Let us hope that we do not come to the point in any society we live in (as opposed to China or the former USSR) where we:

...society would still have reason to use its powers of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to inhibit the formation of that desire generally throughout society…

However, desires are like black holes. We can never see a desire directly. We can only know of their existence by looking at actions and postulating those desires that best answer the question, “What could have caused a person to act that way?�

I suppose your suggesting that if someone on the outside (without the handy tools of interrogation, sodium pentathol or a psychologist/priest) cannot tell that there is a desire (one that would be rejected by society) then it is allowed to remain and fester like a wound, as if the desire could be compared to a scratch on the flesh of our thinking. And the wellwishers in society are only trying to heal someone before a full-blown illness occurs by inhibiting the desires which - presumably - could lead there.

Makes me wish for someone to effectively state the counter case (which my heart - to use an old phrase if you will pardon me - tells me is essential to liberty and individual freedom) concerning the appropriateness (if not rightness) of thinking that societies have a vested interest in policing our desires? Or are we all too afraid of being viewed as supporting these ugly thoughts and desires - as if by agreeing to the thought we are agreeing to any misdeeds? And can this ever be supported in a society which prides itself on individual liberties (without being hollow and untrue to its own credo)?

Sorry to have - possibly - highjacked your thread. Please continue discussing the hypothetical.

kysstfafm

In the realm of morality, society deals with desires generally, not on a specific person-by-person basis. For example, by condemning those who lie, society promotes a general aversion to lying. Praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment are used to affect everybody—even those who do not act on a “festering” bad desire. We see this in the idea that moral principles are meant to be universal.

Also, there is a strong desire-utilitarian argument for a love of freedom. John Stuart Mill provided the basis of this argument in On Liberty. When it comes to desire fulfillment, each person is the most knowledgable as to what states of affairs will fulfill his own desires. He is also the least corruptable. A love of libert—a love of an aversion to interfering with the lives of others—is something each person has a reason to promote.

Of course, this love of liberty does not extend to a love of the liberty to do harm to others, because harm to others DOES thwart desires. That is to say, our desire should be for that liberty that is consistent with the equal liberty of others.

As for your comments about discussing the hypothetical, I invite you to look at the blog that Les referenced that started this discussion. The vast majority of those entries apply these principles to real issues.

Alonzo,

I’ll grant that desires in general have some effect on action (simply because I can’t really think of a counter-example at the moment).  However, I don’t think such a fact really resolves the concerns voiced by Sadie, Kysstfafm, and myself.  This is for two reasons.

First a distinction needs to be made between actions that thwart other desires and actions that don’t.  For example, I would assume that my desire to smoke in public places would likely be in your moral calculus a bad sort of thing (given that smoking in public would thwart people’s desires to not have second hand smoke exhaled on them or something like that).  However, I’ve quit smoking (and have for quite some time), yet still have the desire to smoke in public places.  This probably does have an effect on my actions but since I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore, it’s not clear how my desire to smoke in public thwarts anyone else’s desires.  Though granted my desire to smoke in public gets thwarted but I would assume that the thwarting of bad desires would be a good thing from your model.

The second concern is that sure all desires lead to actions but it is still those actions that do the desire thwarting not the desires themselves.  As such to exclude consideration of desire in favor of consideration of action still seems to be an unwarranted move.

-Socialist Swine

It seems that there’s an open tag floating around somewhere.

Apparently, Socialist Swine, you’ve nailed more than one thing on its head (loose-tag-free?). Possibly some would argue that once you quit and your desire persisted you might engage in alternative (secondary ones being less thought out and more reactionary?) actions due to the thwarted desire, ones like being a little more gruff/cranky with other people (particularly at first and with non-smokers). The alternative actions can be problematic because they can hint (sort of a smoking volcano) of trouble to come (increased tension in social situations) if not recognized, examined and dealt with, or so I think. Now is an action that derives principly from a thwarted desire something to be more careful of than a non-thwarted, desire-inspired action (a principle action, if you will)? Look at people who manage (and not entirely forgetting all those others trying to lose weight) to keep weight off and also sometimes give in to their urges to consume treats as a way to cope with the fact that they are human and that withholding actually lessens their ability to manage their weight? Weakness? Unforgivable? Or understandable?

