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On Desiring the Desirable
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
In a famous passage in her book, Intention, Professor G. E. M. Anscombe argues that we can only render intelligible the idea of someone wanting a thing if we know under what aspect the person sees the thing as desirable. The wanted thing must be characterized by the wanter as desirable in some respect. ‘[What] is required for our concept of “wanting”’, she says, ‘is that a man should see what he wants under the aspect of some good’ (p. 74). And furthermore, ‘the good (perhaps falsely) conceived by the agent to characterize the thing must really be one of the many forms of good’ (p. 76). Thus, while the object of desire need only be conceived as good by the wanter, and need not be really good, this can only be because the object does not have the desirable character the wanter believes it to have, not because the character supposed to be desirable is not really so. Desire cannot but be for one of the real forms of good.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1981
References
1 Anscombe, G. E. M., Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), Secs. 37–40.Google Scholar
2 Gauthier, D. P., Practical Reasoning (Oxford University Press, 1963), 35.Google Scholar
3 Gauthier, op. cit., 34.
4 Anscombe, op. cit., 66–67, 75.
5 Unless by ‘desirable’ we mean not ‘good’ or ‘valuable’, but ‘capable of being desired’. (Could Anscombe and Gauthier have fallen into the same confusion as Mill?)
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