Abstract

Unlike animals, humans enjoy autonomy of motivation; that is, they have discretion as regards many of the preferences they hold. Humans not only find themselves with desires to take particular actions, but they can also select the desires or preferences they will have and act upon. This places man in a curious position. It places him in the position of being like an artist's work in progress, but with the work being the artist himself. It is one thing for an artist to work on an object other than himself. There he can apply his preferences to the object and shape it accordingly. But when the object is himself, it is to raise the question of what his very preferences themselves will be--of who he will be--and it is to give a sense to the notion of an identity crisis or to the burden of self-definition which uniquely confronts man. ;The general thesis of this essay is that for one to exercise the discretion he has over his motivation so as to attain self-definition, his desires must be as he believes them to be. But this in turn means that rather than self-definition being simply a matter of the agent doing what he 'wants to' do, his wants or desires must first be such that their objects have the qualities the agent believes them to have. In other words, the desires must be properly focused or warranted in the light of information about the world. More specifically, the desires must be such that they can be consistently maintained in the face of information relevant to them . Such a refining of desires cannot be accomplished by any one decision on the part of the agent, but is an on-going process in which the agent exposes his desires to information relevant to them, such that they become focused into a stable and coherent set.