Ben Conroy
Everyday Philosophy
If you do something voluntarily, it must be because you wanted to do it, at least in some sense. This apparently innocent statement can in the hands of some philosophers have quite disturbing implications.
First, let’s think about the statement itself. It is true as far as it goes. Even if you do something that you really don’t want to do in lots of respects, if you actually do it voluntarily you must have wanted to do it in some respect. You might have terrible stage fright and find the idea of public speaking horrifying, but if you actually get up and give a speech in public there must have been something desirable to you about giving it. Maybe you really wanted to impress someone in the crowd, or maybe you just wanted to overcome your fear. Whatever the reason, you must have wanted to do it more than you wanted to do anything else, all things considered. If that wasn’t true, you’d have done something else.
It can be frighteningly plausible: it really doesn’t seem possible to be motivated to act without having a desire”
What about cases in which we say that a person overcame his desires to do what was right? Where a person does something not because they want to do it but because they think it is good? Cases of pure self-sacrifice like that of St Maximilian Kolbe, who took the place of another man who the Nazis were planning to kill. Certainly St Maximilian did not want to starve to death. But St Maximilian must have wanted ‘to save the man he replaced’, or ‘to do the right thing’ or ‘to serve God’ or ‘love his neighbour’ and thus wanted to take the self-sacrificial action he took as a means to these ends. The key point is that there is a very close connection between wanting to do something and thinking it is good. (Remember this, we’ll come back to it).
A desire can be irrational if it conflicts with something you actually want more”
So what’s the problem with this? Well, according to David Hume and many of his followers, what I’ve said so far about desire makes morality something that’s ultimately not answerable to reason. Huh?
Argument
Hume’s argument is as follows: there are two kinds of states your mind can be in when it comes to deciding how to act. Those are beliefs and desires. A belief is about how the world actually is. A desire is about how you want the world to be. Hume thinks that a belief can never motivate a person to action without being accompanied by a desire. I might believe “those roast potatoes are very tasty” but unless I also want to eat tasty things, that belief alone will never get me to eat the spuds.
Here’s where it gets disturbing: if only desires can motivate you, then you are ultimately controlled by whatever desires you so happen to have. As far as Hume is concerned, desires aren’t rational things. He wrote that “it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”.
Sure, a desire can be irrational if it conflicts with something you actually want more. If you want to be a famous athlete and also to eat six donuts a day, something’s got to give. But whatever your deepest or ultimate desires are will determine the rationality of all your other ones. If you don’t happen to ultimately desire good things, then you can’t be motivated to pursue them. You can’t be rationally argued out of your deepest desires: if they happen to include ‘the destruction of the world’, there’s nothing irrational about that. The heart wants what it wants.
Influential
This picture of things is extremely influential in modern moral philosophy. That’s because it can be frighteningly plausible: it really doesn’t seem possible to be motivated to act without having a desire.
What about cases in which we say that a person overcame his desires to do what was right?”
But that’s not where Hume goes wrong. He goes wrong in thinking that desires aren’t ever rational things. Earlier on we said that there was a close connection between desiring something and seeing something as good. To desire something you must see it as (in some way) desirable, or as in at least some way good. (This is a point of Aquinas’s). We can understand that connection two ways. Like Hume we could say that what you see as good is determined by what you desire. But we could instead say that your desires are determined at least in part by what you see as good. And ‘what you see as good’ is something that is amenable to rational argument, something about which it’s possible to be right or wrong. Rather than creatures governed by ultimately irrational urges, we might be creatures that pursue the good as we see it. If we realise we’re wrong about what’s good, that in itself can change what we want.