STAMPE AND THE PER SE AUTHORITY OF DESIRE

1. Beliefs and desires are to be distinguished by their different directions of fit to the world: beliefs aim to conform themselves to the world, whereas desires aim to conform the world to them.
2. Moreover, we should understand belief as aiming at the true and desire as aiming at the good.
3. But then desire can provide defeasible reason to act, as perceptual belief can provide defeasible reason to believe.
4. The per se authority of perception implies that one has reason to believe as one perceives even when one has no other reason to trust one's perceptions or knows it to be unreliable (mistaken?).  Reasons to believe can be overridden and need not even be good reasons.
5. The per se authority of desire implies that one has reason to act as one desires even if one has no other reason to regard the object of one's desire as good or one knows it to be valueless.  Reasons to act can be defeasible and need not be good reasons.

(a) It's not clear that we ought to accept the authority of perception or desire when there is good reason to doubt that the perception tracks the truth or that the desire tracks the good. For example, it is doubtful that perceiving that the gas gauge registers F provides reason to believe that my tank is full even if I know it is malfunctioning.  The same seems true of the desire to collect lint.  Reasons to believe or act can be defeasible, but what are they if they are not good reason?

(b) Though desires can be good-dependent, they do not seem to be necessarily good-dependent.  (i) The desires might be unwelcome (e.g. the self-loathing drug addict or pedophile), (ii) desire might be produced by sub-rational processes (e.g. hypnosis or suggestion), and (iii) brutes and small children appear to have desires without belief in the value of their objects.  How can we bo so sure?  (2) is an independent premise; it does not follow from (1).  In fact, we can appeal to (1) to argue against (2).  States with the functional profile of desires can, but need not, be based upon beliefs about the value of their objects.

PERFECTIONISM

• Most non-desiderative conceptions of practical reason are teleological, defining practical reason in terms of tracking objective value.
• Teleological conceptions provide either a mere list of objective goods (e.g. beauty, knowledge, achievement, friendship, equality) or a suitably unified list of objective goods.  A mere list may ultimately be defensible, especially as necessary to capture pluralism, but it is a fallback or second-best position.
• A traditional unified conception is perfectionism, which claims that practical reason ought to be regulated by a person's good, which should itself be understood in terms of the perfection of her nature.
• In understanding and assessing perfectionist views, we should distinguish the justification, content, and implications of perfectionism.
• We should distinguish two main approaches to the justification of perfectionist ideals -- those that understand the appeal to a person's nature as a biological category and those who understand it as a normative category.
• The biological approach is one reading of Aristotelian perfectionism and its appeal to the human function; it is also a feature of Hurka's attempt to ground familiar perfectionist ideals.
• Problem for the biological approach is that there either is no biological essence for human beings or, if there is (e.g. reproductive closure), it cannot underwrite familiar and attractive claims about the content of perfectionist ideals.  Attempts to treat human beings who do not possess significant rational, social, or physical capacities as abnormal or defective members of the species either fail or smuggle in normative notions.

