Monday, October 25, 2010
Colloquium: Defending Desires as Value Data
Graham Oddie, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. Monday 25th October 2010, room a3.100, TPM building, TU Delft.
In my book *Value Reality and Desire* (OUP 2005) I offered a conjecture about the nature of value data: namely, that the basic unit of value data is desire. A desire for P is, in fact, nothing but P’s appearing or seeming good. i.e.
X desires that P iff P seems to X to be good.
The relevant seeming here is analogous to perceptual seeming, rather than mere doxastic seeming. This thesis has a number of things going for it. Inter alia: the source of value data is not weird; desires provide the necessary link between value judgements and motivation, but one which is not too tight; combined with an additional thesis about the perspectival nature of value appearances it avoids a major defect of the fitting-attitude account of value. But it has attracted some apparently powerful objections, which in this paper I will try to defuse.
