Tuesday, September 16, 2008
The Never Ending Search
In Taylor's discussion of gluttony and lust, she argues that one of the problems with these vices is that they result in insatiable desires. I wonder if insatiable desires are really as problematic as Taylor makes them out to be. In the cases of gluttony and lust, it is not that individual desires are never satisfied. For the lustful, desires endlessly reappear even when a desire is satisfied. For the gluttonous, the desires are only satisfied for a short time. So the problem seems to be that even though desire satisfaction does occur, it is not long before more desires of the same kind arise. I wonder if this in and of itself is a problem. It seems to me that having human agency involves the possession of desires and attempts at satisfaction followed by more desires. Without constant desires, one would fall into Taylor's characterization of sloth. So I think any problem with gluttony and lust must have to do with other related factors, not the constant existence of similar desires.
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1 comment:
You have raised a good point that the lustful and gluttonous do have their desires satisfied, these desires are just reestablished relatively quickly. One of the interesting things about these vices is that Taylor does seem to admit herself that they are not quite as bad for the self as other vices are.
Regarding your last point, you have said that a person without desires would fall into sloth, therefore having these desires shouldn’t be making these vices destructive (I added a bit). However, it seems like you are setting up a straw-man of Taylor’s point here. Taylor describes having these extreme desires as one extreme, and you have taken the response to mean that the opposite extreme is entailed by solving gluttony or lust. However, I think Taylor would say that “hey… there’s a point in the middle there, where you can both have desires and not have them excessively, and your life is going to go a lot better if you fall in this middle point than either of the two extremes.” Whether she can say this or she would have to say this middle point is the least-destructive of one’s self is debatable, but either way the main point stands. Self-control or moderation is definitely a key factor here in combating these vices, not necessarily ridding oneself of desires entirely.
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