Michiel Esseling

In recent work, Alex Gregory defends the unorthodox view that desires are beliefs about reasons for action. While Gregory offers compelling arguments in its defense, this paper critically examines how his desire-as-belief view can explain the phenomenon of recalcitrant desires. Taking inspiration from a debate about the cognitive status of emotions, I define recalcitrant desires as desires that persist despite the agent believing they have no reason to do what they desire. I argue that explaining the seeming irrationality involved in this type of recalcitrance presents a challenge to philosophical accounts of desire in general, and Gregory’s desire-as-belief view in particular. In Gregory’s framework, having a recalcitrant desire must ultimately be understood as simultaneously holding contradictory beliefs. Gregory embraces this conclusion and argues that it is simply a feature of our limited rationality, citing other examples of conflicting beliefs. I argue that these examples are misleading. Unlike normal conflicting beliefs, recalcitrant desires also persist despite the agent’s awareness of the conflict. Taking this into account, Gregory’s view cannot successfully explain recalcitrant desires because it must ascribe an implausible kind of contradiction.

How do you know what you want? This deceptively simple question reveals a tension in how we relate to our desires. On the one hand, we sometimes think about desires as things that just happen to us, that we are passively subject to. In this case, knowing what you want is about trying to detect in which direction you are being pulled. On the other hand, it can be disturbing if people treat their desires as mere empirical phenomena they have no special say over. When I express a desire, I seem to express a view of the world that can be justified, criticized, endorsed, or rejected. This seems to demand a different picture of how I know what I want. Richard Moran’s Authority and Estrangement offers a promising account of how to understand this tension. Regarding attitudes like belief and desire, we possess first-person authority; we are not just accurate observers, but we also bear a certain responsibility. This is because the existence of these attitudes depends on an evaluation that is up to us to maintain or reject. Although Moran develops this account convincingly for attitudes like belief, Authority and Estrangement fails to apply it convincingly to desires. The main obstacle is that our desires often diverge from our deliberative conclusion of what to pursue. The aim of this thesis is to apply Moran’s framework of first-person authority to desires in a way that better takes into account the specific complexities of desires. The main innovation of the modified Moranian account I propose, is to understand desires as commitments to prima facie, instead of overall, evaluations. This modified account can accommodate the recalcitrance and complexity of desires, while also allowing us to see our relation to our desires as one of first-person authority in Moran’s sense.