Enjoyment and Reasons
Our goal is an accurate, sufficiently complete for our purposes picture of the explanatory-justificatory role of enjoyment. We begin where the last chapter ended. Enjoyment consists in causal harmony between three elements: the enjoyed experience or activity φ; the occurrent belief, of φ, under A, that it is occurring; and the felt desire, of φ under A, that it should occur for its own sake. The focus of this chapter is on the fact that, typically, the “of φ, under A” pair is a reason for one to have the experience or engage in the activity. The “typically” matters. One can enjoys φ under A when the “of φ, under A” pair is not a reason for one to φ. The distinction between the two cases is crucial to an accurate picture of the explanatory-justificatory role of enjoyment. We provide a sufficiently complete picture by canvassing the various types of cases in the “of φ, under A” pair is a reason. This may not be what one expected when we announced our goal of picture of the explanatory-justificatory role of enjoyment. Why not begin with the evident fact that the prospect of enjoyment is a reason for action? Because the role of the prospect of enjoyment as a reason for action is best understood in terms of its relations to “of φ, under A” pairs being such reasons. An essential preliminary is clarifying the notion of a reason for action.
I. Personal reasons
Talk of “reasons for action” is ambiguous in least two ways. One sometimes means considerations that motivate one and which one regards as justifying the action (at least to some degree); on other occasions, one means considerations that should play a motivational-justificatory role whether or not they do so. Robert is a prominent wine critic. His doctor informs him he has severe and chronic gout, and must, on pain of destroying his health and ultimately his life, stop drinking the French wines in which he delights. Robert persists nonetheless; he thinks of himself as a badly injured warrior who, although doomed to defeat, defiantly refuses to cease fighting for his ideal. When his friends try to change his mind, their arguments fall on deaf ears. The problem is not that Robert fails to believe that ceasing his gourmet pursuits would preserve his health, nor is it that he fails to desires to remain healthy; the difficulty is that the belief/desire pair fails to play the motivational-justificatory role of a reason. It simply fails to motivate Robert to alter his habits, and he denies the pair any justificatory role in dinning decisions; as he says with regard to his health, “I am just not paying any attention to that now.” He makes his dining decisions on exactly the same basis as he did before his doctor told him of his condition. Robert’s friends think the belief/desire pair is nonetheless a reason for Robert to abandon his gourmet pursuits. The friends realize that the pair does not in Robert’s case play the motivational-justificatory role of a reason; their position is that it should. Some of them—the hardliners—insist that it should play a decisive role leading to the abandonment of his gourmet pursuits; the softliners merely think the pair should play some, possibly non-decisive role. Both groups, however, agree that the pair is a reason in the “should play” sense. The friends’ claim raises a number of issues we will put aside. We will focus exclusively on reasons for action as considerations that do (or would) play a motivational-justificatory role in guiding and evaluating thought and action. Let us call such reasons personal reasons for action. We take such reasons to consist of appropriate belief/desire pairs. We first identify the general motivational-justificatory role such pairs play when they serve as personal reasons and then turn to the “of φ under A” belief/desire pairs that comprise our primary concern. An essential preliminary is addressing an objection to the assumption that personal reasons are belief/desire pairs.
- “Humeans” Versus “Kantians”
The objection is that we are, without argument, taking sides in the long-standing debate about what sort of psychological state is required to explain the motivational dimension of reasons. Some—crudely, “Humeans”—insistbeliefsalone are never sufficient to motivate action; they must always be supplemented by a separate motivational state—a desire, hope, aspiration, an allegiance to an ideal, or some such thing. Others—crudely, “Kantians”—insist that a separate motivational state is not always required; beliefs may, in appropriate circumstances, motivate on their own. Our answer to the objection is that these crude extremes are untenable. Plausible Humeans must interpret “desire” broadly to include such diverse sources of motivation as values, ideals, needs, commitments, personal loyalties, and patterns of emotional reaction. Plausible Kantians must refer to such sources of motivation to explain why the same belief may motivate one person but not another. We use “desire” to refer to the items in that broad and variegated range of motivating factors that both Humeans and Kantians must recognize.
One further point is in order. We take it to be clear that beliefs can play a central role in creating, modifying, and eliminating desires. Several our examples in what follows take this point for granted, so we offer examples and explanations in support. Take eliminating desires first. By the time your hosts take you to dinner in Beijing, you are utterly famished. The first dish that arrives looks appealing, and you immediately form the desire to eat a portion; as you serve yourself, you ask what it is. When you learn that it is stomach lining, your desire to eat disappears. There are many such examples. In Cyrano de Bergerac, Roxane is in love with the author of the love letters, whom she mistakenly believes to be Christian. When she finally realizes that Cyrano is the author, she ceases to desire Christian. When Charles discovers that Jim thinks him a buffoon, Charles is unable to put the disrespect aside and his desire to vote in Jim’s favor for tenure disappears.
