Enjoyment and Reasons July 2010 first part

Enjoyment and Reasons Enjoyment involves a causal harmony between three elements: the enjoyed experience or activity φ; the belief, of φ, under A, that it is occurring; and the desires, of φ under A, that it should occur for its own sake The harmony consists in φ’s causing both the desire and the belief, thereby ensuring that one believes that the desire is satisfied In this chapter, we enrich our characterization of this harmony by focusing on relations between enjoyment and reasons for action We offer the following overview, which we hope will prove helpful despite its use of defined terms that clearly call for greater clarification We distinguish between two types of reasons—personal and validating, and we characterize two related types of enjoyment—personal-reason enjoyment, and validating-reason enjoyment We define personal-reason enjoyments by adding two conditions to the definition of enjoying φ under A: first, the “of φ, under A” belief/desire pair functions as a personal reason for one to (have or do) φ; second, one’s φing causally sustains that pair in its role as a personal reason We emphasize that such enjoyments are selfpreserving in the sense that one’s φing causally contributes to the creation of the conditions under which one’s enjoyment of φ under A will continue Thus: one’s φing causally sustains the relevant “of φ under A” belief/desire pair in its role as a personal reason to continue to φ; and, if and when one acts on that reason by continuing to φ, then, as long as one’s φing continues to cause the “of φ under A” belief/desire pair, one’s enjoyment continues Validating-reason enjoyment is a special case of personal-reason enjoyment To define such enjoyments, we first introduce the notion of a validating reason The proposition that φ has A is a validating reason for one to φ if and only if the relevant “of φ under A” belief/desire pair should, all things considered, function for one as a personal reason to φ We focus on a special case of validating reasons, A-sufficient validating reasons: The proposition that φ has A is an A-sufficient validating reason for one to φ if and only if (1) the proposition that φ has A is a validating reason for one to φ, and (2) one believes that φ’s having A is a sufficient reason to believe (1) We define validating-reason enjoyments by adding the following conditions to the definition of personal-reason enjoyment: one’s φing causes one to believe that the proposition that φ has A is an A-sufficient validating reason for one to φ We contend that believe that the proposition that φ has A is an A-sufficient validating reason for one to φ is to believe that there is intrinsic value in φ’s having A Thus, to validating-reason enjoy φ under A is to enjoy something one regards as having intrinsic value Such enjoyments not only play a central role in one’s life, they are also the enjoyments that take center stage in our account of beauty We begin by clarifying the notion of a personal reason I Personal reasons Personal reasons are belief/desire pairs that play (or could play) a certain role in guiding and evaluating thought and action We first identify the general role and then turn to the “of φ under A” belief/desire pairs that comprise are primary concern An essential preliminary is addressing an objection to the assumption that personal reasons are belief/desire pairs A “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”— insist beliefs alone 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 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 reason for 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 wellplayed 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 operate explicitly and dispassionately For Comparison to agent-relative reasons 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 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 See the excellent account of after-the-fact attribution of reasons in Paul Grice, Aspects of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2001); see also the related discussion of “deeming” in the attribution of intentions in Paul Grice, “Meaning Revisited,” in Paul Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Harvard University Press, 1969) 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—almost—simply 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 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 motivationaljustificatory 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 The critical question for us is when and why one would believe that a particular/belief desire pair provides a justification for action The answer yields a classification of personal reasons, and that classification yields a parallel classification of types of enjoyments Given the latter classification, we can not only identify the type of enjoyment underlying the judgment of beauty, we can connect to other types of enjoyment in a way that reveals is special significance Although the discussion which follows applies to personal reasons generally, all the examples we use will be of the belief/desire pairs involved in enjoyment: the occurrent or active belief, of φ, under A, that it is occurring, and the felt or active desire, of φ, under A, that it should occur for its own sake II Personal-Reason Enjoyments We will call enjoyments accompanied by a