Wanting at Will

This talk defends the view that we (often) exercise direct voluntaristic control over our desires. Somewhat more concretely, I will argue that, in an extremely broad sense of 'valuable', one can rationally prefer A to B even while knowing that A and B are equally valuable, and that one can rationally fail to prefer A to B even while knowing that A is more valuable than B. In these sorts of cases, one's preferences (and thus one's desires) are a matter of one's choosing. I will then explore some consequences of these claims for questions concerning functionalist theories of mind, the rationality of akrasia, and the subject matter of decision theory.