Desire's Own Reasons

Abstract

This paper asks if there are reasons that count in favor of having a desire in virtue of its attitudinal nature. Let us call those considerations Desire’s Own Reasons (DOR). I argue that DOR are considerations that explain why a desire meets its constitutive standard of correctness and that it meets this standard when its satisfaction would also be satisfactory to the subject who has it. Reasons that bear on subjective satisfaction are fit to directly and accessibly regulate desires through experience and imagination because desires are naturally sensitive to them. I will also analyze the limits of application that such reasons have and how DOR relate to other kinds of reasons