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Appearing good: a reply to Schroeder.

Article Excerpt
I would like to thank Mark Schroeder for such an insightful discussion of my book; (1) he certainly raises many important questions and I am not sure I'll satisfactorily address all of them in this short piece. I would like to start with what I take to be the most important criticism that Schroeder presses against my view. I argue in Appearances of the Good that "good" plays in the practical realm a role similar to the role that "true" plays in the theoretical realm, a role that I characterized as being the formal end of inquiry. The "scholastic view," the view I defend in the book, then defines desires, intentions, and other practical attitudes in light of this analogy. For instance, desires are understood to be "appearances," but not appearances of what is the case; rather, as the book title suggests, desires are appearances of the good. (2) But desires are not the only attitudes in the practical realm that are understood in this manner by the scholastic view. For instance, intentions are supposed to be evaluative judgments (cases in which the agent holds something to be good) in the same way that beliefs are states in which an agent holds something to be true. Schroeder points out correctly that these claims could be understood two ways.

Let us take, for instance, a case of perception in which the couch appears green to me. One could understand the claim that desires are appearances of the good as, first, the claim that "good" plays the same role in desire that "green" plays in this case of perception. So on this understanding of desires, it is part of the content of the desire that a certain state-of-affairs, object, or property is good. Just as "green" is part of the content of any perception of X as green, "good" in this view would be part of the content of any desire. However, the claim that desires are appearances of the good can also be understood as the claim that "good" plays the same role for desire as "true" plays in the case of perception. When one has a perceptual experience of a green couch, even though "true" is not part of the content of one's perceptual experience, it is still correct to say that it appears that this is how things truly are, or even that if the perception were not to be put in doubt by other states, one would hold it to be true that the couch is green (I'll say more in a moment what that means). Schroeder points out that I seem to favor the second interpretation, but he thinks that one can only have a distinctive and interesting view if one takes the first alternative. So he comes to the conclusion that I must mean the first interpretation.

Perhaps unwisely, I will stick to my word and say that the second interpretation is the correct one. The analogy I intended was really to "true," not to something like "green." (3) Schroeder avoids reading me this way because he thinks that this kind of view is one that can be accepted by separatists and scholastics alike. Schroeder thinks that if "good" does not appear in the content of the desire, then to say that "good" is the formal end of practical inquiry only puts a normative demand on desire. Desires that do not aim at the good are somehow defective, rather than impossible. But this is something that the separatist can easily concede....

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