Original scientific paper
How a Modern-day Hume Can Reject a Desire Categorically: A Perplexity and a Theoretically Modest Proposal
Regan Lance Reitsma
; King’s College
Abstract
We often treat our basic, unmotivated desires as reason-giving:
you’re thirsty and take yourself to have a reason to walk to
the drinking fountain; you care intrinsically about your young
daughter and take yourself to have a reason to feed and clothe
her. We (behave as though we) think these desires generate
normative practical reasons. But are there (satisfiable) basic
desires that don’t? It might seem so, for we sometimes find
ourselves impelled to do some very strange, and some very
awful, things. For example, would a loving mother with a
violent impulse thereby come to have a reason to harm her
beloved child? Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that there
are (satisfiable) basic desires, such as the mother’s, that fail to
generate reasons. Can a subjectivist, a theorist in the Humean
tradition, accept this thesis? Against the historical grain, I argue
yes. I frame my discussion in terms of solving a puzzle in Harry
Frankfurt’s subjectivist theory of rational agency and appeal to
the concept of a personal ideal to reveal how a subjectivist, a
follower of Hume, can countenance the existence of “rationally
impotent basic desires.”
Keywords
Hume; Frankfurt; subjectivism; rational agency; desires; categorical imperatives; practical reasons; personal ideal; norm of rational impotence
Hrčak ID:
125800
URI
Publication date:
10.7.2014.
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