Moral Realities

The first part of this essay is, predominantly, the outcome of my attempts to become a little clearer upon that concept. The first chapter leans upon one of the rare cases in which a great philosopher has given an explicit statement of his conception of desire; the chapter does that so as to eliminate certain widespread, almost natural, misunderstandings of the nature of desire. The second, more constructive, chapter is a consequent attempt to present some more plausible view of what desire is and of its place within human mental and active life; that attempt is made within a perspective determined by some most important distinctions between kinds of desires. Then finally, in the third chapter, the results of that more constructive discussion are deployed for the purposes of presenting what might, in somewhat archaic and grandiose terms, be called A General Theory of Value—a general and systematic descriptive metaphysics of value.