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Sobel on Pleasure, Reason, and Desire

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Abstract

The paper begins with a well-known objection to the idea that reasons for action are provided by desires. The objection holds that since desires are based on reasons (first premise), which they transmit but to which they cannot add (second premise), they cannot themselves provide reasons for action. In the paper I investigate an attack that has recently been launched against the first premise of the argument by David Sobel. Sobel invokes a counterexample: hedonic desires, i.e. the likings and dislikings of our present conscious states. The aim of the paper is to defend the premise by bringing the alleged counterexample under its scope. I first point out that reference to hedonic desires as a counterexample presupposes a particular understanding of pleasure, which we might call desire-based. In response, following Sobel, I draw up two alternative accounts, the phenomenological and the tracking views of pleasure. Although Sobel raises several objections to both accounts, I argue in detail that the phenomenological view is not as implausible as he claims it to be, whereas the tracking view, on its best version advocated by Thomas Scanlon, is an instance of the phenomenological view and is therefore also defensible.

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Notes

  1. There are other versions of the Model, depending on e.g. whether all desires are admitted, or only those that pass a certain test, or whether only actual desires of the agent matter. See Brandt (1979); Williams (1981, 1995a, b, 2001); Hubin (1996, 1999, 2001, 2003); Noggle (1999); Murphy (1999); Sobel (2001a,b). Since the argument I deal with is designed to tackle all of them, details do not matter.

  2. I use the label ‘value-based’ only for lack of a better term: I will use the terms ‘reason’ and ‘value’ interchangeably in the text. It is not my intention to take side in the debate, which is the primitive: reason or value. Accordingly, although the premise is often put in evaluative terms, in what follows I will assume that those who talk about goodness would also endorse the normative version insofar as they want to make claims about reasons for action by employing the present argument.

  3. I disregard the distinction between normative judgment and normative appearance, although the latter is also used to formulate the premise. See Scanlon (1998), pp. 39–44, Hurley (2001), and Tenenbaum (2007). Given the nature of the discussion to come, this and other, otherwise important refinements do not matter for the purposes of this paper.

  4. Admittedly, I work with fairly brush strokes here. The relation between desire and the agent’s normative judgment is a controversial issue. In particular, it is not clear whether the premise understands desire as necessarily related to normative judgment, or takes desire to have some kind of normative content. See Setiya (2007), Hurley (2007), Tenenbaum (2007), and Hawkins (2008) for further discussion along these lines.

  5. However, reasons for having desires may not be the same as reasons for action. In particular, if there are reasons provided by the state of desiring, it might be the case that one has reasons to desire something, but no reasons to act on this desire. See Scanlon (1998), p. 97, Parfit (2001), pp. 21–4, Rabinowicz and Rønnow–Rasmussen (2004) for influential discussions on the buck-passing account of value (and, of course, the toxin puzzle can also be noted here).

  6. Unlike Sobel, I restrict my attention to the case of pleasure. Sobel clearly takes pain and pleasure to be symmetrical in their respective accounts; hence he takes his arguments to apply to pain as well, which he hardly mentions (except, peculiarly, in the title of the paper), focusing on pleasure instead. I think this is a mistake since there are important differences in our experiences (and available accounts) of pleasure and pain. Cf. Goldstein (1989); Hare (1972); Aydede (2000, 2005); Persson (2005), Chapter 1; Rachels (2000). For this reason, any proper investigation of the role of pain in this context would require separate discussion, which I cannot provide here.

  7. Sobel’s discussion focuses on the views of Thomas Scanlon and Derek Parfit. I will however only refer to their views when this is unavoidable and contributes to the discussion. I do so partly to avoid getting entangled in an exegesis of the views of these authors, and partly because Sobel’s own treatment of the subject suggests that he was really driven by his demand for a general account of pleasure and its relation to reasons with Scanlon and Parfit being merely targets of opportunity.

  8. Katz’s view, as it appears in Katz (1986), is discussed as a version of the tracking view in Sobel (1999) together with Kagan (1992) who sets out to interpret Katz’s theory. Crisp (2007), pp. 104–5 also gives his own, different interpretation of these views. Whereas I believe Crisp’s interpretation may be correct as to these two writings, overall, as my remarks in the text show, I think both interpretations are mistaken.

  9. But may be phenomenally conscious, to borrow a distinction from Ned Block. This is important because pleasure is typically taken to be a conscious experience, cf. Schroeder (2004), pp. 82–3. But it is possible to argue that we should identify pleasure not with consciousness of pleasure but with bare pleasure, which is arguably phenomenally conscious, even if not cognitively accessible. See Katz (2005a), (2006), 2.3.3.

  10. It is important to note that “wanting” is also different from full-fledged desiring. As Berridge (2009), esp. pp. 378–9, 388–390 makes it clear, “wanting” need not be conscious, nor intentional, and it need not have an object. In effect, then, there are three attitudes concerned: desire (or wanting without quotation marks), “wanting”, and liking. These three attitudes can come apart, although they are normally congruent. Addiction is a good example: the agent may “want” as well as desire what she is addicted to without liking it, i.e. without getting any pleasure out of it.

  11. This view appears in Bengtsson’s manuscript The Hedonic ConnectionPleasure and Desire, and refers to Anscombe (1967). Cf. also Bengtsson (2009), p. 69. Note also that Bengtsson (2003, 2004, 2009: 61–2) takes the liking to be self-referential: what the liking likes is the whole experience of which the liking is a part.

  12. There are other objections Sobel refers to. See Sobel (1999), p. 230; Sobel (2002), pp. 241–2; Sobel (2005), pp. 444, 450. For responses see Crisp (2007), pp. 108–9; Aydede (2000), p. 565; Katz (2006), 1.3, and the considerations put forward in the text.

  13. In his manuscript On What Matters, Parfit highlights other differences between what he calls hedonic liking that makes certain sensations pleasurable, and the meta-hedonic desire to have a pleasurable experience. For example, hedonic liking cannot be future-directed (also Scanlon 2002: 339; though cf. Chang 2004: 77–9; Sobel 2005: 454–5; Heathwood 2007: 32–34), and it cannot be fulfilled or unfulfilled. But it should be noted that, just as in Parfit (1984: 493), he still rejects the phenomenological view. His ‘official’ position seems to be that pleasure is a sensation that is hedonically liked by the agent, where it is the liking that confers value on the experience. However, now Parfit allows for the position that hedonic liking can affect the sensation turning it into a state that provides reasons by virtue of the way it feels. This admission takes him closer to Scanlon’s view that I will soon discuss.

  14. Sidgwick (1907), p. 46 may be making a similar point. However, this is disputed, see Katz (1986), Chapter 2, 48 note 36; Christiano (1992), pp. 274–6; Sobel (2005), p. 443, note 13 and 444; Shaver (1997); Sobel (1997); Heathwood (2007), p. 26 note 9 for the debate. Also, one may be tempted by these remarks to hold that pleasure is an organic whole. See Rachels (2004), p. 24 for this view.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Leonard Katz and David Brax for their continuous help with different drafts of the paper, as well as my colleagues in Stockholm for their comments in the seminars where the paper was presented. I would also like to thank Derek Parfit for explaining to me his views on pleasure and for making his manuscript available for discussion and citation. Research on this paper has been funded by a Guest Scholarship from the Swedish Institute, a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Swedish Research Council (Grant number: 435-2007-7830), and the Hungarian State Eötvös Fellowship.

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Tanyi, A. Sobel on Pleasure, Reason, and Desire. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 14, 101–115 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9220-4

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