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A person who takes some consideration to be a reason for going to New York may thereby have a desire to go to New York in the broad sense of ‘desire’ that is common in philosophical usage. To have a desire for something in this sense is just to have some kind of pro-attitude toward it; to take there to be a reason for something is just to see some consideration as counting in favor of it. So it may seem that the dis- tinction between having a desire, understood in this broad sense, and taking something to be a reason is merely terminological.32_{But even}

when the notion of desire is broadened in this way, its link with the ordinary use of the term invites a distorted picture of the structure of our practical thinking. In this section I will examine some of the differ- ences between the structure of practical reasoning that is suggested by the desire model and that which is allowed when reasons are taken as basic. These differences are important for the chapters that follow, since it will turn out that the structure of our thinking about right and wrong, and about other values, is more adequately represented in terms of reasons rather than in terms of desires.

A desire is naturally understood as having a two-part structure: it has an object and a weight. It is a desireforsomething, typically taken to be some state of affairs, and it counts in favor of that thing with a certain degree of strength. On this view, when our desires con_ict, rational decision is a matter of balancing the strengths of competing desires. If we take desires, along with beliefs, as the basic elements of practical thinking, then this idea of balancing competing desires will seem to be the general form of rational decision-making.

The object of a desire is some state of affairs: to have a desire is to desire that something should be the case.33_{Reasons, on the other hand,}

can support many judgment-sensitive attitudes. One such attitude is wanting, and the parallel between having a desire and having a reason is closest in the case of reasons for wanting things to go a certain way. But in the realm of reasons this is only one special case, as can be seen by taking note of the various ways in which reasons can con_ict with or support one another.

Like desires, reasons can con_ict in a practical sense when they are reasons for wanting incompatible things. Often these reasons, like desires, arepro tanto:that is to say, they are compelling reasons unless outweighed by other, better reasons, but they can be outweighed without losing their force or status as reasons. If I am trying to choose

a restaurant for a group outing, the fact that one friend likes Indian food is a reason for choosing an Indian restaurant, while the fact that another member of the group prefers Italian counts in favor of a different choice. In the end I must choose one way or the other, but this need not involve deciding that one of these competing reasons did not count or was not really a relevant consideration.

But reasons can be related to one another in more complex ways. I may, for example, judge one consideration, C, to be a reason for taking another consideration, D, not to be relevant to my decision whether or not to pursue a certain line of action. In this case the relation between the reason-giving force of C and that of D is not merely practical con_ict, as in the case of desires for incompatible states of affairs. The con_ict is deeper. The reason-giving force of C not only competes with that of D; it urges that D lacks force altogether (at least in the given context). Often, our judgment that a certain consideration is a reason builds in a recognition of restrictions of this kind at the outset: D may be taken to be a reason for acting only as long as considerations like C are not present. In this case the reason-giving force of D is commonly said to be merely prima facie.

To make this more speci~c, consider a small-scale example. Suppose that I am going to play a game—tennis, say, or croquet. One thing that I may need to decide is whether I am going to “play to win.” Re_ecting on this question, I might reach any one of three answers. It might be that, given the nature of the occasion, my relations to the other partici- pants, and their expectations and levels of skill, there is strong reason to play to win whether I feel like it or not (to do otherwise would involve letting others down or not standing up for myself). Alterna- tively, it might be that, given who I am playing with, I should not play to win even if that is what I would most enjoy; to do so would be inappropriate. The ~nal possibility is that it might be all right either to play to win or not to do so—I can be guided by what I feel at the moment I would most enjoy.

