Bratman's Theory of Identification with Desires

Paper Summary:

Michael Bratman, in his book Faces of Intention" offers a theory of identification with desires that states that "To identify with a certain desire, one needs to decide to treat it as reason-giving in some relevant practical reasoning and to be satisfied with that decision." After explaining Bratman's view in depth and the related views of Harry Frankfurt and J. David Vellemon, this paper presents an entire class of desires that by Bratman's definition should be desires that one identifies with but which in reality are not. This involves presenting examples of desires that one identifies with but that one would not treat as reason-giving in terms of his actions; that is, desires that one identifies with but would never reasonably act on. Some objections to the counterexamples are made by the author (some of which Bratman makes in his book and some of which he actually made to the author personally in the class this paper was writer for) and provides responses to them.

From the Paper:

"As demonstrated by the writings of Michael Bratman, Harry Frankfurt, and J. David Velleman, explicitly defining what it means to identify with a desire has been no easy task for even the most prominent names in philosophy of action. The difficulties encountered in characterizing how we identify with certain desires and distance ourselves from others are not surprising when one considers how vague our intuitions are about the subject. There does not seem to be any simple, commonsense notion of what it means to identify with a desire nor is there an easy way to formally characterize classes, or even instances, of desires that we do or do not hold as really being "ours." In the end, "our intuitions seem to be able to tell us for sure only that there are desires we have that we do not identify with. And when one considers how little sense it seems to make that we should have such desires to begin with, it easy to see that one trying to offer a definition for identifying with a desire has an uphill battle in front of him. In this paper, I will consider one such definition offered by Bratman and show that it does not quite win this battle. After explaining Bratman's view, I will give a counterexample to his theory that highlights an entire class of desires that are not captured by his definition of identification. I will then respond to possible objections to this class of counterexamples and conclude by considering a shortcoming in Bratman's view that I believe leads to the problematic examples that I present."

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