ABSTRACT

According to the guise of the good, a desire for P represents P as good in some respect. ‘Perceptualism’ further claims that desires involve an awareness of value analogous to perception. Perceptualism explains why desires justify actions and how desires can end the regress of practical justification. However, perception paradigmatically represents the actual environment, while desires paradigmatically represent prospective states. An experience E is an awareness of O when the nature of E depends on the nature of O. How could desires depend on the merely possible? Extant perceptualist accounts have not adequately addressed this question. I propose a novel account of how desires can be an awareness of value. An awareness of value involves the successful exercise of a capacity to discriminate value out of non-evaluative representations. The resulting content and phenomenology of such a desire depends in the right way on the value properties of the desired state. An agent requires the right view of the non-evaluative features of a state to discriminate its evaluative features. I argue that imaginings are uniquely able to provide such a view, and so enable value discriminations. My account retains the epistemological attractions of perceptualism despite the disanalogy between desire and perception.

摘要

根据善的伪装，对P的渴望代表P在某些方面是善的。“感性主义”进一步声称，欲望涉及类似于感知的价值意识。感性主义解释了为什么欲望能够证明行动的正当性，以及欲望如何能够结束实践正当性的倒退。然而，感知典型地代表了实际环境，而欲望典型地代表了预期状态。当E的本质取决于 O 的本质时，体验E就是对O的认识。欲望怎么可能依赖于仅仅可能的事情呢？现有的感性主义解释尚未充分解决这个问题。我提出了一种关于欲望如何成为价值意识的新颖解释。价值意识涉及成功运用从非评价性表征中区分价值的能力。这种愿望所产生的内容和现象学以正确的方式取决于所需状态的价值属性。代理人需要对国家的非评价性特征有正确的看法，以区分其评价性特征。我认为，想象力能够独特地提供这样的观点，从而实现价值歧视。尽管欲望和知觉之间存在差异，但我的叙述仍然保留了感性主义的认识论吸引力。