5.1. A challenge to the (revised) standard theory

Belief plus desire theories of hope still face an important challenge. Philipp Pettit (Reference Pettit2004) and Adrienne Martin (Reference Martin2014) argue that the standard theory may well be sufficient to account for some (superficial) hopes, but it fails to capture our most ‘substantial’ (Pettit Reference Pettit2004, 157) or ‘fullest’ (Martin Reference Martin2014, 62) hopes. Pettit says the following about the standard theory:

On this line of thought, the standard theory is not false, strictly speaking, but it misses many important hopes. We need a more complex theory distinguishing between different types of hope. Furthermore, I am doubtful that the revised standard theory, or at least what I have said about it thus far, is going to satisfy theorists worried that the standard theory cannot account for (all of) our deepest hopes.

Martin (Reference Martin2014, 14–15) develops a detailed example, labeled Cancer Research, to illustrate substantial hope. In this example, Alan and Bess both suffer from apparently terminal cancer. With no other treatment options remaining, they agree to participate in an early-phase drug trial. Both know that there is less than a one-percent chance of being cured and both desire to be cured to the same degree. Yet there are key differences. Alan claims to hope for a cure, but he has a ‘glass half empty’ attitude about it. He regularly points out how poor of a chance he has and claims to have enrolled in order to benefit others. Bess, however, cannot help but fantasize about being cured; she reports that the small chance of a cure is what keeps her spirits up and this chance is why she decided to participate in the trial. While both Alan and Bess hope, they do not hope the same. This is despite the fact that they have equally strong desires to be cured and despite assigning the same probability to being cured.

If everything Martin says about hope in Cancer Research is possible, then, the standard theory leaves out some significant hopes (what are variously labeled ‘full’, ‘substantial’, or ‘deep’).Footnote ⁹ With regard to this line of objection, the revised standard theory arguably stands or falls with the standard theory.Footnote ¹⁰ Martin can plausibly build into her example that Bess’s and Alan’s desires to be cured take the belief that a cure is possible into its cognitive base without changing the attractiveness of her claim that hope is more than a desire and probability assignment.

Before defending the revised standard theory, I consider Martin’s and Pettit’s attempts to capture the nature of our deepest hopes.Footnote ¹¹ I argue that both are counterintuitive in ways that should motivate us to reconsider the lessons we should draw from Cancer Research.

5.2. Martin and Pettit on hope

According to Pettit (Reference Pettit2004) and Martin (Reference Martin2014), an agent substantially hopes that P just in case they endorse an underlying superficial hope that P (understood along the lines of the standard theory), although they differ on the precise nature of the endorsement. Pettit’s view is that substantial hope requires cognitive resolve on the part of the hoper to act as if what is hoped for will come about, or at least as if it were likely to come about (Reference Pettit2004, 157). Hope, then, often involves ignoring, or setting offline, a belief that what we hope for is not likely come about (159). This theory leads to a simple explanation of what is going on in Cancer Research: Bess resolves to act as if her desire to be cured will be fulfilled while Alan does not. Such a decision to act in accord with one’s superficial hope is what makes a hope substantial.

My worry with Pettit’s account is that it conflates a way in which an agent can relate to a hope with a distinct way of hoping. This point can be brought out by comparing hope to other emotions. For example, a person who fears flying on planes may resolve to ignore her fear as much as possible, or she may resolve to acquiesce to her fear, accepting that flying really is dangerous. If she flies on the plane despite her fear, we may praise her for overcoming her fear. Crucially, in overcoming her fear, it does not seem as if she ipso facto fears in some lesser sense than if she resolved to acquiesce to her fear. Emotions are one thing, resolutions to follow emotions another. Turning to hope, it seems to stretch the ordinary concept to treat it differently from emotions in this respect. A person who has hoped for years to be a Broadway performer, and has resolved to pursue this hope (to act as if it will likely come true), may, in light of new information about the strain that her ambitions have placed on her family, resolve not to pursue such a career. But in changing her resolution, it does not seem intuitive that she ipso facto changes her underlying hope. As this example (as well as others mentioned below) illustrate, a deeply rooted hope can be analogous to a deeply rooted fear that persists despite contrary intentions or judgments. Barring no other way to capture what is going on in cases such as a Cancer Research, then, I propose that we set aside the cognitive resolve theory of hope.