Hiya Zilch, hope you had a great weekend!

The evolution of a social animal largely unites ethical behavior with our own self-interest. But what happens when they are not united?

Consider the question I posed to Alonzo earlier: suppose aliens offered to rob a bank and give you the money. They will use their technology to make sure you can not get caught. Do you accept?

Atheist ethics dictate that we accept. Christian ethics dictate that we refuse.

The only exception I can think of is one the Ulfrekr brought up: suppose our atheist has such a strong sense of empathy and moral sympathy that accepting the offer would leave him plagued with feelings of guilt. This goes back to what I said earlier - evolution has (largely) united our self-interests with cooperative behavior. But not everyone feels that way - all you have to do is pick up a newspaper for confirmation!

Socialist Swine

Desires

I am going to start by being a bit pendantic. I want to do this because it provides a useful illustration of how desires work.

I suspect that you do not have “a desire to smoke in public”. Instead, you probably have a desire to smoke. That desire to smoke can be fulfilled by the act of smoking in public. It can also be fulfilled by the act of smoking in private. If it were true that you had “a desire to smoke in private”, this desire coudl not be fulfilled by smoking in private, and you would not be inclined to do so.

If you had a desire to smoke, plus an aversion to doing harm to others, then you would be disinclined to smoke in ways that risk causing harm to others. Assuming that second-hand smoke is harmful, you would be disinclined to smoke in public.

What society is complaining about, with respect to those who smoke in public, is not the desire to smoke, but the lack of an aversion to doing harm to thers—an aversion that people generally (including smokers—insofar as they have an aversion to the effects of being harmed by others) have reason to promote.

This leaves open the question of whether second-hand smoke is harmful to others. Forpurposes of this discussion, it is sufficient to say that the question of the harmfulness of second-hand smoke has moral significance.

Social Conditioning

The next important point to keep in mind is that society cannot target desires individually. It targets desires generally—throughout society.

Let us assume that you do, in fact, have a desire to smoke in public. Yet, for some reason, you do not smoke. We may only assume that you do not smoke because, in addition to this desire to smoke in public, you have an aversion to something that may result from smoking in public (e.g., lung cancer).

Your desire to smoke in public may be harmless. However, society directs its moral tools against the desire to smoke in public generally. It is reasonable to believe that the desire to smoke in public will not always be harmless to others. To prevent this harm, others (and those who care about these others) have reason to target the desire to smoke in public with condemnation and, possibly, punishment.

Because your desire to smoke in public does not manifest itself in terms of action, society will never have a reason to target you specifically with condemnation or punishment. However, society would still reasonably call the desire to smoke in public “wrong.“

We must remember, I am assuming the truth of your hypothetical desire to smoke in public. In the real world, what society is really targeting is not a desire to smoke in public, but an aversion to doing harm to others (coupled with the belief that second-hand smoke is harmful to others). People without a sufficiently strong aversion to doing harm to others are a threat. To reduce the chance of suffering harm to others, society uses praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to promote an aversion to doing harm to others.

Losing Weight

From this, I can discuss the issue of a person who is trying to lose weight.

An ‘appetite’ is a particular type of desire that diminishes in strength when it is fulfilled. It includes such things as thirst, hunger, and lust. A person trying to lose weight has an aversion to the effects of being over weight. As the desire for food grows, it can reach a point where it is stronger than the aversion to the effects of hunger. The person eats. Before the appetite gets the ability to diminish, the person discovers that he has blown his diet.

The person who cheats a little on his diet to prevent from overeating has a valid strategy for losing weight. As his appetite grows, he seeks a small amount of fulfillment. If he is wise, he seeks fulfillment before his desire for food exceeds his aversion to the effects of weight. This small indulgence prevents the hunger from reaching this peak, thereby preventing the type of binge eating that other dieters may suffer.

There is nothing particularly mysterious in this.

Desires and Actions

You also wrote, “...all desires lead to action…“

This is not necessarily true. A desire is a disposition to act, but it does not necessarily lead to action.