personal reason personalreason enjoyments By way of example, suppose Ziva enjoys the activity of deep-sea fishing under an array of features A That is: Ziva occurrently believes, of the activity, under A, that it occurs, and she has the felt desire, of that activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake If the enjoyment is a personal reason enjoyment if and only if the belief/desire pair is a personal reason for Ziva to engage in the activity There would be little point in requiring that the pair be a personal reason if the “of φ, under A” belief/desire pairs involved in enjoyment were always personal reasons This is not the case, however 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 is not, however, a personal reason A belief/desire pair plays the justificatory role of a reason for one to perform a particular action only if one believes it provides (at least some) justification for action Gouge does not meet this condition 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 Consider the following examples, addint the relevant belief about means: the desire, as you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, to leap off; the sudden urge to drink a can of yellow paint; or, the desire to be a famous jazz musician when one is, and knows one is, utterly lacking in musical talent For a less outré example, 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 selfrespect 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 Compare a case in which a belief/desire pair does provide 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 believes, of her experience, under an array A, that it is occurring, and she desires, of that experience, under A, that it should occur for its own sake Let A include, in addition to watching the performance, a number of features that, for Victoria capture the expression of her daughter’s personality, her particularly physical gracefulness, all as her daughter’s unique realization of types of experiences and activities she knows so many fourth graders have had so many times before For Victoria, the belief/desire pair functions as a personal reason In contrast to Gouge, she sees the pair as providing a justification she is ready to offer to herself and others There are importantly different possible explanations of why Victoria so regards the pair We canvas these possibilities in detail; it is, however, best to so in the context of the following definition of personal-reason enjoyment A The Definition of Personal-Reason Enjoyment To formulate the 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 personalreason 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; (3) the belief/desire pair in (2) is a personal reason, under A, for x to φ This raises two questions What is the rationale for requiring (3)? And, what is what the rationale for requiring that φ is causes (3)? The answer to both questions is essentially the same: enjoyments satisfying that condition play a central role in one’s life We begin with the first question We noted that (3) is true only of some enjoyments, but that is not to identify the explanatory role that makes it worth singling out such enjoyments as a type worthy of special attention Our initial characterization of that role reveals the need to canvas the various possible explanations for thinking that an “φ, under A” belief/desire pair provides a reason under A to φ Our initial characterization begins by comparing two enjoyments For the first, recall the earlier case of the adolescent, deeply religious Gouge, who enjoys looking at his best friend under an array of features A that includes several features indicative of his sexual attraction Imagine Gouge breaks off relations with his friend in part in order not to enjoy looking at him For the second example, suppose Ziva, who is enjoying the taste of chocolate, eats another piece to continue the (same type of) experience Why does Gouge pursue flee his enjoyment while Ziva pursues hers? The answer is that Sarah’s enjoyment is a personal-reason enjoyment while Gouge’s is not Consider each enjoyment in more detail When Gouge looks at his friend, his experience causes him occurrently believe, of it, under A, that it occurs, and to have the felt desire, of it, under A, that it should occur for its own sake But the belief/desire pair does not function as a personal reason to look in a sexual way at his friend as he is unwilling to offer the pair as a justification for doing so He regards the belief and desire as Satan’s minions tempting him to evil Turn his back on Satan, he cuts off relations with his friend Compare Ziva When she enjoys the chocolate taste, she occurrently believes, of the experience, under the feature tasting chocolate, that it occurs; and, has the felt desire, of the experience, under tasting chocolate, that it should occur for its own sake; further, the belief/desire pair is a personal reason to have the experience Thus, it is no mystery that Sarah eats another piece of chocolate; she is acting on her personal reason to have the chocolate tasting experience Note that the personal reason consists of an occurrent belief and a felt desire, the same belief and desire that are components of the feeling of enjoyment In this way, the personalreason affirmation of φing is manifest in the feeling of enjoyment One may rightly object that it is not manifest that