Thursday, May 06, 2010  Conflicting Desires  A member of the
studio audience has written with the following question:  My
question is that I understand the bad desires being those that
thwart other desires and good desires being those that fulfill
other desires but given no intrinsic value doesn't that mean
that all desires could thwart and fulfill other desires?  I
would like to begin by looking at conflicts among propositions
in general.  You look at a set of propositions and discover that
it contains the following pair:  Jim is seventeen years old.
Jim is not seventeen years old.  You put these two side by side
and, assuming that we are talking about the same Jim and using
the same standard for "year", the two statements contradict each
other. They cannot both be true.  How do you determine which
proposition to adopt?  You cannot do so by looking just at these
two propositions. You have to look outside of these propositions
at other pieces of evidence.  That is to say, we bring other
propositions to bear