The Threefold Nature of Desire and Its Implications for Ethics and Theology

The study distinguishes three principal forms of desire: bodily desires, desires for perfection, and desires entailed in value-responses. By distinguishing between the self-centered, acquisitive desires for perfection and the inherently self-transcending desires entailed in value-responses, the author lays the groundwork for his most original contributions. First, he argues that if the traditional concept of the good as an object of desire is a formal object of the desire for perfection and if cultivating desires entailed in value-responses is as important for one’s perfection as cultivating one’s desires for perfection, then the traditional notion of the good should be supplemented by the category of value as the important-in-itself. Second, he argues that distinguishing categorically between the desires for perfection and the desires entailed in value-responses opens up the possibility for a philosophical argument for attributing the latter desires to the absolutely perfect being. Here is the core of the argument: if desiring something necessarily means lacking something, then God cannot be both desiring and absolutely perfect; however, if it can be cogently argued that the desires entailed in value-responses are perfections rather than imperfections, then they can be attributed to an absolutely perfect being.