Suppose that I reach this last conclusion, and that I do feel like playing to win, so I decide that is what I will do. Reaching this conclusion involves deciding which reasons will be relevant to how I play. The fact that a certain shot represents the best strategy will count as suf~cient reason for making it. I need not weigh against this the possibility that if the shot succeeds then my opponent will feel crushed and disappointed. This does not mean that I cease to care about my opponent’s feelings. I may still want him to be happy, hope that he is

able to take pleasure in the game, and refrain from laughing at his missed shots.34_{My concern for his feelings is not eliminated or even}

diminished; I just judge them not to be relevant to certain decisions. This example of a decision, based on reasons, that determines the reason-giving force of other considerations is an instance of a very common phenomenon. The same thing can be seen, for example, in the forms of decision-making appropriate to various formal and informal roles. Being a good teacher, or a good member of a search committee, or even a good guide to a person who has asked you for directions, all involve bracketing the reason-giving force of some of your own inter- ests which might otherwise be quite relevant and legitimate reasons for acting in one way rather than another. So the reasons we have for living up to the standards associated with such roles are reasons for reordering the reason-giving force of other considerations: reasons for bracketing some of our own concerns and giving the interests of cer- tain people or institutions a special place.

We all recognize that reasons for belief do not have the simple structure that the desire model of practical reasoning describes: they do not simply count for a certain belief with a certain weight, and deciding what to believe is not in general simply a matter of balancing such weights. There certainly are cases in which deciding what to believe is a matter of “weighing” evidence for and against the proposi- tion in question, but this is so only because our other beliefs about the nature of the case identify those considerations as relevant for a belief of the kind in question. In general, a given consideration counts in favor of a certain belief only given a background of other beliefs and principles which determine its relevance. Because of these connections, accepting a reason for or against one belief affects not only that belief, but also other beliefs and the status of other reasons. This can happen in many ways. A reason for one belief counts against belief in proposi- tions incompatible with it. It can also affect other beliefs by, for example, undermining (diminishing the reason-giving force of) evi- dence supporting them, or by discrediting objections to them.

My claim is that reasons for action, intention, and other attitudes exhibit a similarly complex structure. I do not mean to deny that deciding what to do is sometimes a matter of deciding which of several competing considerations one wants more or cares more about. My point is rather that when this is so in a particular case it is because a more general framework of reasons and principles determines that these considerations are the relevant ones on which to base a decision.

Much of our practical thinking is concerned with ~guring out which considerations are relevant to a given decision, that is to say, with interpreting, adjusting, and modifying this more general framework of principles of reasoning.

These “principles” are what Kant called maxims, that is to say, principles specifying the adequacy or inadequacy of various considera- tions as reasons for one or another judgment-sensitive attitude. It is a familiar Kantian theme that morality is concerned with maxims; that is, that moral reasons are reasons for and against taking certain other reasons as suf~cient grounds for action. I will have more to say about this in the chapters ahead. But for Kant, maxims are not just features of moral reasoning but central components of practical reasoning more generally, and my present point is that this seems intuitively to be correct. Morality aside, our practical thinking takes place within a framework of maxims and is concerned with adopting, interpreting, and modifying these principles as well as with deciding, within the framework they provide, whether we have suf~cient reason for acting in particular ways.

We can see this in our ideas about what it is to adopt an aim or end. Adopting an aim is not simply a matter of assigning a positive value to a certain class of results, which then compete, on the basis of this value, with other reasons of all kinds. Rather, when we adopt an end we form the intention of pursuing it as something which has a certain role in our life: as a temporary pursuit or amusement, for example, or as a serious long-term hobby, or as a career or a goal within our career, or as one of the guiding commitments of our life.35_{Depending on the}

place in life that an aim is to be given, different reasons will be relevant to the decision whether to adopt it. Considerations that would be perfectly good reasons for taking up some activity as a temporary amusement would strike most of us as absurd grounds for a funda- mental commitment (and vice versa). Similarly, depending on the place that a given aim has in one’s life, it will have different kinds of reason- giving force in relation to one’s other concerns. These two points are obviously related:becausemaking golf one of the guiding aims of my life would involve giving it priority over most other concerns, I would need to give reasons for doing this that would make sense of its having that role.

