AUTONOMY AND DESIRE

AN ESSAY IN MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY

A Dissertation Summary

Robert Noggle

Several ethical and political theories favor the satisfaction of self-regarding desires. Desire theories of welfare claim that desire-satisfaction creates welfare. Liberalism claims that the state must allow (and perhaps facilitate) people's doing what they want, so long as they do not harm others. This "pro-desire" stance is plausible because the goal of satisfying self-regarding desires seems attractive.

But satisfaction of certain self-regarding desires seems unattractive. Examples are (some) desires associated with addictions, psychological compulsions, and psychological conditioning. These desires seem "alien" to the person whose desires they are. They belong to a person in the sense that they can play roles in explaining her behavior: they cause behavior just like authentic desires. But they seem to arise from outside the center of one's autonomous agency. Someone with an alien desire typically does not see it as part of her self, and an observer will often say things like "She doesn't really want to wash her hands over and over; she has this compulsion," or, "He doesn't really want the drink; he's addicted."

The satisfaction of a desire like this does not seem to be an attractive goal. Even if an alien desire is self-regarding and not based on any mistaken beliefs, it doesn't seem to be worth favoring in the same way other desires are. Though we may still favor its satisfaction on balance, we would still not favor it in the same wholehearted way as we would if its genesis had been more "normal." Yet pro-desire theories would seem committed to favoring its satisfaction. Thus alien desires present an important counterexample to the basic claim of pro-desire theories.

If we are to defend the pro-desire stance, we must find a way to separate alien from authentic desires so that we can abandon the principle that the satisfaction of all self-regarding desires is to be favored and replace it with the more plausible principle that the satisfaction of non-alien self-regarding desires is to be favored. And we should offer a rationale for drawing the distinction between desires that we favor wholeheartedly and those that we do not.

I begin by developing a background theory of motivation. I examine the debate between Humeans and Anti-Humean over whether motivational states are beliefs or desires. I argue that plausible versions of the Humean and anti-Humean positions are merely notational variants of each other. I think that this is an important finding (one which has implications for certain arguments about moral realism), but for the purposes of the dissertation what is important is not whether we use a Humean or anti-Humean theory to describe motivation, but the plausibility constraints on any acceptable theory of motivation.

Any plausible theory of motivation must display a hierarchical structure. That is, it must account for the fact that normally if I desire that P and believe that Q is a means to getting P to obtain, then I will come to have some motivation toward Q. This constraint yields a theory of motivation that is foundational in structure: some desires are basic, and the rest are generated by other desires and beliefs, particularly means-end beliefs.

Not all cases of motivation seem to fit into this neat paradigm. Operant conditioning, for example, can motivate a person to act in ways she would be motivated to act if she believed something that she does not in fact believe. Suppose, for instance, that a mad scientist uses food as a reward to condition a hapless victim to cluck like a chicken. Now if the conditioning is successful, the victim will have an urge to cluck like a chicken when he is hungry, and it will grow stronger when he is hungrier. And he will have this urge even when he is no longer in the mad scientist's lab. This desire makes no sense given the paradigm.

But it would make perfect sense if the victim believed that clucking was a means to getting food. The problem is that presumably the victim believes nothing of the sort. Yet the desire persists. Addictions and compulsions also often have this feature; indeed, what makes these afflictions so bizarre is that the victim does not seem to have the very belief that would make her behavior intelligible.

The most straightforward way to explain such motivations is to claim that the desire is caused by a belief-like representational state the content of which the victim does not actually believe. I call such a state a quasi-belief. A quasi-belief is a representational state that functions like a belief in the formation of desires. But it neither affects nor is affected by ordinary beliefs. That is, a contradiction between the content of a quasi-belief and that of a normal belief does not tend to cause either of them to disappear. Moreover, a quasi-belief is not introspectively accessible, and it can have as its content a proposition that the person believes is false.

I draw on empirical psychology to argue that there are several phenomena that can be best explained as involving quasi-beliefs. These phenomena are automatic or "over learned" actions, certain kinds of irrational emotional motivations, and operant conditioning. Each of these phenomena seems to involve mental states which bear information, but which don't seem to be beliefs in the straightforward sense. In short, there is ample evidence that some of our behavior involves quasi-beliefs.

If we assume that there can be conflicts between the contents of quasi-beliefs and normal beliefs, then we can account for cases in which a person desires to act as if she believed something she does not in fact believe. And this what I think an alien desire is. That is, a desire is alien if it is produced by a quasi-belief the content of which is a proposition the person believes is false.

One virtue of this theory is that it provides a plausible conception of authenticity which tells us what it means for an alien desire to be outside of the self. On any plausible conception of the self, a self is that which has beliefs. And if this is so, then alien desires clearly arise from outside the self. For they are based on information that is contained only in quasi-beliefs and which is not introspectively available to the self. This information is not only outside the self; it is positively at odds with beliefs which are part of the self. Thus there is a clear sense in which alien desires arise from outside of the self.

This theory distinguishes between alien and authentic desires in a way that agrees with our judgments in clear and uncontroversial cases. More important, it provides the pro-desire theorist a rationale for excluding alien desires from the desires that are to be favored. For presumably the reason that desire-satisfaction is attractive is that desires come from the self; favoring the desires of the self is a way of respecting persons. But alien desires are in a clear sense outside of the self. For that reason, a failure to wholeheartedly favor the satisfaction of alien desires is consistent with respecting persons.