the belief/desire pair is a personal reason; it is just the components of that reason, the belief and desire that are present to consciousness Let us suppose, however, that Ziva is has sufficient self-knowledge and is sufficiently reflective to readily identify the belief and desire that are present before her mind as a personal reason to have her chocolate tasting experience In general, personal-reason enjoyments tend to be self-preserving The “of φ, under A” belief/desire pair is personal reason under A to φ, where the occurrent belief and felt desire are manifest to one’s consciousness Assume one acts on that reason and thereby ensures that one continues to have or φ Suppose one’s φing causes one to believe, of φ, under A, that it is occurring; and to desire, of φ, under A, that it should occur for its own sake That belief/desire pair serves, as it may, as a personal reason under A to φ, and, assuming she one acts on that reason, one may continue to φ and so on—until other factors or interests intervene, leading one to curtail one’s enjoyment, or simply causing it to fade It is an important fact about enjoyment that it can capture one in such feedback loops It explains in part the power enjoyment can exercise over us It explains in part why one eats another piece of chocolate or has another glass of wine, why one goes sailing for hours on end, and why, although the annoyance of one’s dinner companion is visibly increasing, one cannot stop gazing at the attractive person at the other table The feedback loop is a typical pattern, not by any means a necessary one The feedback loop requires not only that one act on the personal reason, but that one’s so acting have certain effects One may resist the desire to eat another piece of chocolate, to continue to sail, or to continue to look at the attractive person; or one may simply not have the relevant desires to continue One’s enjoyment as one eats the tenth piece of chocolate (sails for the fifth hour, looks at the attractive person for the second continuous minute) may include simply the desire that the experience or activity occur, not that it continue Such cases nonetheless share one important feature with the feedback loop cases: in both the function of the belief/desire pair as a personal reason reveals the experience or activity as something one is for, not against This distinguishes both cases from the enjoyments which we try to avoid, which we tend to flee when they happen—Gouge’s enjoyment of his friend’s looks, recovering-chocolate-addict-Sarah’s enjoyment of chocolate The fact that the belief/desire pair reveals the experience or activity as something one is for, not against can play an important explanatory role in its own right Consider personal-reason enjoying writing the last word of the essay or the sudden whiff of a perfume which would be cloying if one were to smell more of it In these cases the personal reason is a reason just to have, not to continue, the experience or activity In such cases, one would still be willing to offer the belief/desire pair as a justification If asked, for example, why you are you writing the last word of the essay, you might offer a variety of explanations and justifications for doing so, but you could certainly offer as an explanation and justification the fact that you desire to write the last word for its own sake, and belief that that is what you are doing Such remarks not, of course, hold for the whiff of perfume, which is an experience, not an intentional activity like writing the last word—not unless you actively sought out the perfume in order to smell it Suppose, however, that the whiff of perfume was entirely unplanned and unexpected It just happened to you What explanatory/justificatory role does the belief/desire pair play in this case? It explains and justifies your lack of regret, your lack of an adverse reaction, and your lack of resolve to try to avoid such experiences in the future The feedback loop and the observations about being “for, not against” comprise our initial characterization of the explanatory role of the “φ, under A” belief/desire pair as a personal reason The characterization is seriously incomplete, however There are importantly different ways to be “for, not against”; there are, that is, importantly different explanations of why one is willing to offer a belief/desire pair as a justification These differences create important differences personal-reason enjoyments e describe this variation in the following typology of personal reasons B A Typology of Personal Reasons We distinguish two types of personal reasons involved in enjoyment: those belief/desire pairs that one should, all things considered, function as a personal reason; and those with regard to which one has no such belief  ... I Personal reasons Personal reasons are belief/desire pairs that play (or could play) a certain role in guiding and evaluating thought and action We first identify the general role and then turn... personal-reason enjoyments e describe this variation in the following typology of personal reasons B A Typology of Personal Reasons We distinguish two types of personal reasons involved in enjoyment: ... associate reasons for action with dispassionate reflection This is not to deny the obvious fact that reasons sometimes operate explicitly and dispassionately For Comparison to agent-relative reasons