“Fragility” is a dispositional state. A fragile object is disposed to break if struck with a blunt object. However, a fragile object does not necessarily break. Whether it breaks or not depends on whether it gets into a situation that suits the conditions for the dispositional state.

You wanted me to explain why there is a focus on desires rather than actions. The reason is this:

Actions are caused. Desire utilitarianism holds that there is no such thing as contra-causal free will. There is “free will” only in the compatibalist sense. This is the sense that says, “could have done otherwise” means “would have done otherwise if he had wanted to.“

On this model, “Should have done otherwise” implies “Could have done otherwise if he had wanted to,“ plus “Should have wanted to.“

“Should have wanted to” implies “Could have wanted to.“

“Could have wanted to” means that the desires in question are those that can be molded through social conditioning using such tools as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment.

This does not deny that evolution can set in mental stone some desires that morality would also select. The benefits of cooperation fully explain why we would see evidence of some evolutionary pressure towards the same type of cooperation that morality also identifies as good. However, the concept of an “evolved morality” makes no sense.

First, fixed desires—those that evolution has set in mental stone—are not the realm for moral concepts. It makes no more sense to say that a person has a moral obligation to do that which evolution makes mandatory, than it does to say that a person who falls from the roof of a vacuum chamber at NASA has a duty to accelerate to the ground at 10 meters per second squared. Evolutionary ethicists speak as if these types of claims make sense.

Second, let us take the lion as an example. Lions have evolved in such a way that, whenever male lions take over a new pride, the first thing they do is kill all of the “step children”. This is an evolved disposition. Is it morally right? Those who say that our moral dispositions evolved need to answer a question that I claim they cannot answer. What is it that makes an evolved disposition “moral?“

Now, to get back to the main point; if you say that a person “should have done X” you have to be saying that he should have had those desires that would have caused him to do X. Morally demanding that he do X without the requisite change in desires is like demanding that the Earth change its orbit, while insisting that all of the forces acting on the Earth remain the same. It is simply not going to happen.

If our statement “should have done X” implies a change in desires, then we also have to look at the implications of having those desires. We may assume that the desires that would cause an agent to do X would also cause that agent to do Y, where Y will not only thwart a great many desires but is far more common. In this case, it makes absolutely no sense to ell people that they should do X. Our condemnation and punishment in these causes would cause the formation of a desire that would also cause people to do Y. It would make far more sense to use our powers of condemnation and punishment against those who do X, as a way of inhibiting the desires that would otherwise have people doing Y.

The standard objection to act-utilitarian morality involves coming up with a highly improbable situation where there is an act that will have good consequences. This involves a doctor who can kill one parent to save five, or a sheriff who can frame an innocent man to prevent a riot. However, if we demand that the agent do this thing, then we must argue for weakening the aversion to doing harm to an innocent person. Weakening this aversion to doing harm to an innocent person will almost certainly result in the thwarting of other desires under other circumstances. We want to promote the aversion to doing harm to an innocent person. Therefore, we have reason to condemn the doctor who kills one patient to save five and the sheriff who frames an innocent man.

There is only one type of person who can always do the act-utilitarian best act. This is the person with only one desire—a desire to maximize utility. As soon as we add one other desire to the mix—any desire at all—then there will be situations in which that other desire will motivate the agent to act in ways that do not maximize utility. There is no possible way that humans can have only one desire—a desire to maximize utility. Thus, the act-utilitarianism demand that people act like people who have only this one desire violates the principle of “ought” implies “can”.

Desire utilitarianism not only avoids the counter-examples to act utilitarianism. It explains why act utilitarianism fails. Act utilitarianism fails because it divorces the act from its causes. In doing so, it fails to consider the consequences of changing the causes of action.

This is why I reject act-utilitarianism or any moral theory that focuses primarily on acts. None of them take seriously the question, “What does it take for the person to actually perform that action?“ Once we take this question seriously, we find ourselves looking at desires.

Alonzo,

First let me note that it was you who first suggested the necessary tie between desire and action:

What does it mean to have a desire that has no affect on actions? It would be like having a black hole that has no affect on the physical universe. Again, we would have no reason to think it is even there.

I was just granting your point.  I had initially argued that desires without actions would not have any effect on other desires and as such a desire simpliciter cannot thwart other desires.

