CEPPA Talk (online) – Sergio Tenenbaum (Toronto)

Title: Practical Reason and the Satisfaction of Desire

Location: Teams (online only)

Abstract: I have a desire for dulce de leche ice-cream (or that I myself eat ice-cream) but there’s no ice-cream nearby. A heavenly angel takes pity on me and decides she will help me out. She conjures the ice-cream and quickly shoves it through my mouth at a temperature that burns my taste buds just as I had finished eating a whole watermelon. She then tells me: “Smile away my dear mortal; your desire has been satisfied!”. This vignette illustrates a well-known issue in understanding the nature of desire: the problem of under-specification. This problem has been recently debated mostly in the context of philosophy of language as a problem for a standard theory of propositional attitudes. My interest here is not to settle the dispute in the philosophy of language, but to understand better how the satisfaction of desire is determined in the context of practical reason. That is, in the above vignette, I certainly failed to procure what I wanted. But if not in the mismatch between the proposition (or the common noun, or the infinitival) that I use to express my desire and the facts on the ground, in virtue of what has my desire failed to find satisfaction? After all, the world seems to have conformed to the content of my will.

In this paper, I first investigate the different ways in which desire finds no satisfaction. I then argue that a certain understanding of how desire relates to the good explains, better than any other alternative, how what is represented in my desire can fail to find satisfaction in the world despite its content being made true. In fact, I will argue that this phenomenon provides an important argument for the guise of the good; since “satisfaction” seems to be the major potential alternative as the formal object of desire and intentional action, the fact that satisfaction is inseparable from at least the apparent good, shows that these are not rival aims of agency but one and the same formal object of our practical attitudes. I will end with a potential difficulty for this argument; namely, that some cases of failure of satisfaction seem to require a “guise of the pleasant” above and beyond the “guise of the good”. I briefly sketch how on a Kantian view of human agency the guise of the pleasant is incorporated into the guise of the good and even more briefly try to explain how a similar account might be available to those less sympathetic to the Kantian conception of agency.