Questions from a correspondent/interlocutor

Oliver Alston comments:

"I’ve been worried about a few things regarding desirism. Most of these worries are closely related to the problem of free action more generally. 

1)     I find it difficult to see how you can talk about weighing up desires, being rational about them, critically evaluating them if determinism is true. Isn’t it simply just the case that I act according to my strongest desire, and my strongest desire is a simple brute fact, not of my own choosing or effort? In which case ‘desirism’ boils down to the philosophy that one ‘does what one does because they do it’ which doesn’t seem to be much of a worldview at all. 

2)      Of course you can’t say that one must live by their strongest desires, because a moralistic ‘must’ is used and, also, people by default automatically follow their strongest desires anyway. 

3)      Besides, what if you have a lot of people who desire to be as moralistic as possible (this isn't a hypothetical statement, I know people like this) and who love being moralistic?  

"Any kind of overarching philosophical system is going to suffer from these kinds of problems, I reckon. It's hard to recommend, advise, suggest, persuade anyone to live according to their desires because that's what they do anyway." 

My reply:

Yes, this is a very general issue having to do with freedom of the will. And I will offer an even more general response having to do with metaphysics, to wit:

Reality is whatever it is. Our conceptual access to reality is always based on a model. Models prove their mettle in terms of their usefulness for our human projects. (Cf. my blog post “Models and Pragmatism.”) Since human beings have multiple and various projects, it is only to be expected that our models will be multiple and various. (Cf. my philosophy of yes and no.)

            Applying this to the matter at hand, the way we model free will is therefore likely to be multiple and various. As a result, although I, like you I gather, am a determinist, I also see no reason to deny the freedom to follow desirist recommendations. More specifically:

As a determinist I believe that whether someone will become a desirist and take up the attitudes and practices I recommend has been carved in stone since the Big Bang.

However, I don’t see this as any kind of obstacle or contradiction to my recommending that that person become a desirist, since if they do become one, it will be as a result of my having recommended it (and countless other contingencies). In other words, my recommending will itself turn out to be part of the causal/deterministic story to be told about why they became a desirist.

            Putting this in the more general terms of free will, I would therefore say that, no, we don’t have free will in the sense that everything we do had to happen, but, yes, we do have free will in the sense that whatever we do intentionally is the result of our own beliefs and desires (among countless other contingencies, and allowing for some outré exceptions, such as being brainwashed).

            As for desiring to be moralistic: Yes, I cannot deny that there are people like that. I know some too! (I may be one of them!) I have, accordingly, tempered my claim in this regard. (Again see “Models and Pragmatism.”) Recall again that my overarching view of things has become “yes and no”; so of course I am now prepared to acknowledge that, yes, there are grounds for being moralistic, and no (or yes), there are grounds for rejecting moralism. I have spelled out both at length in many essays and books.

            But so also I am still free (which idiom I usefully employ here) to prefer amoralism to moralism as a rule, which I do (having been “determined” to do so, I presume), and of course I am amply prepared to adduce arguments in favor of my position and against the moralist’s (which, again, I have done for going on two decades … with no end in sight!).

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