Also I’m fairly familiar with the literature regarding dispositions.  I studied for some time with C.B. Martin and during that period was forced to read his debate with U.T. Place and David Armstrong repeatedly.

However, I’m not sure how dispositions are salient to this discussion.  Furthermore, I’m unsure as to how the fact that people often reference desires as explanation to action is salient either.

It seems to me that the heart of the matter is the question regarding whether desires, on their own, can have an effect upon other desires.  If you can demonstrate that they can, then I will grant that desire utilitarianism is worth further discussion.  However, if my suspicion that desires require action to effect other desires then it strikes me that desire utilitarianism is merely act utilitarianism in disguise.

Alonzo, I have spent the last several days poring over your blog, and I must say that I am stunned by how good it is. Simply put, it makes for some of the most fascinating, thought-provoking reading that I have ever engaged in.

*Please don’t construe this comment as ass-kissing. It’s intended to be complimentary. 

Justin, I had a great week up in the mountains, thanks!  Unfortunately, the food was very good, so I’m back to crackers and water for a while…

Consider the question I posed to Alonzo earlier: suppose aliens offered to rob a bank and give you the money. They will use their technology to make sure you can not get caught. Do you accept?

Atheist ethics dictate that we accept. Christian ethics dictate that we refuse.

Justin, do you know an atheist who would accept the money?  I’m an atheist, and I wouldn’t.  An atheist can have all kinds of ethics, and there can be lots of overlap with Christian ethics, for lots of reasons.

The only exception I can think of is one the Ulfrekr brought up: suppose our atheist has such a strong sense of empathy and moral sympathy that accepting the offer would leave him plagued with feelings of guilt. This goes back to what I said earlier - evolution has (largely) united our self-interests with cooperative behavior. But not everyone feels that way - all you have to do is pick up a newspaper for confirmation!

Yes, and the more religious a nation is, the more societal problems it has.  Is that what you mean?

High levels of organic atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality. Most nations characterized by high degrees of individual and societal security have the highest rates of organic atheism, and conversely, nations characterized by low degrees of individual and societal security have the lowest rates of organic atheism.

Not that religion necessarily creates the problems- it’s certainly more complicated than that.  Probably the most salient connection here is that wealthy nations, which are better off in most societal aspects, are also better educated, and thus have more atheists, in general.

SS said: However, if my suspicion that desires require action to effect other desires then it strikes me that desire utilitarianism is merely act utilitarianism in disguise.

Ding, ding, ding, ding!!!!!!!!  SS wins the prize for correctly identifying the leopard trying desperately to hide its spots in this thread.

Socialist Swine

If you knew of two roads—Route 1 and MacIlhattan Road—one way to determine if they are two names for the same road is to determine what they are made of. If one is asphalt, and the other is gravel, you know they are not the same road.

Yet, even if both are asphalt, they still might not be the same road. The are not the same road if, it turns out, they go to two different directions.

Yes, desires only fulfill other desires through acts. However, there is only one set of desires that will create a person who will always and only do act-utilitarian best actions. This would be a person with one desire, and one desire only—a desire to perform act-utilitarian best actions. If he has any other desire—no matter how weak—it will worm its way into his actions and, under some circumstancs, pull the agent into doing something other than the act-utilitarian best act.

The act utilitarian cannot prefer chocolate over vanilla. He must choose to eat chocolate or vanilla based solely on the utility of what he eats. He cannot dislike pain. If he has an aversion to pain then there will be cases in which this aversion will prevent him from doing the act-utilitarian best action. He cannot enjoy one type of movie over another; he must choose his movies based solely on the utility of watching one movie or the other.

Applying the principle of ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, such a system of ethics has been reduced to an absurdity.

Desire utilitarianism says to focus on desires and, out of respect for ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, only those desires that can be molded through social interaction. This permits all sorts of situations where an agent may perform something other than the act-utilitarian best act.

The two theories point in different directions. Act utilitarianism says, “Do that act that has the best consequences.“ Desire utilitarianism says, “Do that act that a person with good desires (to the degree that desires can be influenced through social conditioning) would do.“

These are not the same thing.

Justin

I would like to know something.

