The 2nd annual Interdisciplinary Approach to
Philosophical & Psychological Issues Conference

"Desires as Sub-agential Evaluations of the Good"
Avery Archer
Columbia University

According to the standard version of the ?guise of the good? theory of desires, an agent desires x only if that agent believes that x is good. Such theories make having the belief that x is good a necessary condition for desiring x. However, this precludes the possibility of nonlinguistic animals that lack the concept of the good having desires. In this paper I offer an alternative to the standard “guise of the good” theory of desires that allows for the possibility of nonlinguistic animals having desires. To this end, I argue that to desire x is for x to be evaluated as good by some subsystem of the agent, where the criterion of evaluation is determined by the subsystem’s architecture.

I motivate my claims by exploiting an analogy between desires and perceptual appearances. For example, in the case of a Ponzo illusion, one object may appear larger than another even if one knows that they are equal in size. In such cases, the way that things perceptually appear and the way one believes things to be may come apart. I suggest that while the way one believes things to be involves an agential level evaluation, the way things perceptually appear involves subagential evaluations. I maintain that an analogous point holds in the case of desires. However, while perceptual appearances involve subagential evaluations of the true, desires involve (subagential) evaluations of the good.