Chapter 7

REASONS

“ I may desire any fruit as of an excellent relish; but whenever you convince me of my mistake, my longing ceases.”

- David Hume (1711-1776), A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Section III (Hume 1888:416-417)

Changing Desires

            Our desires change through time. When we are children, we want to play and do things with our parents. When we are adolescents, we want to spend time with our friends and discover our sexuality. When we have a family, we want to fulfil our responsibilities. When we are middle-aged, we want to save for our retirements. When we retire, we find a whole, new set of more leisurely wants.

            In part, we form our desires in response to our cultural and economic circumstances. Someone born disabled, homeless, and driven to beg in the streets of Calcutta will likely form very low expectations and very basic wants. His wants might extend only to having enough to eat and drink. In opposite circumstances, someone born very rich will form expensive tastes. She will adapt her preferences to her wealth. Just having enough to eat would not be enough; she will desire caviar, champagne, and expensive restaurants. Born into a culture isolated deep in the Amazon rainforest, someone will want to own only the familiar products of the jungle. Born into the midst of Western consumerism, someone else will want to own things mechanical, electronic, and artificial.

            Advertising changes our desires. Advertisers, whatever they might say, do not just take our wants as given, or assume that our desires are innate and unchangeable. They do not see their role as merely telling us where to find what we want at the best price. Advertising also creates wants; it attempts to attach positive emotional evaluations to goods and services, and it often succeeds. We are often unaware of why we want what we want. Advertising takes advantage of our lack of awareness, of how unprotected we are against wanting on the flimsiest of reasons and associations.

            Our desires respond to new information. As we learn more about the nature of whatever it is we want, our desire for it is liable to change. David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish psychologist and philosopher who helped formulate the crude psychological assumptions later adopted by economic theory, admitted as much. In the chapter motto, he notes that though we may initially want to eat some fruit, if we find out that it is not edible, then our desire for it goes away.

Reasons for Desiring

            It is true, but trivial, that people try to satisfy their wants. We need to look behind the surface of want-satisfaction and assess the reasons for why people have the wants they do. Desires and wants are not the ground level explanation of the way a person is. Nor are their wants and desires the most important thing about people. People have reasons for having the wants they do, reasons which lie at a level deeper than their wants and desires. Their reasons involve emotions and beliefs about the world as it is and as it should be, and we can evaluate their reasons as good or bad.

            People normally act for reasons. We can usually find an explanation of why they have the wants and desires that they do. We can understand the reasons why they are motivated to act in the ways that they do. If they have no reasons at all, if we can find no explanation for their motivation, then their actions will appear puzzling, irrational or even crazy.

            Imagine someone who always chooses one thing over another for no reason at all. Gerald Gaus gives the following example of how such behavior will seem irrational:

This is so even with apparently trivial choices, as for example if she always chooses chocolate over vanilla ice cream, though she does not enjoy chocolate more, does not find its color more pleasing, is not seeking to ingratiate herself with her chocolate-loving sweetheart, she doesn’t even do it to save decision-making costs. She just always picks chocolate for no reason whatsoever. This, I suggest, is much closer to a paradigm of neurotic, than of rational action. (Gaus 1990:101)

Even if someone always acts to fulfil her wants, she still wants what she wants for a reason. Someone who had no reasons for her desires would not be a psychologically healthy person.

            We can most easily see the reasons lying behind desires, wants, and preferences when the reasons are bad ones. Recall the myth of Sisyphus. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, the first king of Corinth, was disrespectful to the gods. Angered, the gods condemned Sisyphus to eternally heaving a large rock up a hill, only to have the rock always escape and roll to the bottom again. Sisyphus’s punishment was not the heavy labor, but the complete meaninglessness of his life. The myth of Sisyphus has become a metaphor for a life lacking meaning. (Camus 1955) Now consider a thought experiment that rewrites this myth:

Let us suppose that the gods, while condemning Sisyphus to the fate just described, at the same time, as an afterthought, waxed perversely merciful by implanting in him a strange and irrational impulse; namely, a compulsive impulse to roll stones. We may if we like, to make this more graphic, suppose they accomplish this by implanting in him some substance that has this effect on his character and drives. . . . Now it can be seen why this little afterthought of the gods, which I call perverse, was also in fact merciful. For they have by this device managed to give Sisyphus precisely what he wants – by making him want precisely what they inflict on him. . . . Whereas otherwise he might profoundly have wished surcease, . . . his life is now filled with mission and meaning. (Taylor 1970:259)

This second, modified Sisyphus gets his wants satisfied. But does his life therefore become meaningful? It might feel more meaningful to him, but is it really so? The problem is that behind the wants and desires of the second Sisyphus is a “strange and irrational impulse.” This impulse is the reason for the second Sisyphus’s desire to roll stones, and it is not a good one; it is a strange and irrational one. Wants and desires, as we actually experience them, are not always good guides to meaningfulness. We have to look at the reasons why we have these wants, and recognize that these reasons can be bad ones.

