Hetty believes it would be good to resist her heroin addiction-the stuff costs too much, it's a hassle to purchase, it's illegal, and there's the risk of overdosing. Despite this, she still desires a fix-and succumbs. Huck thinks it's bad to help a slave escape from his owners-he believes it to be a kind of theft of valuable property, legitimately purchased. Despite this, Huck likes Jim, he doesn't want to let him down-so he lies about Jim to the slave hunters. Hetty and Huck experience dissonance-the familiar, often depressing failure of one's desires to line up with what one takes to be good. Dissonance does not seem to be an inevitable feature of experience, however, for it presupposes the possibility of having one's desires and one's values aligned-call this harmony-and harmony is also familiar, although often difficult to achieve. The phenomena of dissonance and harmony should find a place in any theory of value and desire. There might be various ways of doing this, but at first blush realism about value is particularly well equipped to handle the phenomena. For the value realist is, inter alia, a cognitivist about value, holding that matters of value are the subject of true and false propositions, and hence of true and false beliefs. This seems to be just what we need to provide the required conceptual space for one's values and one's desires to come apart. If to espouse a value is, at least in part, to believe that something is valuable, then it is not hard to see how dissonance might arise. Believing and desiring are, after all, two quite different kinds of mental states, and so it is not at all surprising that one's desires might on occasions fail to be appropriately aligned with one's beliefs about what is valuable. It is tempting to think that harmony provides us with a kind of regulative ideal-that one should strive to eliminate dissonance, in so far as that is possible, by striving to bring one's desires into line with one's values. In Hetty's case it seems it would be better if she could bring her desires into line with the high value she places on overcoming her addiction. But presumably that's partly because we think she is right about the value of doing so. ' In Huck's case it is not at all clear that we would want him to realign his desires with his beliefs about goodness.