Martin defends an alternative endorsement model of substantial hope. On her view, a person hopes that P in the fullest sense only if she (i) desires that P, (ii) believes that P is possible but not certain, (iii) sees the probability assigned to P as licensing taking the desire for the outcome (and the outcome’s desirable features) as a reason to think, feel, and plan with respect to P, and (iv) takes the desire and desirable features as sufficient reason for those ways of thinking, feeling, and acting (Reference Martin2014, 62). ‘Sees’ and ‘takes’ do not denote individual mental states but are rather a matter of standing ready to offer justifications for one’s thoughts and behavior on the basis of the probability assignment, desire, and desirable features of what is hoped for (see Martin Reference Martin2014, 36, n. 2). Her theory thus goes beyond the standard theory insofar as hope involves, as she puts it, ‘incorporating’ the desire and probability assignment into one’s agency. This theory produces the following explanation of Cancer Research: Bess counts as hoping in the fullest sense because she treats as reasons for participating in the trial each of her desire to be cured, the desirable features of being cured, and the belief that being cured is possible; Alan, on the other hand, does not take such a licensing stance and so does not hope in the fullest sense.

Martin’s theory is counterintuitive in the same basic way as Pettit’s, namely that it conflates a way of relating to a hope with a way of hoping.Footnote ¹² The trouble here is specifically with recalcitrant hopes, namely hopes which persist despite a belief that we ought not have them. The phenomenon of recalcitrance is familiar from the philosophy of emotion (see D’Arms and Jacobson Reference D’Arms, Jacobson and Hatzimoysis2003). For example, a person’s fear of a spider is recalcitrant if they fear it despite believing it to be harmless. Or, a person’s shame about their sexual orientation is recalcitrant if they are ashamed by it despite believing it not to be shameful. In dealing with recalcitrant emotions, we will often try to get the emotion to align with our belief. One way to do this is to focus on the grounds for the belief that the emotion is not appropriate in an effort to get the emotion to become sensitive to that same information. To try to overcome recalcitrant fear of a spider, for instance, one might focus on how this species of spider is unable to bite through human skin. But, intuitively, there is not a sense in which we no longer experience fear, shame, etc. in the fullest sense simply by believing that the fear, shame, etc. is not appropriate. Similarly, Luc Bovens (Reference Bovens1999, 679) comes close to providing an example of a recalcitrant hope when he imagines a car racing enthusiast who hopes to see a crash but is ashamed of this hope. What we need to add to get a recalcitrant hope is that the agent also believes that car accidents are very undesirable yet hopes for them anyway. An agent afflicted with such a hope may try to focus on the undesirable features of crashes (e.g. the potential for death and injury) to vanquish her disturbing hope; but she cannot hope less for a car accident simply by believing that she should not hope in this way. To suppose we can is, once again, to conflate a way of relating to a hope with a way of hoping.Footnote ¹³

In the next section, I explain how the revised standard theory can account for deep and serious hopes, which I anticipate will further reduce the attraction of these more intellectualized theories.

5.3. Revisiting the (revised) standard theory

Many criticisms of the standard theory operate with a vague notion of what it is for a desire to be of a certain strength. But if we clarify the nature of desiderative strength, then I think it will emerge that proponents of the standard theory have not oversimplified hope, but that its opponents have instead oversimplified desire. I first characterize how hopes can be deep on the revised standard theory, and, thereafter, turn specifically to Martin’s key example, Cancer Research, to see how a proponent of the revised standard theory should explain it. Going forward, a crucial point to keep in mind is that I do not wish to squabble about which hopes count as ‘deep’. I use this language loosely to denote the range of hopes that Martin and Pettit claim the standard theory leaves out, as well as any other hopes we pretheoretically consider significant. My task, as it were, is to ‘leave no hopes unturned.’ I will have failed if there are some genuine hopes that cannot be accounted for by the revised standard account.

