternative approach, which avoids conditionals, is attractive. But it encounters so many additional problems that I shall conclude that we are not now in a position to define rationality in this area and must treat it as a state or disposition which to date has only been partially characterized. Thus, if we want a definition of the difference between rational and irrational desires, we must at present settle for the rather unexciting one mentioned above.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 329 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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References

1 Throughout the discussion, I shall frequently use ‘desire’ as short for ‘desire or aversion’.

2 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 395, 409.Google Scholar All page citations concerning Rawls are to this source.

3 Brandt, Richard “Rational Desires,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 43 (1969-1970), pp. 43–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar All page citations in the body of the paper are to this article.

4 Brandt's article is solely concerned with what he calls ‘intrinsic’ desires, ones where the person could in ordinary speech be said to desire the object of the desire for itself. My counterexamples are chosen accordingly, although the definitions I shall tentatively propose at the end of the paper are not limited to intrinsic desires.

5 This is analogous to a situation in which a belief arises through bias or prejudice but is later borne out by evidence and attains rational grounds and rational status. Brandt, continues to ignore such possibilities regarding desires in his more recent paper, “Rationality, Egoism, and Morality,” Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972), pp. 681-97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On p. 683, he says that people could “clean up” their desires through “cognitive psychotherapy” and could make some desires vanish “if they repeatedly brought to mind with full belief and maximal vividness all the knowable facts that would tend either to weaken or to strengthen the desire ….” He claims that in such a situation the desires would be “maximally influenced” by knowable facts. I wish to emphasize, instead, the insufficient influence of factors in the actual situation.

6 Thus, the neurotic man and the unauthentic woman of whom Brandt spoke may thwart satisfaction of their rational desires for pleasure and the avoidance of pain by acting upon their irrational desires.

7 Philosophers and psychologists who wish to avoid treating desires and beliefs as entities may read these definitions as speaking, instead, of various causal relations among states of the person (his-having-a-desire or his-having-a-belief), events of acquiring these states (his-coming-to-have- a-desire or his-coming-to-have-a-belief), and sources of these events and states.

8 Clause (c) is phrased so that when a person has two mutually incompatible desires of which neither (a) nor (b) is true but neither of which are rational1 then neither desire counts as irrational. Of course, we might sometimes say that the person is irrational for being in this conflict, but I am not attempting to define the phrase, ‘rational person’.

9 Rawls himself admits that it is only for simplicity that he assumes “there is one and only one plan that would be chosen” with full deliberative rationality “and not several (or many) between which the agent would be indifferent …. ” (p. 408)

10 Thus, we may wish to say that a capacity for rational1 desires is a presupposition' for having irrational desires.