Free Will and Desire
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Free Will and Desire Brian Looper1 Received: 26 October 2017 / Accepted: 7 November 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract I make a case for the thesis that no one can refrain from trying to attain the object of his or her currently strongest desire. (More precisely, I argue for this given that our domain of concern doesn’t include desires for things—such as visiting with a deceased relative or flapping one’s arms and flying—that one deems unattainable, but rather is restricted to desires for things one might deliberate about pursuing.) I arrive there by defending an argument by Peter van Inwagen for a relatively mild conclusion about the way desires limit our abilities, and by arguing that if van Inwa‑ gen’s conclusion is correct, and correct for his reasons, so is my bolder thesis. I close with replies to objections, such as the objection that it is better to take my argument as a reductio ad absurdum of van Inwagen’s than to take my conclusion seriously. There appears to be a difference in meaning between the statements “He is acting as he desires” and “He is acting as a desire moves him to act”. A child holding her nose and downing her medicine may be moved by a desire to satisfy her persistent parents; a man getting a tooth drilled may be moved by a desire for dental health; a soldier falling on a grenade may be moved by a desire to save his comrades. But none of these seems to be a case of one acting as one desires. To act as one desires is to do what one wants to do. But to be moved by a desire to act often involves doing things one does not want to do, even things one wants not to do, in order to secure the object of one’s desire. I shall call this a difference between acting as one desires and merely acting “on” a desire. Experience proves that we do not always act as we desire most. Does it prove that we do not always act on our strongest desire? It does if our concern is with every kind of desire. For one might desire most to visit with a relative who has died or to flap one’s arms and fly; neither guarantees an effort to attain these things. But if we restrict the domain of concern to include all and only desires for things we think are attainable (that is, to things we think we would attain if we tried), hence to things we * Brian Looper [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106‑3090, USA
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might actually deliberate about pursuing, then the thesis that we always act on our strongest desire is not so easily dismissed. With the category of desires that concern us thus delineated (I shall leave this restriction tacit from here on), my thesis is this: Anyone who desires to perform an act and has no conflicting desire of equal strength is unable to refrain from that act.1 Two clarifications must be made immediately. First, one does not have an ability to refrain from an act merely because one might not perform it. A cigarette smoker is not able to quit just because he might, at any moment, be
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