Humean Nature: How Desire Explains Action, Thought, and Feeling
Neil
Sinhababu defends the Humean Theory of Motivation, according to which
desire drives all human action and practical reasoning. Desire motivates
us to pursue its object, makes thoughts of its object pleasant or
unpleasant, focuses attention on its object, and is amplified by vivid
representations of its object. These aspects of desire explain a vast
range of psychological phenomena - why motivation often accompanies
moral belief, how intentions shape our planning, how we exercise
willpower, what it is to be a human self, how we express our emotions in
action, why we procrastinate, and what we daydream about. Some
philosophers regard such phenomena as troublesome for the Humean Theory,
but the properties of desire help Humeans provide simpler and better
explanations of these phenomena than their opponents can. The success of
the Humean Theory in explaining a wide range of folk-psychological and
experimental data, including those that its opponents cite in
counterexamples, suggest that it is true. And the Humean Theory has
revolutionary consequences for ethics, suggesting that moral judgments
are beliefs about what feelings like guilt, admiration, and hope
accurately represent in objective reality.