• The perfectionist might eschew appeal to the biological category of human being, appealing instead to the normative category of person.  Though most adult humans are persons, humanity and personhood are imperfectly correlated.  Humans need not be persons (actually or potentially), and persons need not be humans.  Persons are accountable or responsible insofar as they are normatively competent -- having the capacities to distinguish between the intensity and authority of their desires, to deliberate about the value or authority of their desires, and to regulate their emotions, desires, and actions in accordance with their deliberations.
• (1) This sort of normative perfectionism provides an attractive reading of the way in which Aristotle's function argument appeals not to biology per se but to a moral psychology of rational animals.  (2) It provides a promising interpretation of how the perfectionist elements in Mill's claims about happiness rest on his claims about the happiness of progressive beings, which, in turn, rest on his assumptions about the role of self-government in responsibility.  (3) It also appeals to Kantian claims about the role of rational nature and its capacity to set ends as providing both the justification and content of practical reason.  (4) Normative perfectionsim is most fully articulated in Green's appeal to moral personality as establishing the justification and content of a perfectionist ethical theory.
• According to normative perfectionism, the content of the good (a life of activities that embody rational or deliberative control of thought and action)  is given by the very capacities that make one a rational agent, subject to reasons for action, in the first place.  This appears to provide a rationale for the normative authority of perfectionist ideals.
• Insofar as one is F, one cares about developing one's competence for F and about engaging in activities that embody F.
• Insofar as one is a body-builder, one cares about developing one's knowledge of anatomy, nutrition, training and choreography and about successfully pursuing a training regimen that develops muscle mass and tone proprotionately and a performance routine that displays the approrpiate physic aesthetic.
• Insofar as one is rational agent, one cares about developing one's deliberative competence and sensitivity to reason and one chooses environments, plans, and projects that allow scope for deliberative thought and action.
• Some values of F are non-essential and rationally optional.  Body building is inessential and rationally optional; rational agency is not.
• If so, the demands of normative perfectionism are categorical imperatives (cf. Prolegomena sect. 193).

• Normative perfectionism implies that desire, as such, has no normative significance.  This would show that instrumental rationality -- conceived as performing actions that are means or necessary conditions to satisfying one's ultimate desires -- is not only not the whole of practical reason, but not even a part.  However, this need not impugn the different conception of instrumental rationality -- conceived as performing actions that are means or necessary conditions to that which one already has reason to do.  Instrumental reason, conceived of in this way as relative rationality, is an essential and proper part of practical reason.
• We can reject the Humean idea that reason can only be the slave of the passions if we realize that desire can be (even if it need not be) good-dependent.  For then desire will be (normally) consequential on recognizing a course of action as appropriate or valuable.  But then practical reason and the personal good can satisfy the resonance constraint.  Internalism, conceived of as relativizing reason or value to potential motivation or desire, places no substantive constraints on the content of practical reason or the good.  So understood, it is a vacuous requirement.  If internalism is understood to relativize practical reason or the good to the agent's antecedent desires, then it is a sectarian and tendentious requirement.
• Objective lists need not forsake pluralism, though they will eschew content-neutrality.  Perfectionist views can also recognize pluralism, provided only that there are multiple ways of perfectioning oneself that are equally or comparably good.  They too can recognize pluralism, while rejecting content-neutrality.  Our criticisms of desidertaive accounts suggest that even if we accept some kind of pluralism we reject content-neutrality.

• Basic worry for perfectionist conceptions is not pluralism per se, but recognizing the full variety of goods, some of which may not have an evident connection with perfection.  For instance, what about the goodness of pleasure or the badness of pain.  In the face of such worries, pure perfectionists can opt for accommodation or reform.  Perfectionists accommodate insofar as they argue that the alleged recalcitrant good can really be fit under the perfectionist umbrella.  They reform insofar as they deny that the alleged goods are really good independently of any contribution they make to perfection.  If neither accommodation nor reform is acceptable, then perfection must be supplemented in a mixed conception.
• A special case of this worry arises from our handling of the significance of desire.  How can we reject the normative significance of desire and still account for the evident fact that in a great many cases the fact that an agent wants something is a reason for her to care about and pursue it and often a reason for others to care about her caring about about and pursuing it?
• In reply, we might distinguish between the signifiance of choice and desire.  The perfectionist can and should attach normative significance to choice and post-deliberative desire.  Compare Green who distinguishes between desire and the will and attaches intrinsic normative signifiance to the latter only (PE sects. 139-42).
• This perfectionist claim is not the same as an informed desire view.  (a) The perfectionist imposes an actual historical condition on desires, not a mere counterfactual condition.  (b) The reflection need not be ideal to have normative significance.
• Deliberative endorsement is not an exceptional occurrence.  One acts on one's will when one acts on standing principles and when one concludes that there is no need for special or further deliberation.  One also acts on one's will when one acts on desires that are sustained by reflective endorsement, even if they did not originate in reflective endorsement.