While she acknowledges the scientific reality of the existence of genes, she admits a wish this wasn't the case, a desire for us to reject the genetic revolution and all that it holds.
Now comes "The Farfarers," by Farley Mowat, a book not unlike Donnelly's in that it presents a revisionist view of history with little but the author's enthusiasm to support the thesis and, in Mowat's case, a desire to tweak the establishment view.
Both Ptolemy and Arrian, "The Landmark Arrian" informs us, had their own biases — in Ptolemy's case, a desire to exalt himself at the expense of his rivals, and in Arrian's, perhaps, an exaggerated regard for authority, both military and imperial.
What makes a desire self-regarding is controversial, but there are clear cases and counter-cases: a desire for my own pleasure is self-regarding; a desire for the welfare of others is not.
The prestige of such experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on their African heritage with new eyes and in many cases with a desire to reconnect with a heritage long despised or misunderstood by both whites and blacks.
(Although Park didn't study it, it might also, in a minority of cases, reflect a desire to diversify among providers– say with a target-date fund from Fidelity and an equity fund from Goldman Sachs, assuming a 401(k) offers both choices).
This is the view that for one to freely choose to undertake a given course of action — say, to throw out the trash — one must have freely chosen the determinants that lead one to undertake that course of action, including one's antecedent desires and one's character (in this case, perhaps a desire for a filth-free home, among others).
They seem to be motivated, in this case, by a desire to embarrass Captain Yee, and by frustration that the larger case against him is so weak.
But then Jhabvala, unlike Naipaul, wasn't drawn to India by ancestry or, as in Forster's case, by a desire to move beyond a complacent Western liberalism.
The decision to back the opening of the schools was justified in each case by a desire to respond to parental demand and foster an improvement in standards.
