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Article Excerpt
[Review Essay: Sergio Tenenbaum, Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), viii + 315 pp.]
1. Appearances of the Good
According to what Kant called "the formula of the schools," we desire only what we conceive to be good, and avoid only what we conceive to be bad. Historically, many philosophers have found attractive the even "stronger claim that the desire for a certain thing should be identified with a positive evaluation of this thing" (23). It is this stronger claim that Sergio Tenenbaum is concerned to defend--or rather, to resurrect--in Appearances of the Good. In this volume, Tenenbaum is concerned to motivate and articulate an attractive contemporary version of this scholastic view of desire, and to confront prominent criticisms from two main directions. The result is a bold and novel statement of a historically prominent view, which brings it back into the contemporary debate. Reading Tenenbaum's book is not all easy going, and I'll suggest in what follows that it leaves important holes and has some prominent problematic features, but the book does deserve a place as the most promising contemporary defense of the scholastic view, and is a must-read for those with a serious interest either in the nature of desire or the nature of practical reasoning.
The two main sources of opposition to the scholastic view with which Tenenbaum is concerned in the book are what he calls separatist and subjectivist views. Whereas scholastics insist on a connection between evaluation and motivation, separatists hold that evaluation and motivation can come apart. Not only can we fail to be motivated to do what we believe to be good, separatists insist, we can be motivated to do things that we fail to believe are good, or even believe are bad. In fact, we can even be motivated to do them because we believe they are bad. Cases of akrasia, accidie, and perverse motivations like those of Milton's Satan motivate separatism and pose a special challenge for scholasticism--the challenge to which Tenenbaum attributes the migration of philosophers away from scholastic sympathies over the last thirty years, and for which Michael Stocker receives prominent credit. (1)
Subjectivists differ from scholastics in another way. Rather than insisting that evaluation and motivation come apart, as separatists do, subjectivists differ from scholastics in their order of explanation. Whereas scholastics hold that desires are appearances of the good, subjectivists say that the good is determined by what we desire. This isn't explicit, but Tenenbaum appears to hold that subjectivism, like separatism, is motivated by examples. So while chapters 6 through 8, which constitute his response to separatism, are organized around using his scholastic framework to explain the examples--of perverse motivation (chap. 6), akrasia (chap. 7), and accidie (chap. 8)--that motivate separatism, chapters 3 and 4, which appear to constitute his response to subjectivism, seem likewise to be organized around granting and explaining "subjectivist intuitions" (chap. 3) without going so far as to commit to a subjectivist view (chap. 4). Chapter 5 is concerned with a sidelight--the question of whether a scholastic view, with its appeal to the good, is deontology-friendly (Tenenbaum claims that it is and to explain how), and the book is rounded out by opening chapters that explain and motivate the basic principles of Tenenbaum's scholastic view of desire, the corresponding view of intention, and the theory of practical reasoning that connects them.
In what follows, I won't address all of the important arguments in Tenenbaum's book. What I will do, after clarifying and explaining Tenenbaum's view as well as I am able, is to develop what is in my view the most serious challenge facing the scholastic view--the problem of how it is that the good comes to appear to us through our desires--how our desires come to be states that have the good as part of their content. In particular, I'll show how this question can be answered within a subjectivist framework, and in a way that preserves all of Tenenbaum's motivations for the scholastic view. Subjectivism, I'll be arguing, is not best understood as motivated by cases, but as attaining the advantages of scholasticism while being able to solve its problems. An adequate defense of scholasticism needs to explain why it can give a better answer to this question than subjectivism can--a prospect in which I'll close by suggesting there is little ground for optimism.
2. Tenenbaum's Scholastic Theory
Tenenbaum's scholastic theory has at least four important parts. First, desires are evaluations--but they are not judgments of the good. They are, instead, appearances, being related to judgments of the good in approximately the same sort of way that sensory appearances are related to beliefs. Second, appearances of the good involve, for Tenenbaum,...
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