Desire, Depression, and Rationality

Abstract

Internalists hold that all reasons derive from existing motivations. They also hold that agents act irrationally when they fail to act on the strongest reasons they have. Emotions can make one act irrationally. But depression as an emotion tends to remove the motivation to act at the same time as it causes irrational inaction. If depression can cause irrationality, then the reasons to act must remain. Hence the internalist must explain how reasons can remain if depression removes motivation. This paper does so by arguing that the cognitive, evaluative aspect of motivation remains when the dispositional and affective aspects are removed.

Keywords:

• Desire
• Emotion
• Rationality

Acknowledgements

This paper benefited from comments by Andrea Scarantino and from several anonymous referees of this journal.

Notes

Notes

[1]  One may nevertheless be morally obligated. I claim that moral obligations give reasons only to the morally minded.

[2]  Moods are taken here to be relatively long-term, often objectless emotions.

[3]  It will be noticed that I have included evaluations, ordinarily construed as judgments, among the elements of motivational sets. Since, as a neo-Humean internalist, I do not want to say that all such judgments create reasons, I will have to make clear when evaluations are motivational and when they are not.

[4]  Sometimes we use ‘wish’ interchangeably with ‘want’, as when I say, ‘I wish to leave the room’. But this seems an affected way of trying to be formal or polite and in any case is not the primary use of the term.

[5]  Griffiths recognizes that this characterization underlies the ordinary concept of an emotion (1997, pp. 243–247), but he does not allow that this is a legitimate explanatory category.

[6]  I believe they classify desire in this way in order to provide a positive counterpart to fear and disgust.

[7]  Nomy Arpaly (2000) emphasizes these occasions and therefore denies the rationally privileged status of evaluative judgment, but the argument is not sound if these occasions are in the minority.

[8]  As per note (1), we do not allow those who are not so minded to be excused or freed from moral obligations.The question is whether these obligations (absent sanctions) give them reasons to act, such that failure to act on them is irrational.

[9]  But see Goldman, 2005, 2006, and “The case against objective value,” forthcoming.