Object based taxonomy;
- Object being, the thing that you desire. Eg: desire to glass a water and the water drinking happens to be the object
- In the case of sexual desires, the object is most often an act. Just ask: what does the person want?
- Feature based taxonomy
- why does the person want this?
- These objects and desires that the person desires can vary from person to person.
- The problem with the object based taxonomy: sexual desires appear to have no bounds. There happens to be nothing in common that these objects of desire have in common. The chaos with these objects having nothing in common is a problem.
- Goldman’s analysis has a problem. Yeah, sure sexual desires are uncommon and statistically uncommon. But his analysis has no
mention of why these perversions are even sexual in the first place. A person desiring a shoe is simply not an act which warrants any contact with another person.
- Jacobsen: Anything and everything has been an object of sexual desire for some person. There’s nothing unique about some of these desires. For example, some lady may find it sexually charging to wash dishing, however uncommon It is.
- The object of a sexual desire could be anything. However, the act counts as a sexual desire
- What makes a state a sexual desire as opposed to some other state of arousal is the activation of certain body parts.
- Jacobsen thinks it’s a big mistake that others fail to distinguish desires from appetites. Appetites have no objects, unlike desires. Therefore, they can be brought to an end in a different way.
- What is the object of a sexual desire? Whatever turns you on, but NOT the act of being turned on. To be turned on is to be in an aroused state. We desire these objects because they will have an effect on our state of arousal.
- (622) when you’re classifying desires based on their features some desires may be different from others. However, if you classify via object than its obvious that they are of the same category based on that object.
- Reduction absurdum: say for instance somebody wanted to drink water to quench thirst and the other person wanted to feel coolness. No desire has some particular object because it may so be the case that the feature is actually the true object.
- Example (form the view of objector): person A desires to drink a glass of water for its coolness, therefore person A really desires coolness (not the glass of water). (check D2) Therefore, coolness has some feature (F) that makes it desirable to person A. [F = making the person feel nice]. Therefore, person A really desires is F, not coolness. (check D2), therefore F has some feature F* that makes it desirable to person A. there’s something about coolness that the person desires (a feature of a feature). If you keep pushing this feature of a feature argument, then there may end up being no real desire (infinite regress).
o To avoid this consequence, there must be at least some things we de- sire in virtue of features they possess even though those features are not themselves the objects of our desires. This consequence suffices to preserve the autonomy of the Feature-Based taxonomy for desires
- Fulfillment of a desire is not enough to satisfy a desire. Satisfying a desire requires cognitive closure. This happens when the person has done the act knowingly or unknowingly and when the disposition comes to an end because you know (or think you know) that you’ve done this. The person is fully satisfied but the persons desire was not satisfied? Desires are satisfied only when they re fulfilled (and
cognitively closed)
- Desires can be lost as well
- (TEST)Proceeding in this way, I propose the following definition of sexual de- sire: a sexual desire is a desire the object of which is an act or activity of an agent desired in virtue of certain effects which that activity has (or is taken by the agent to have) on her states of sexual arousal; the relevant features of the activity which make it desirable are that it will (or is taken to be an activity which will) initiate,
