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Desire's Own Reasons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2022

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UKU TOOMING*
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HOKKAIDO UNIVERSITY [email protected]
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Abstract

In this essay I ask if there are reasons that count in favor of having a desire in virtue of its attitudinal nature. I call those considerations desire's own reasons. I argue that desire's own reasons are considerations that explain why a desire meets its constitutive standard of correctness and that it meets this standard when its satisfaction would also be satisfactory to the subject who has it. Reasons that bear on subjective satisfaction are fit to regulate desires through experience and imagination because desires are naturally sensitive to them. I also analyze the limits of application that such reasons have and how desire's own reasons relate to other kinds of reasons.

Keywords

desirereasonsimaginationsatisfaction
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 2022 , pp. 259 - 277
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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Footnotes

My gratitude goes out to the audiences at the Department of Philosophy Talk-Shop at Harvard University, the 2019 meeting of Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in Denver, the Department of Philosophy work-in-progress seminar at Tartu University, and the Tokyo Workshop on Agency and Rationality 2019. Special thanks to Rachel Achs, Derek Baker, Selim Berker, Alex Davies, Sandy Diehl, Paul Katsafanas, Robbie Kubala, Kengo Miyazono, Patrick Shirreff, and two anonymous referees of this journal. The research described in this essay was supported by JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research in Japan (Standard), JSPS KAKENHI (19F19762).

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