Assume that you and I are co-workers. I am about to leave on vacation and I have withdrawn a substantial amount of cash from my account. Stupid me. That evening, you are working late. I call you and say, “I lost my envelope full of money. Would you check to see if I left it on my desk?“

According to your ethic, you would say, “No,“ and pocket the money. After all, if I do not know where it is, I will not be accusing you of taking it. It is the perfect crime. Just tell me that there is no envelope on my desk, then walk off with the money.

My guess is that you would not do it.

More importantly, I think that you can see the value in creating a society in which people had an aversion to taking money under these circumstances.

We can trust that a person who hates the taste of liver and onions will not eat liver and onions even when he is alone—even when nobody is going to catch him doing so. He will pass up the opportunity. Similarly, a person who hates to take money that belongs to others will also pass up the opportunity to do so, even when he can get away with it. It is something he just does not like to do.

We all have reason to use the forces of social conditioning at our disposal to create neighbors who have an aversion to doing us harm, even when they can get away with it. That is what we aim to do with this system that we call ‘morality.‘

Can I just step in here and say how much I really like Alonzo’s discussion?  Thanks, Alonzo.

Alonzo,

But how does one define “good desires” in any other means than to refer to their influence over the manifestation of acts that bring about the best consequences?  That’s the question I’m asking.

You are correct in noting that desires tend to fulfill other desires through their actions.

As a result, good desires tend to push our actions close to act-utilitarian ‘best acts’.

This means that act-utilitarianism is not a good ‘first guess’ at a moral theory. Jeremy Bentham (the originator of act-utilitarianism) was not completely and totally wrong with no possibility of redemption. He was in the right area. He was only wrong in the details.

Those details tell us that it is sometimes mistaken to say that a person ought to do the act-utilitarian best action.

It could not account for counter-examples such as the doctor who can kill one patient to save five, or the sheriff who can prevent a riot by framing an innocent man, or the man who visits his friend in the hospital purely because it is the act-utilitarian best act, or the nurse who kills Hitler as an infant and thereby performs a ‘good act’ without knowing it, or the case of Jim, a reporter visiting a sadistic dictator, who is told that he must kill one innocent person or the dictator will kill twenty.

These are all objections that straight act-utilitarianism cannot handle.

There is also a structural objection to act-utilitarianism. It misses the fact that morality is not a two dichotomy of actions, it is a trichotomy. Desire utilitarianism says that all actions are either ‘ought’ (the act that maximizes utility) or ‘ought-not’ (everything else). In fact, actions are broken down into three categories; ‘obligation’, ‘permission’, ‘prohibition’.

Virtually all of our actions fit into the category that act-utilitarianism cannot handle; the category of ‘permission’. Writing this answer is not something that I am obligated to do, nor am I prohibited from doing it. It is one of countless actions that I may permissibly do (other include exercising, going to the grocery store, starting laundry, playing a computer game, answeringing a different objection in a different location, etc.) Only one of these is the act-utilitarian best act. Contrary to the claims of act-utilitarianism, I have no obligation to find out what it is and to do it.

So, even though act-utilitarianism is in the ballpark, it needs some fine tuning.

Recognizing that all actions are caused by desire, and ‘you ought to do X’ implies ‘you ought to have had those desires that would have caused you to do X’, and that we now need to worry about the effects of having those desires, gives us the adjustment we need to handle these problems with act-utilitarianism.

Doctors must have an aversion to killing healthy patients. Sure, in this instance, he may be killing a healthy patient to save five others. However, doctors (being human) have a great many desires. The desire to be home with their family. They desire money. The like some people more than others. A weakened aversion to killing healthy patients might, this time, mean saving the lives of five others. However, the weakened aversion would then not be there to weigh against the desire to go home early, or for money, or to be rid of somebody they do not like.

The fact that ‘ought to do X’ implies ‘ought to have the desires that would have caused him to do X’, and the absence of that desire would likely lead to bad consequences in a huge number of far more common situations, suggests that it is not the case that the doctor ‘ought not to have the desires that would have caused him to do X’, which implies that, for its own safety and security, it is false to say that the doctor ought to kill this one healthy patient to save five. In fact, doctors ought to have a strong aversion to killing healthy patients. To help ensure this, we bring our moral tools of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment against doctors who might consider killing a healthy patient, even when it can save five others.

