A Reply to Penner and Rowe

Abstract

A footnote and several comments from my article Socratic Theory of Motivation (Apeiron, xxv, no. 3, Sept. 1992) were recently the subject of an appendix to Penner and Rowe's article Desire for the Good: Is the Meno Inconsistent with the Gorgias? (Phronesis xxxix/l, 1994). The authors argue that I am mistaken in stating that there is a consistency between Penner's and Santas' views of desire for the good as expressed by Socrates in the Meno, 77B-78B. I am happy to grant that this most recent article makes eloquent and clear sense of Penner's dominance view of the object of desire and that Santas' interpretation of the Meno passage does contain an assumption about the separability of what Penner calls the insides and the outsides of the object of desire which is in sharp and direct contradiction to the theoretical apparatus expressed by Penner and Rowe's dominance view. I would, however, like to clarify my own views concerning the way desire works (and could indeed be working for Socrates) which the authors also argue against in their appendix. I will argue that in my article I describe a lower level theory concerning desire which could be consistent with the dominance view that Penner endorses at the higher level. I do not wish to imply that Penner does or should hold my view concerning what can or should underlie his dominance view, only that it is plausible that this is the underlying structure of the kinds of desires that we find Penner describing on his dominance theory. It is my contention that in objecting to several locutions that I make concerning the connection between a desire and its object, Penner mistakenly compares a relatively sophisticated level of desire (which is the level necessary for the dominance view) with a much more basic level of desire (which is the level that I have in mind in stating the locutions to which he refers). While there is every reason to believe that Penner and I disagree about this more basic level of desire (it is not clear to me that Penner has, as yet, a theory concerning what underlies the sophisticated sort of desire to which he refers), I do believe that, starting with my more basic theory, I can build just the kind of sophisticated desire to which Penner refers on his dominance model. I also agree with Penner that it makes sense to think that this dominance theory is how Socrates would have resolved the issue of desire for the good when faced with the kinds of examples that Penner discusses (see his Helen and the ice cream examples, pp. 5, 8-9, 25). Since Penner does not address the issue of the nature of beliefs and desires, it