Desires can be strong or weak along several dimensions. Footnote ¹⁴ First, one desire is stronger than another to the extent that it has greater motivational power. So if I desire to spend the day skiing but also desire to spend the day lounging about, then (holding fixed other sources of motivation) if I do not ski and instead act on my desire to lounge, we can say that my desire to lounge is, at least in this one respect, stronger than my desire to ski. A second sense in which desires can be strong has to do with how they affect our attention. My desire for coffee is in some sense stronger than my desire to continue working if, as a product of my desire for coffee, I constantly find myself fixating on the prospect of drinking coffee, and the means to obtaining coffee, rather than focusing on my work. Desires are strong in this second sense, we might say, to the extent that they ‘occupy our mind.’ Finally, desires can also be stronger or weaker with respect to how they feel. To take a familiar example, a coach’s pregame pep talk aims to ramp up the felt intensity of her team’s desire to win, which will affect the energy that they bring to the upcoming game.

In thinking about the true depths of some of our desires, we should look not only at momentary snapshots of desires and their corresponding strengths, but also how they pattern relative to one another over time. This will help us to understand the sense in which many desires that do not often ‘bubble to the surface’ are still substantial. For example, consider a person, Jasmine, who desires to work at an art museum in a major metropolitan area. This desire does not influence her motivation, attention, and feeling on a daily basis, but it will ‘take over’ much of her psychology when a job opportunity appears at one of the desired locales. In comparison, Jasmine also has a desire to play card games with her friends during lunch, which exerts a significant, daily influence on her motivations, thoughts, and feelings. Despite the more consistent influence of this latter desire, there is still an important sense in which the former is stronger. For when the opportunity to pursue her desired job arises, the desire for such a career suppresses many of her quotidian urges, propelling her toward her dream. Thus some of our deepest desires are also patient; their strength is revealed by how they take a leading psychological role (in terms of influence on motivation, attention, and feeling) at key moments in which the possibility of fulfilling them becomes salient.

It’s important to notice, however, that some of our apparently patient desires may exert a more profound influence on our daily lives than at first appears. For example, Jasmine’s desire to work at a major art museum leads her to take art history classes in the evening. Part of the reason that she takes the classes is because she’s interested in the subject matter, but another is that she wants to fulfill her desire to work in a big-city art museum. Thus even though she may only intermittently focus on her career goal, the desire for such a career explains the pursuit of many of her day-to-day projects that are instrumental to that end.

The complex character of desiderative strength helps us to understand the distinction between more and less significant hopes. The distinction is not sharp, but is along a spectrum, one that is multidimensional according to the different dimensions of desiderative strength. To recap, the different dimensions of strength mentioned here are as follows: motivational, attentional (both regarding ends and means), and felt quality. Furthermore, some hopes/desires that are substantial are patient, not exerting a significant daily influence, but, instead, residing in the psychological background until a perceived opportunity to promote the desire emerges. I will have more to say about these patient hope-constituting desires below.

Now that we have the different dimensions of desiderative strength in view, we can see the ways in which the (revised) standard theorist can account for what is happening in Martin’s example, Cancer research. Recall that Alan and Bess were supposed to have the same beliefs about the possibility of being cured as well as equally strong desires to be cured. Yet, according to Martin, the way in which Bess treats her underlying desire and belief suggests that she hopes in the fullest sense while Alan hopes in a lesser sense. I argue that proponents of the standard theory can offer an intuitively attractive redescription of the case. To begin, they will insist that we must make sure that we are really conceiving of Alan’s and Bess’s desires as equally strong, since certain features of Martin’s description may subtly suggest otherwise. Consider this passage:

But remember, if the desires are of equal strength, then Bess’s desire to be cured must not itself motivate her any more than Alan’s desire to be cured motivates him. When we really hold fixed in our minds that the motivational, attentional, and phenomenological influences coming from their respective desires to be cured are the same, and that their probability assignments are the same, the intuitive force of the case as an objection to the standard theory dissipates. Alan does not hope differently but relates to his hope in a different way. More precisely, a proponent of the standard account will insist, quite reasonably, that Alan hopes in the same sense as Beth but that his hope is recalcitrant (see Section 5.2).

