Inclinations are Volition

Responding to Florence Bacus's "Inclinations are Voluntary"

Florence Bacus (FB)’s new blog – Moralla W. Within – kicked off about a week ago and has unhesitatingly churned out bangers at an admirable pace. Thursday’s article, Inclinations are Voluntary, developed and defended a highly counterintuitive point - that our desires are up to us:

I said that deliberation about whether to desire, say, money consists in deliberating about whether, in general, to promote my wealth in cases where all else is equal. But in any particular case where all else is equal, nothing forces me to promote my wealth. So, in general, it is up to me whether to promote my wealth in general in cases where all else is equal. This reasoning applies just as well regardless of whether we’re talking about inclination or rational motivation. Therefore, it is up to me what I am inclined to do.

It’s a fascinating argument, and after sitting with it for a few days, I feel I can now properly articulate the precise extent to which I agree with it, and the reasons why.

First, a quick sketch of the relevant conceptual landscape: our desires (what we want) can be sorted into two bins – inclinations and rational motivations. Our rational motivations account for the moral sphere, and our inclinations are basically matters of personal preference.¹ When we take some course of action, we weigh the relevant desires - so for instance, if I am deciding whether to buy a chocolate bar, I weigh my desire for the chocolate against my desire for the money I’d forgo in purchasing it.

If we break FB’s argument into chunks, we get something roughly equivalent to the following:

1. Deliberating about what to desire is the same as deliberating about what to do in general.

2. It’s up to me what I do in each case.

3. If it’s up to me what I do in each case, it’s up to me what I do in general.

4. If it’s up to me what I do in general, and deliberating about what to desire is the same as deliberating about what to do in general, then it’s up to me what I desire.

5. Therefore, it’s up to me what I desire.

Right off the bat, I have no reason to disagree with premises 1, 2, and 3. And I have no trouble with the fact that 5 is counterintuitive, in and of itself – I have defended many a counterintuitive conclusion of my own,² and I put no great methodological stock in intuition, on its own, in any case.

But I cannot accept premise 4, on this framing, for the precise reason I accept one through three – for me, a thing is “up to me” if it is determined by my desires, which is to say, if the facts about it are explainable in terms of the facts about what I want. To deliberate about what to desire is the same as deliberating about what to do in general (premise 1), precisely because the former determines the latter. It’s up to me what I do in general (premises 2 & 3) because what I do in general is determined by what I desire!

I don’t believe this is merely a semantic quibble. If something is not determined by your desires, I know of no sense in which it is up to you. If a party is thrown and your desires play no role in the way the party goes, I will not say there is any sense in which the party is up to you. If your desires played a small role in determining how the party went (suppose you were consulted on the flavor of the cake), there is only a small extent to which the party is up to you. If your desires fully determine the facts of the party – if every decoration, drink, guest, and appetizer is specifically of your choosing – then the party was fully up to you.

Another example: I would face no great practical difficulty, if I desired, in painting myself green. I have my car keys and can purchase paint at the nearest hardware store. However, before I take this course of action, I must surmount a tremendous obstacle – I do not desire to paint myself green. I do not even desire to desire to paint myself green, or desire to desire to desire, and so on, and so I will take no steps that are likely to yield that psychological state. Which is to say – if our desires are fixed, then our choice in a given circumstance is up to us, but it is also nevertheless fixed. It is not, generally, possible for us to choose a course of action we do not desire.

Further, it’s not obvious to me that there is any case whatsoever in which a person could desire to desire something, without already desiring it! For instance, consider a man engaged in an affair – he might say he doesn’t want to stop, but that he wants to want to stop. I don’t believe him! I think (a) he already wants to stop, but he wants other things more, (b) these other wants then prevail when he makes the choice, late at night, to keep at it, and (c) afterwards, he faces consequences (guilt? herpes?) which lead him to regret the choice. He wants to have chosen to stop – but this is not the same thing! Likewise, if I want to want X, and take steps to bring about a situation in which I want X, it seems obvious that I’d only seek to bring about this situation as a means to bring about X (unless I somehow desire desiring X intrinsically) - but if this is so, I’m already pursuing X! And if I am pursuing it, in what sense do I not want it?

A more plausible account, I’d argue, of the control we actually have over our desires is that we exercise it indirectly, through attention and deliberation. Directing our attention at different sources of information supplies new reasons, and our desires might shift after deliberating on these new reasons. For instance, if I directed my attention towards reading about the long-term harm and unpleasantness of lung cancer, I might, after deliberating on this, less strongly desire to smoke cigarettes. In this sense, we could have some “finger on the scales” regarding the desires of our future self. And it’s certainly conceivable that something like meditation could “strengthen” that metaphorical finger, by increasing the extent to which we can choose what we pay attention to and deliberate on.

Maybe one could even draw a rough sketch of this process: experience, mediated by attention, determines the reasons we have; reasons, mediated by deliberation, determine our desires and beliefs about the world; our beliefs and desires determine our choices; and our choices (mediated by reality) determine our subsequent experiences, along with the manner in which we subsequently deliberate and exercise attention.³

In closing – I don’t think our desires are up to us, per se. Rather, I think what we do is up to us precisely to the extent it is determined by our desires – but our desires aren’t determined by our desires!

1. I’d contend these are one and the same, but that’s beyond the scope of this post - and in any case, the argument’s reasoning applies just as well for both.

2. Cf., A Partial Defense of Singerism Against its Worthy Adversaries | On the Sublime Art of Bullet-Biting.

3. But perhaps not! I’m not a psychologist.