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“Desire Formation and Human Good”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2017

Richard Arneson
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Extract

In Wuthering Heights a man and a woman fall in love and their passion for each other wreaks havoc on several lives, theirs included. Long after his beloved is dead, Heathcliff's life revolves entirely around his love for her. Frustrated by events, his grand romantic passion expresses itself in destructive spasms of antisocial behavior. Catherine, the object of this passion, marries another man on a whim, but describes her feelings for him as like superficial foliage, whereas ‘her love for Heathcliff resembles eternal rocks beneath.’ ‘I am Heathcliff,’ she declares, shortly before dying at the age of nineteen.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 59 , December 2006 , pp. 9 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2006

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References

1 Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights, ed. Daiches, David (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963). Originally published 1847.Google Scholar

2 For a far more affirmative view, see Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Wuthering Heights: The Romantic Ascent,’ Philosophy and Literature, vol. 20 (1996), pp. 362–382CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also my discussion toward the end of this essay.

3 Adams, Robert M., Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1999, p. 200.Google Scholar

4 The quoted words are those of D. H. Lawrence, as cited by Williams, Bernard in Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 86.Google Scholar

5 Conflict between lower-order and higher-order preferences cannot be all there is to less than wholehearted embrace of a lower-order preference. One might have an unconfident and halfhearted preference for a thing, supported by an unconfident and halfhearted second-order preference concerning it, and so on, up the hierarchy.

6 Rawls, John, ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods,’Google Scholar reprinted in John Rawls: Collected Papers, ed. Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 359–387; see pp. 382–3.Google Scholar

7 The best analysis of these issues regarding reasons and prudence is still in Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

8 Philip Bricker considers this idea in ‘Prudence,’ Journal of Philosophy, vol. 77, no. 7 (07, 1980), pp. 381–401Google Scholar. My analysis of the ‘bare person’ issue generally is indebted to this excellent essay.

9 Jon Elster takes this line in ‘Sour Grapes,’ reprinted in his Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 109–140Google Scholar. Elster distinguishes autonomy and utility and seems to regard both as enhancing an individual's quality of life.

10 Kraut, Richard, ‘Desire and the Human Good,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 68, no. 2 (11, 1994), 39–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 There may be problematic slippage here. Satisfying one's desires is one thing and fulfilling one's life aims or ambitions is another. The latter involves a commitment, an orientation of the will, in a way the former does not. The theory of the good might treat desire satisfaction and aim fulfillment differently.

12 Hurka, Thomas, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Is it intrinsically better to have more rather than less desire in the aggregate (I assume desire is being conceived in such a way that its total amount per person varies)? In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill suggests that having strong desires is potentially instrumentally better than having weak desires. He seems to envisage that one person may have more, and more intense, desires than another person, in total: ‘To say that one person's desires and feelings are stronger and more various than those of another, is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses are but another name for energy’ (chapter 3, paragraph 5). I don't understand the ‘perhaps’ and the ‘certainly’ in the first quoted sentence, but having more and stronger desires surely can be instrumentally valuable to maximizing one's expected well-being if the desires are well-aimed. But I don't see that it is intrinsically better or worse to have more rather than less desire in the aggregate.

14 Hurka, , Virtue, Vice, and Value, p. 14.Google Scholar

15 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 501–502.Google Scholar

16 Adams, , Finite and Infinite GoodsGoogle Scholar, chapter 3. Adams backs away from the view by the end of the chapter, so his position is not that enjoyment is necessary for it to be the case that excellence adds to the well-being of the one who does or gets it, but rather that the well-being value of excellence without enjoyment and of enjoyment without excellence are steeply discounted. So understood, Adams's position is close to Darwall's. Serena Olsaretti has developed another version of the hybrid view. According to her position, no achievement however great adds to the well-being of the person unless that very person has some pro-attitude toward the achievement itself (regarded apart from its further consequences).

17 Darwall, Stephen, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), last chapter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Dworkin, Ronald: Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), chapter 6.Google Scholar

19 But the extent of disagreement here depends on one's views on the nature of the excellent. Adams's theistic Platonism appears to understand the excellent to be a broadly encompassing category, so that simple ordinary pleasures such as scratching one's nose might qualify as an instance of the excellent. For Adams, finite goods are fragmentary shards of the infinite, and what constitutes them as excellent is their greater or lesser resemblance to infinite good.