            In sum, we should not accept the view of wants and desires that is part of the ideology underlying our economic system. We do not have an enduring set of preferences that we must maximally fulfil to have a meaningful life. Our preferences are not fixed. Instead, we form them in response to circumstances. Behind our preferences are reasons. Without reasons, our wants and desires would be neurotic or irrational. These reasons can be good ones or they can be bad ones. Our reasons for desiring, not our desires themselves, are the source of what matters.

Reasons and Emotions

            What sort of things are these reasons for desiring? We have no reason for limiting ourselves to the simple desire/preference psychological theory of economics. Such a theory may lend itself to the creation of attractively precise, mathematical models of decision making. Nonetheless, it describes poorly the actual mental life of real people. Real people have a whole range of motivating mental attitudes that do not reduce in any obvious way to desires. They have appetites, emotions, goals, intentions, plans, and purposes, and they deploy all these in their deliberations about how to lead their lives. Deliberation ranges over what matters to people, and things matter in many different ways. Often deliberation results in a desire to do something; the outcome of deliberation is a desire in the thin, motivational sense. (Blackburn 1998:121- 137) Behind such desires, however, are reasons; without such reasons desires would be neurotic.

            Often, our desires arise out of our emotional life. The reason we want to obtain something is that we enjoy it, like it, admire it, or love it, are pleased by it, are proud of it. We want to avoid something else because we hate it, despise it, are afraid of it, are worried by it, or are ashamed of it. The connection is not always direct. An emotion like jealousy will lead us to various different wants to hurt, to undermine, or to supplant. These wants are more subtle than is just wanting to avoid the object of our jealousy. Sometimes, too, the connection between emotion and motivation can be very indirect; love for one’s spouse may send one out into the rain on an errand one would not otherwise want to run. When we explain or justify our wants and desires, it is to our emotional life that we look. Directly or indirectly, our emotions are the reasons why we want as we do. Our emotions respond to our circumstances, and our wants change with them.

            If our emotional life explains our wants and desires, then looking to our emotions for a guide to what matters is the obvious route to take. After all, something matters to us only when it engages our emotions. A closer examination of the structural differences between desiring and mattering gives further evidence that wants and desires are poor guides to what matters.

            Recall that desires are intimately bound up with motivation, that motivation is oriented toward action, and that action involves the causation of future events and states of affairs. Motivational desires are always desires for some event to happen. We do not want objects directly, instead we want to come to possess them or see them or own them. Because wants and desires are motivations, they are always directed toward future events and states of affairs. This leads to two structural differences between wanting and mattering.

            The first structural difference is this: By contrast with wanting, mattering is not confined just to future events and states of affairs. Events, both in the present and in the past, can matter to us as well. A lovely walk in the park that she took last week can matter to a person. Today, though, she does not want that walk she took a week ago. She cannot want a past walk since she can only want future events. She can be glad she took it, can wish it had been longer, can have enjoyed it at the time, can have wanted to take it earlier, can hope to have another walk just as pleasant, but she cannot coherently want that past walk now. (Sumner 1996:128-133)

            The second structural difference is this: The things that matter to us include not only events and states of affairs but also objects, individuals, and collections thereof. However, we cannot directly desire objects and things. Saying that we desire something is always an elliptical way of saying that we desire either to enter some relationship with it or to do something with it. When someone wants the fancy car in a showroom, he wants to own it, or rent it, or drive it. He does not want it directly. Nor can we directly want or desire other people in the purely motivational sense that we have been discussing. When we say that we want someone, this is an elliptical way of saying that we want to spend time with, to meet with, or to talk to him or her. (One person can, however, want or desire another person in the strongly emotional sense of wanting him or her in a sexual way. The emotional sense of desiring is akin to lust, or intense longing.) Our wants are limited to events and states of affairs, whereas what matters to us can extend also to objects, individuals, and communities. (Anderson 1993:130)

            Wanting is not the fundamental evaluative attitude because it has the wrong structure. Wants are not fundamental. They are not given or unchangeable. Always, there are reasons why we have the wants and desires that we do. When we give reasons for our desires, the explanation generally involves a description of our emotional lives.

            Perhaps, then, emotions, not wants, are the fundamental evaluative attitudes and the proper guides to value. Emotions, unlike wants and desires, do have the right structures to be guides to value:

            First, emotions can be directed not only on the future, but also on the past and present. We can fear, worry about, or look forward to future events. As well, though, we can like, enjoy, hate, or be bored by the present moment, and we can cherish, detest, or be saddened by the past.

            Second, emotions can be directed no only on events, activities, and states of affairs, but also on objects, individuals and communities. We can worry about a future event, As well, though, we can also admire, fear, or be in awe of a natural object, we can love, adore, admire, or despise another person, and we can feel loyal to, or be stultified by our communities.

            Our search for meaning is a search, not for some purpose that comes to fruition only in the future, but for what inherently matters now. The fulfilled-desire route, for reasons canvassed in the last two chapters is the wrong route to follow. We must abandon the idea that nothing but getting what we want will lead to a meaningful life. Getting what we want is not the source of meaningfulness. We will try, instead, a route that uses our emotions as guides to what matters.