This answer can be applied to all of the common objections to act-utilitarianism. They all involve some hypothetical and unusual (or impossible) situation in which the act-utilitarian best action is something that we do not want to see the person do. The reason we are squeemish about him doing the act-utilitarian best act is because we recognize that a person capable of doing that act—that has the desires that would make doing such an act possible—if made universal throughout humanity, would be a danger to us all. Consequently, we say that he ought not do the act-utilitarian best act. We say that he ought not to have the desires that would make such an act possible, and that it would be foolish to suggest that such desires become universal.

The other area where act-utilitarianism fails (the dichotomy versus the trichotomy of moral categories) stems from the fact that we can divide desires into three categories.

There are desires that it would be good for everybody to have (e.g., an aversion to sex without consent).

There are desires that it would be bad for everybody to have (e.g., a desire to watch others scream in pain).

There are desires that it is good for some people to have, but not everybody.

As an example of the latter, it is good that some people have desires that are best fulfilled by becoming firefighters, while others have desires that are best fulfilled by being teachers. If everybody desired to be firefighters, then we could only have teachers by thwarting the desires of some who wanted to be firefighters. If everybody desired to teachers, then we could have firefighters only by thwarting the desires fulfilled by teaching.

These optional and variant desires give us the category of moral permissibility. A person does not have an obligation to be a firefighter or a teacher. Both of these options are permissible. In this way, we hope that some people will desire to become firefighters. Others will desire to become teachers. In this way, our society can have both firefighters and teachers with the fewest number of desires being thwarted.

So, yes, desires fulfill other desires through action. And, yes, good desires will tend to push us towards act-utilitarian best actions. However, good desires will not always demand that we do the act-utilitarian best action. We are permitted to have a range of desires, and to do those actions that fulfill desires within that range. There are even some cases where good desires will compell us NOT to do the act-utilitarian best action. They will, for example, make us so adverse to killing a healthy patient that a moral doctor would not do so even when he could use the victim’s organs to save five other patients.

There is a strong area of overlap between desire-utilitarianism and act-utilitarianism. However, there are also differences. And those differences make a great deal of difference.

The structural objections I’ll grant you but they can be resolved within a act-utilitarian framework.  What I’m still not convinced of is that “good desires” aren’t really reducible to “good actions”.  That’s what I would like you demonstrate.  If you can do that then I will accept that desire-utilitarianism might be a superior view to act-utilitarianism.  However, you still haven’t made a case for why desires have moral import seperate from actions.

Socialist Swine

At this point, I have to ask if your question is not entirely semantic. I have shown how desire utilitarianism is structurally different from act-utilitarianism and how the recognition of the role of desires as causes of action handles several objections with act-utilitarianism.

It also handles the problems with classic “rule utilitarianism” by showing how desires are rules that were programmed into the human brain in such a way that they do not allow for exceptions.

If you wish to call this theory “act-utilitarianism 3.0” (with classic rule utilitarianism being “act-utilitarianism 2.0”), then this is purely a semantic dispute. This falls into the category of discussion I illustrated above with the astronomers’ problem of defining the word ‘planet’.

The question of how to define terms such as ‘planet’ or ‘act-utilitarianism’ are a matter of convention. However, they are also substantially irrelevant because what we call things do not change what they are. A dispute as to whether to call this “act-utilitarianism 3.0” or “desire utilitarianism” is not a substantive issue.

I don’t think this is an issue of naming, I think it’s a substantial issue regarding whether desires are independently morally relevant.  I have acknowledged that you have me convinced about the structural differences between the view you endorse and the Bentham/Mill sort of act utilitarianism.  I’m just not sure that the reference to desire is substantive, in that it seems to me that really when you’re talking about a “good desire” you’re still really talking about a “good action” in that a desire is only good or bad as the result of the actions that it tends to bring about. 

What I’ve been asking you is, why should we view desires as morally salient in a manner that isn’t reducible to action?

That’s a substantive question not a terminological one.

Oops, I made an error.  The last sentence of my previous post should read:

“That’s a substantive question not a merely terminological one.“