Appearances Of The Good: An Essay On The Nature Of Practical Reason

This page intentionally left blank Appearances of the Good An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason ‘‘We desire all and only those things we conceive to be good; we avoid what we conceive to be bad.’’ This slogan, which Kant dubbed ‘‘the old formula of the schools,’’ was once the standard view of the relationship between desire or motivation and rational evaluation. Many contemporary critics have rejected this scholastic formula as either trivial or wrong. It appears to be trivial if we just define the good as ‘‘what we want’’ and wrong if we consider apparent conflicts between what we seem to want and what we seem to think is good. In Appearances of the Good, Sergio Tenenbaum argues that the old slogan is both significant and exactly right, even in cases of apparent conflict between our desires and our evaluative judgments. Maintaining that the good is the formal end of practical inquiry in much the same way that truth is the formal end of theoretical inquiry, this book provides a fully unified account of motivation and evaluation. Sergio Tenenbaum is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has contributed to Philosophy and ˆs, Philosophical Quarterly, and Oxford Phenomenological Research, Nou Studies in Metaethics, and he is editor of New Perspectives in Moral Psychology. Appearances of the Good An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason SERGIO TENENBAUM University of Toronto CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521837835 © Sergio Tenenbaum 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2006 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-511-29461-7 ISBN-10 0-511-29461-1 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 ISBN-10 hardback 978-0-521-83783-5 hardback 0-521-83783-9 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents page vii Acknowledgments Introduction 1 2 1 The Basic Framework: Desires as Appearances The Basic Framework: From Desire to Value and Action 21 52 3 4 The Subjective Nature of Practical Reason The Objective Nature of Practical Reason 100 145 5 Deontological Goods 195 6 Motivation without Evaluation? Unintelligible Ends, Animal Behavior, and Diabolical Will