One’s beliefs can also create desires. Hungry only for steak, you do not desire to eat the meat before you, which you have mistakenly identified as pork. When I point out that it is indeed steak, you form the desire to eat it. To take a more elaborate example, imagine a lawyer’s client, a victim of years of spousal abuse, killed her husband with a shotgun blast as he walked in the door of their home. The lawyer argues for acquittal not just by addressing the legal requirement that the husband posed immediate threat of grievous bodily harm, but also by portraying the woman as an innocent, long-suffering victim, trying for the sake of the children to hold the marriage together. The lawyer paints a picture of ever-increasing abuse and brutal physical and psychological domination that made the shotgun blast the only real route to save not only herself but also to salvage any reasonable life for the children. If the picture works as the lawyer hopes it generates a desire to acquit.
Apart from elimination and creation, changes in belief may also work changes in desire. Suppose one desires to be kind to one’s spouse, grow roses, and teach philosophy effectively. Over time, one acquires a variety of interrelated beliefs about what counts as being kind to one’s spouse, about the pros and cons of various ways of growing roses, and about what philosophy is and how one can most effectively teach it. Your beliefs about what counts as kind focus your original desires on the types of activities those beliefs pick out. Your beliefs about the pros and cons of rose-growing strategies lead you to desire to grow roses in this way or that. Your insights into the nature of philosophy and how to teach it lead you to desire to teach in particular ways.
B. The Motivational-Justificatory Role
A personal reasonfor one to perform some action A is a belief/desire pair that plays, or in appropriate circumstances would play, a certain motivational-justificatory role in regard to A.[1] An example: Smith devotes considerable time to chess; he studies the game, analyzes his past games, seeks out chess partners, browses in the chess section of bookstores, and so on. When asked why he engages in these activities, he explains that a well-played game displays the beauty of forces in dynamic tension and reveals creativity, courage, and practical judgment in an exercise of intuition and calculation akin to both mathematics and art. This belief combines with various desires to motivate him to engage in a variety of activities, and the belief/desire pairs serve as at least part of the justification for performing the action, a justification that he offers to himself and, if fully truthful, to others.
The chess example focuses on the explicit articulation of reasons, and this may suggest the implausibly rationalistic view that a reason always plays its motivational-justificatory role through explicit reasoning prior to action. Worse yet in the context of our discussion of beauty, it may associate reasons for action with dispassionate reflection. This is not to deny the obvious fact that reasons sometimes do operate explicitly and dispassionately. For example, reflecting on his need to improve his ability to blend strategy and tactics, Smith may—explicitly and even dispassionately—reason his way to the conclusion that he should study former world champion Mikhail Tal’s games. The same reasons, however, could operate implicitly and in the presence of passion. Imagine that Smith, without prior reasoning, accidentally happens on a collection of Tal’s games while wandering around a bookstore to kill time. The collection catches his eye; the conviction, “I need this!” takes hold of him, and straightaway he decides to buy the book. The thought and the decision occur against the background of an emotion-laden memory of a recent bitter defeat caused by his lack of skill in blending strategy and tactics. Despite the passion and lack of explicit reasoning, the same belief/desire pairs that figure in the explicit reasoning may also operate in this case. If Smith were later asked why he bought the book, it would hardly be odd for him to say, “I realized I needed to study Tal’s games to improve my ability to blend strategy and tactics.” In doing so he would not only be justifying his choice, he would be identifying his motives. While on occasion we treat such after the fact rationalizations skeptically, as the likely products of self-deception or fabrication, on the whole they are part and parcel of the routine conduct of everyday life, and we generally accept them unless we have specific grounds for doubt.[2] We take it to be clear that belief/desire pairs can play a distinctive motivational-justificatory role in guiding and evaluating thought and action. Neither the motive nor the justification need be decisive. All that is required is that the belief/desire pair provide some, possibly overridden, motivation and justification.
For our purposes, it sufficient to note that there is a distinctive motivational-justificatory role; we need not describe that role in any detail, with one exception. We will appeal to the following necessary condition: a belief/desire pair is a personal reason for one to perform an action A only if one believes it provides (at least some degree of) justification for doing A. We take it to be clear that a personal reason plays its motivational-justificatory role at least in part through on one’s belief that the reason justifies action. One is not blindly driven along by one’s personal reasons; rather, one guides one’s conduct by the light of the justifications one takes them to provide.