The revised standard theorist can take advantage of the same response but can also offer a second explanation of what may be happening, one according to which Alan is not hoping, after all. When Martin (Reference Martin2014, 15) says of Bess that ‘the bare possibility is what keeps her going’, then we may want to understand this in accord with the important qualification of the revised standard theory. The view, recall, says that hope-constituting desires take as part of their cognitive base the probability assignment. Applied to Cancer Research, then, we may say that Bess’s desire arises not only in response to her beliefs about what it would be like to be cured (e.g. that she would be able to see her grandchildren grow up) but also in response to her belief that she might be cured. Alan’s desire, however, may be alienated from his probability assignment and instead be responsive to a belief that he won’t be cured. This explanation of the difference between Alan and Bess assumes that it is (psychologically) possible to believe that P is possible while also believing that P won’t happen. And this does seem possible. For example, a person might say, ‘Of course it’s possible that we’ll win the championship, but I believe it won’t happen’.Footnote ¹⁵

Cancer Research, then, is not a compelling counterexample to the standard theory, as it is meant to be, and is even less effective against the revised standard theory. Furthermore, given what I have said about how our hopes can be deep on this approach as well as the possibility of recalcitrant hope, I hypothesize that no dialectically persuasive counterexamples are forthcoming.

6.1. Two questions

My goal in this section is to show how the theory outlined above about the nature and depth of hope helps us to make progress on two important practical questions. The first is whether it is ever rational to hope in a deep and serious way for socio-political ideals that are extremely unlikely to ever come about. Although one important line of thought answers no, I argue that what I have said about the depth of hope (Section 5) makes room for an affirmative answer. I then turn to the question of why hope can sometimes be dangerous. I criticize Martin’s (Reference Martin2014, 85–97) view that hope can easily lead us to become lost in unrealistic fantasies, thereby inhibiting good deliberation and agency. What I have said about the nature of hope (Section 4) helps us to see why Martin is not quite right, but the revised standard theory also helps us to see an important way in which hope truly can be hazardous.

6.2. Hope for ideals: lessons from the depth of hope

Should we hope for ideals that are extremely unlikely to come about? I address this question through the lens of a specific case, namely that of whether to hope for a racially just society. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses this question in his sermon ‘Shattered Dreams’, observing that while racial justice is of incredible value, it is also incredibly improbable:

He answers:

In this sermon, King says, that ‘our ability to deal creatively with…blasted hopes will be determined by the extent of our faith in God’ (Reference King, Carson, Carson, Englander, Jackson and Smith2007, 526). But must we turn to the divine, or is there also a secular pathway to maintaining hope? In what follows, I explore whether it may be rational to maintain such a hope from within a secular worldview, taking for granted the revised standard theory and, in particular, my defense of it in the face of Martin’s and Pettit’s objections.