The claim I am making here is a structural one. I am calling attention to familiar features of our practical thinking that, I argue, are naturally represented in terms of reasons and judgments but cannot be ac-

counted for if we take practical reasoning to be a matter of balancing competing desires on the basis of their “strength.”36_{This claim might}

be resisted on the ground that I have presented the competing-desire view in an overly simple form. In the case of “playing to win,” for example, it might be argued that a person who has reason to play to win is just someone who prefers competing-hard-even-if-this-results- in-some-unhappiness-for-others to preserving-the-feelings-of-others- by-not-going-all-out. Such a person could also prefer avoiding-hurt- feelings-by-resisting-the-temptation-to-make-caustic-remarks to in- dulging-in-caustic-remarks-even-at-the-cost-of-hurt-feelings. The pro- ponent of the desire model need not deal only with desires so broad as “a concern for the opponent’s feelings,” since a person can take quite a different view of hurt feelings resulting from fair competition and hurt feelings resulting from gratuitous insults.

Perhaps the results of the kind of reasoning I have described are the same as those that would be produced by a balance of desires with certain weights when the objects of these desires are suf~ciently ~nely discriminated. But even if the results are the same, the process of arriving at these results is more adequately represented in terms of reasons than in terms of desires for ~nely discriminated results. Why, for example, should one feel differently about hurt feelings of the two kinds just distinguished? Because if friendship is to be compatible with other ends, then even friendship cannot require onealwaysto avoid anything that would cause one’s friend disappointment or distress. If friendship is not to be a tyrannical relationship, then we have to make such distinctions, and there are good grounds for suspending this concern in cases of “friendly competition,” or when one is serving on a search committee, or in some other administrative capacity, but not for suspending it whenever one might get pleasure from making caus- tic comments. This claim depends, obviously, on a particular view of friendship. For some people, perhaps, exchanging what I might call caustic comments is a part of the pleasure of being friends. I am not here concerned to argue for one view of friendship over another. My point is that the process of deciding what one has reason to do in such cases is more a matter of re_ecting on what constraints one’s concep- tion of friendship places on one’s reasons than a matter of simply asking oneself what one desires, and how strongly.

Another way of preserving the desire model would be to appeal to the idea of second-order desires.37 _{So, for example, a person who is}

not only how strongly he wants the pleasure of competition or the pleasure of making caustic remarks, and how strongly he wants to avoid certain kinds of hurt feelings, and so on, but also whether he wants to be the kind of person who is moved by one of these desires in certain circumstances. Taking second-order desires into account intro- duces a broader form of re_ection that more closely resembles the kind of thinking I have described. But if second-order desires are really

desires,then there is the question of how their second-order character, if it is just a difference in the objects of these desires, can give them the kind of authority that is involved when one reason supports the judg- ment that another putative reason is in fact irrelevant.38_{My desire to}

be a person who does not let considerations of personal interest in_uence his decisions as department chair con_icts in the practical sense with my desire, in this case, to do what will make my life easier. I cannot act in a way that will satisfy both of these desires at once. But they are just two desires that con_ict with each other. The introduction of second-order desires therefore does not do justice to our sense that there is a deeper con_ict, expressed in the judgment that the reason represented by the latter desire is not relevant.

I have tried in this section to call attention to features of our practi- cal thinking that are better represented in terms of a framework of reasons than in terms of competing desires. I have not argued that we must deliberate in the way I have described—that rationality requires it—but only that we do commonly think in this way and that it seems appropriate to do so. If the category of “desires” in the broad sense that is commonly used in philosophical discussion includes what I have called “taking something to be a reason,” then reasoning based on desires in this sense can allow for the forms of reasoning that I have described. But the term ‘desire’ in its ordinary meaning does not sug- gest these possibilities, and even seems to exclude them. To this extent, then, the broader philosophical use of ‘desire’ is not a harmless choice of technical terminology but a seriously misleading one.