Is it Irrational to Wish to be Human? (by Guest Blogger Brad Cokelet)
First off, I want to thank Eric for inviting me to Blog on The Splintered Mind. I hope my posts, like Eric’s, help some fellow procrastinators fill their time in a less regrettable fashion than they would otherwise. But today’s topic is wishing, not hoping.
In the Groundwork, Kant makes a striking, negative claim about what it is rational to wish for: “But inclinations themselves, as sources of needs, are so far from having absolute value to make them desirable for their own sake that it must rather be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free of them,” [4:428] Is Kant right? Is it irrational to wish to have human inclinations for creature comforts like food and sex?
It will help to consider an argument for a similar conclusion that Graham Oddie discusses in his recent book. It focuses (no surprise) on desires for things that are indeed good; desires for the bad are presumably not something a rational agent would wish to have. Here is a version of that argument adapted to present purposes.
First, note that if we desire something then we do not have it. Thus, given that the object of a desire is something good, our desiring entails that we lack something good. But that entails that if you wish to have a desire for something good, then you wish to be without something good. And given that it is irrational to wish to be without something good instead of wishing to have that good, that entails that it is irrational to wish to have desires for the good. So we can conclude that it is irrational to wish to have desires.
How should we respond to this argument and Kant’s claim?
I think the most promising possibility is to argue that some desires are plausibly seen as necessary parts of or necessary means to a valuable experience. For example, we might argue that you have to have sexual desires in order to have valuable sexual experiences. We could then either argue one of two ways:
(1) That these desires are instrumentally valuable and that we cannot conceive of the experiences without them.
(2) That the desires are intrinsically valuable because we can undergo the relevant valuable experience if and only if we delay gratification and enjoy a desire, so to speak.
Questions abound here: Are there other types of experiences that we need desires in order to have? Is there a better way to respond to this argument? Or is Kant right that, if we are rational, we will wish to leave our humanity behind?