To illustrate, and to make the transition to the discussion of enjoyment, imagine that Thomas Gouge’s intensely religious upbringing instilled in him the conviction that a man should not feel erotic desire for another man. The adolescent Gouge nonetheless enjoys looking at his best friend under an array of features A that includes several features indicative of his sexual attraction. Thus, he believes, of his experience of looking at his friend, under A, that it is occurring, and he desires, of the experience, under A, that it should occur for its own sake. The belief/desire pair doesnot, however, meet the requirement that Gouge believes it provides (at least some) justification for looking in a sexual way at his friend; hence, it is not, for Gouge, a personal reason to do so. His religious convictions lead him to conclude that the belief/desire pair does not provide even the most miniscule degree of justification for looking in a sexual way at his friend; he sees the desire as an alien invader to be resisted and destroyed, not a citizen of the realm of desires capable of providing him with a justification for action. He would consequently never offer the belief/desire pair to himself or others as providing even a shred of justification; on the contrary, his judgment is that the pair should not, all things considered, serve as a personal reason.
Such examples abound. Suppose Sarah is eating a desert she mistakenly thought contained no chocolate. She suddenly finds herself occurrently believing, of her taste experience, under tasting chocolate, that it is occurring; and having the felt desire, of the experience, under tasting chocolate, that it should occur for its own sake. She reacts with disgust. Until recently, she suffered from an uncontrollable urge to eat to chocolate. Her inability to resist the urge diminished her self-respect and caused her to gain weight. Finally, she rebelled against the addiction by banning chocolate entirely from her diet and by coming to view the desire for chocolate as an alien invader to be resisted and destroyed, not a citizen of the realm of justification-providing desires. Sarah does not waver from these convictions; she spits out the desert and attacks the desire by recalling vivid memories of her loss of self-respect and her weight gain. She does not regard the belief/desire pair as providing any degree of justification for tasting the chocolate. Any number of examples can be constructed along this pattern.
II. Personal-Reason Enjoyments
To return to enjoyment, return to Gouge. Even though the relevant belief/desire pair does not serve as a personal reason for Gouge, he may, as we indeed supposed, enjoy looking at his friend in a sexual way. He will regard the enjoyment as a temptation Satan has placed in his path, and he will turn away from it, but he will enjoy it nonetheless. The enjoyments which consistently occupy center stage in one’s life are (one hopes) those in which the associated “φ, under A” belief/desire pair does qualify as a personal reason. Imagine Victoria is watching her eight–year old daughter perform in the school play put on by her daughters’ fourth grade class. She enjoys the experience of watching the performance under an array A that includes, among a variety of other features,watching my daughter perform in the school play, watching her daughter do what many other children have done but do it in her particular way as something new to her. She believes, of her experience, under A, that it is occurring, and she desires, of that experience, under A, that it should occur for its own sake. The belief/desire pair functions as a personal reason. She regards the pair as providing (at least a partial) justification for watching her daughter perform, a justification she would readily, indeed passionately, offer to others. If she were to offer the pair to others as a justification, she would describe some or all of the features in A, intending thereby to specify the features she believes watching her daughter exemplifies, and the features with regard to which she is filled with desire.
Let us call enjoyments accompanied by a personal reason personal-reason enjoyments. To formulate a definition, we need to adopt a canonical way of describing personal reasons. To see why, suppose that someone asks Victoria why her attention is so intently focused on one child in particular. She might well answer simply, “That’s my daughter,” but if she were inclined to elaborate, she could describe the features in A. Part of her point would be that she believes her experience realizes these features, and desires, under those features, to have the experience. We clearly under-describe such reasons when we generalize from such cases by describing the relevant of “φ, under A” belief/desire pair merely as a reason to φ. Victoria’s belief/desire pair is not merely a personal reason to watch her daughter perform; it is a reason to have that experience as exemplifying the features in A. We will express this by saying that an “of φ, under A” pair is a personal reason, under A, for one to φ. This allows us to offer the following definition of personal-reason enjoyment:
x personal-reason enjoys an experience or activity φ under A if and only if
(1) x φ’s, and x's φing causes (2) – (3):
(2) (a) x occurrently believes, of φ, under A, that it occurs; (b) and has the felt desire, of φ, under A, that it should occur for its own sake;