Here’s a classic philosophical thought experiment: Sandra is struggling with an addiction to heroin. She desperately wants another hit, but she wishes she didn’t. She wishes that she could stop craving heroin and that she could start living a very different life. Faced with this thought experiment, many people have the intuition that Sandra’s desire to do heroin is not part of her true self – that Sandra’s true self is entirely on the other side of this inner conflict.
Now consider a reversed version of the classic thought experiment: Sandra has a visceral aversion to using heroin, but she wishes that she didn’t feel that way. Many of her friends are using heroin, and it’s clearly the easiest way to fit in with the people in her social group, so she wishes that she could stop feeling this aversion and just start using heroin like all her friends are. In this reversed case, do you have the same intuition? Does it seem like Sandra’s aversion to doing heroin is not part of her true self – that her true self is entirely on the other side of this inner conflict?
Within the philosophical literature, the usual view about the original version of this thought experiment is that the agent’s desire does not count as a part of her true self because she completely rejects this desire. Then a lot of the literature is about precisely how to cash out the broad idea that she is somehow rejecting a part of her own self (in terms of second-order desires, or in terms of identification, or in terms of her values, and so forth).
But none of this stuff has anything to do with the actual reason why we have this intuition! The reason we have the intuition that her desire isn’t part of her true self has nothing to do with the fact that she herself rejects this desire. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that the desire in question is a desire to do heroin. There’s something about this specific desire that makes people think it is not part of the agent’s true self, and if we want to understand the way people ordinarily understand the true self, we need some way of making sense of this.
Within the literature in experimental philosophy and psychology, the usual view is that people think an agent’s true self is drawing that agent toward things that truly are good. Thus, if one part of the agent’s self is drawing the agent to use heroin and another part of the agent’s self is drawing the agent to refrain, people will have a general tendency to think that the part of the agent that is drawing her to use heroin is not her true self. This tendency doesn’t have anything to do with which part of the agent is the part that the agent herself rejects. Independent of anything like that, it is just a very fundamental tendency to think that the deeper essence of the agent is the part of her that is drawing her to the good.
As a result, experimental philosophy research finds that people show a general tendency to think that bad desires are less full part of the agent true self. In cases like the classic philosophical thought experiment, where the desire that the agent rejects is a desire to do something bad, people think that the desire that the agent rejects is not part of her true self. But in cases like the reversed version, where the desire that the agent rejects is a desire to do something good, people tend to think that this desire is a part of her true self.
This effect seems to connect with some much deeper philosophical issues that have nothing to do with second-order desires or anything like that. Basically, it seems like when people are thinking about what is most essential about an object, they tend to pick out what is good about that object. This isn’t just something about how they think about agents; it arises much more generally. For example, if you are reading an academic paper and you think that there is a lot of pointless stuff in it but that there is also an idea of genuine value, you will tend to think that the real essence of the paper is the valuable idea. And when people are thinking about what is most essential about the United States – what the United States is “really all about” – they tend to think about the good things about the United States. This is an important but mysterious phenomenon, and I don’t think we have a good understanding of it quite yet. It seems to involve some important connection in the ways people ordinarily think about essence, teleology and value.
But if we want to understand the role of things like reflective endorsement and second-order desires, then clearly, we need to be wary of looking at cases in which peoples intuition are determined by this other factor. Surely, it is cheating to look at cases in which the agent has a second-order desire not to do something that we ourselves regard as bad. If the action in question is something like doing heroin, then there’s an unrelated psychological process that will lead us to see the desire is not being part of the true self. If we want to understand the role of second-order desires per se, we should look at cases in which the desire itself is not something that we would independently see as particularly bad or good.
So let’s introduce a third case in which you have no independent ideas about whether the desire is good or bad: Sandra is an undergraduate student who is caught between two different majors, A and B. She has a strong desire to focus on major A, but when she reflects about what she is doing, she thinks that she should focus entirely on major B. Sometimes she finds herself staying up at night reading books related to A or writing in her journal about questions related to A, but when she thinks about it, she always concludes that this is a big mistake. She wants to stop wanting to study A so that she can focus on what she think she really ought to do, which is B. In this case, which of the two desires would you see as coming from Sandra’s true self?
If you are like most people, then when faced with cases of this type, you specifically have the opposite of the intuition aligned with the traditional view. That is, when there are two desires such that one align with the agent’s unreflective urges and the other with the agent’s reflective endorsement, the desire associated with more reflective endorsement is seen as less part of her true self.
Given all this, why might people have had thought that there was some special connection between reflective endorsement and the true self? I don’t know the answer, but in closing, I want to briefly mention one speculative hypothesis. Perhaps the issue is that it just generally happens in life that we more often encounter cases like the classic philosophical experiment in the first paragraph of this post than cases like the reversed version in the second paragraph. That is, when we see an agent who has an unreflective urge toward a behavior but who completely rejects that behavior at a reflective level, we very frequently think that the behavior is something bad. As a result, we normally think that the desires that the agent rejects on reflection are not part of her true self.
But this is just a statistical correlation. Ultimately, second-order desires are not what matters. It’s not as though we have the intuition that these desires are not part of the agent’s true self because the agent wishes she didn’t have them. Rather, we have that intuition because the desires have a certain other quality, and that other quality happens to frequently arise in cases where people reject their own desires.