Silencing Desires

Authors: Attila Tanyi

Publish Date: 2012/11/07

Volume: 41, Issue: 3, Pages: 887-903

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Abstract

In an overlooked section of his influential book What We Owe to Each Other Thomas Scanlon advances an argument against the desiremodel of practical reasoning In Scanlon’s view the model gives a distorted picture of the structure of our practical thinking His idea is that there is an alternative to the “weighing behavior” of reasons a particular way in which reasons can relate to each other This phenomenon which the paper calls “silencing” is not something that the desiremodel can accommodate or so Scanlon argues The paper first presents and interprets Scanlon’s challenge After this the paper argues through the examination of three responses that Scanlon is right in claiming that the model cannot accommodate the phenomenon as he describes it However the paper further argues that there is no need to accept Scanlon’s depiction of silencing advocates of the model can give an alternative account of what happens in cases of silencing that is just as plausible as Scanlon’s own Scanlon’s challenge is thus the paper concludes illegitimate 169This paper has benefited from the comments of audiences in Stockholm and Konstanz My conversations in these and other occasions with Christoph Fehige were particularly instructive for writing the section on the idea of conditioning I would also like to thank an anonymous referee of this journal for very helpful comments that have led to a major restructuring and revision of the paper Research on this paper has been funded by a project grant of the German Research Foundation Grant number TA 820/11

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