David Velleman (1996), for example, argues that agency is characterized by a particular higher-order inclination to 'behave in, and out of, a knowledge of what you're doing.' Although this is a kind of desire, it is distinct from the contingent desires that might be satisfied by particular actions and which internalists usually identify as the source of our reasons.
If we have to care about what our ideal advisor would want us to do in order to be coherent, or perhaps in order to be self-governing agents in the first place, then the reactions of a suitable subject in suitable circumstances will be normative for us, regardless of our contingent desires and interests.
His successor's first task will be to hold together a disparate parliamentary group, divided between left-wingers and moderates, between vestigial socialist centralism and the Quebec contingent's desire for devolution.
Today, with 7,000 Nauruans inhabiting the island's green skirt -- and with an economic future contingent upon Western desire for limestone coffee tables -- I gingerly asked the president what might happen to the people on Nauru in the next 10 years.
It is not, like desire, something idiosyncratic, contingent, or variable from one person to the next.
The pace at which Afghan troops and police are being trained to the necessary standard is not matching urgent security needs or the desire of Nato contingents to hand over responsibility to local forces.
Reasons for action which are contingent in this way on desires and inclinations are furnished by what Kant called hypothetical imperatives.
And since this law must have no content provided by sense or desire, or any other contingent aspect of our situation, it must be universal.
For instance, if my desire for X is contingent on a false factual belief about the nature of X, then it is not obvious that practical reason requires that the desire be taken into account in determining what it is rational for me to do.
The reasons for action that moral requirements furnish are not contingent upon the possession of any desires or wants on the part of the agent to whom they are addressed: I cannot release myself from the requirement imposed by the claim that torturing the innocent is wrong by citing some desire or inclination that I have.