To begin, the hope for a racially just world can seem foolish. The United States, for example, remains painfully distant from true racial equality, despite the end of slavery in the nineteenth century and de jure segregation in the 20th, among a variety of other achievements.Footnote ¹⁶ Today’s United States is witness to the mass incarceration of black males and de facto segregation in schools. If a substantial hope for racial justice involves acting as if these and other obstacles will (likely) be overcome and some ideal of racial harmony realized, then hope can seem a failure to face up to the tragedy of the situation. But this is precisely what some theories – most notably Pettit’s cognitive resolve theory – would require. Given such an account of hope, one might think hopeless resistance would be a more honest and effective (by virtue of being a more realistic confrontation of the difficulties) approach.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet given the revised standard theory, it seems as if holding onto hope for racial justice can be rational. On this approach, hopes are catalogued in a fine-grained way according to their influence on motivation, attention, and feeling; and hopes do not necessarily involve acting as if the hoped-for outcome will (likely) come about. Some people may be able to harbor idealistic hopes that exert a daily influence on their psyche. But this can be difficult given a clear-headed awareness of the minimal chances. Oftentimes, emotions such as sadness and grief seem more appropriate to the state of the world. Crucially, on my approach, these emotions are not incompatible with, or even necessarily in tension with, hope. A person can be deeply sad about racial injustice in the world and sad that a racially just world is an unlikely prospect; yet none of this rules out a deep hope for a morally ideal world. Even at times in which sadness has a profound influence on one’s psyche, there can still be a deep, patient hope for the distant possibility of justice.

There is value in such a hope. It positions one to recognize opportunities to work toward the ideal. After all, on the revised standard theory, hope-constituting desires dispose the hoper to attend to the means to fulfilling the desire. Furthermore, a substantial hope for racial justice can, and I think often does, cultivate and explain ‘intermediate’ hopes for, say, morally superior voting (de-)regulations, voter districting, and allocation of tax payer money. In other words, idealistic hopes can provide an effective psychological breeding ground for many of our more realistic day-to-day ethical hopes to emerge. By contrast, despairing over the ideal may make the pursuit of such intermediate projects, which ought to be pursued, more difficult. In general, the keys to seeing why idealistic hopes are rational are the following: (i) hope is compatible with a variety of negative emotions such as sadness and grief that may also be appropriate to a situation, (ii) idealistic hopes needn’t exert a profound day-to-day influence on one’s psyche but can be patient, and (iii) deeply rooted idealistic hopes can foster admirable patterns of more realistic socio-political hopes.

There is an additional worry about hoping for racial justice, however. Katie Stockdale (Reference Stockdale2017) has recently argued, entirely correctly in my view, that bitterness is a justified response to such racial injustices. But then what is bitterness? Stockdale defines it as follows:

Thus if we agree that bitterness is a justified response to much of the racial injustice in the world, then given Stockdale’s definition of bitterness, a loss of hope must also be justified. Indeed, Stockdale is explicit that this is her stance. Furthermore, King’s sermon quoted above appears to support Stockdale’s point that there is a choice between hope and bitterness (though King sides with hope).

At least two kinds of solutions are available. The first is to argue that bitterness and hope on the part of the oppressed are compatible because their fitting targets are, upon closer inspection, distinct in key ways.Footnote ¹⁸ Bitterness is appropriately directed at, say, the current perpetrators (witting or unwitting) of injustice, while idealistic hopes are appropriately directed at those currently working to fix the problems and to future generations. Another response, which is the one that I favor, says that bitterness is not always hopeless anger but may also be pessimistic anger. According to the sense of ‘pessimism’ that I have in mind, one is pessimistic about something when one expects it not to come about. This form of pessimism is compatible with hope, since one can hope that something will occur despite not expecting that it will (cf. Bell [Reference Bell1992, x] on pessimism in the ‘victory sense’). Although I cannot argue for the view in full here, it seems to me that taking bitterness to involve pessimism, rather than hopelessness, better explains why (some) bitter people bother trying to convince the wrongdoers that morality requires that they repair the wronging. At the very least, adopting this alternative account of bitterness seems to be a reasonable move for those who maintain (as I think we should) that hope and bitterness are sometimes jointly appropriate. In general, patient hope, which the revised standard theory makes room for, is a serious form of hoping, yet not one which is psychologically consuming; it can reside alongside profound negative emotions, even bitterness.

6.3. The dangers of hope: lessons from the nature of hope

It is uncontroversial that hope has the power to sustain us through difficult trials. This idea is encapsulated by the common injunction to keep hope alive, for when we lose hope, the thought goes, we will lose much, if not all, of our motivation. This view suggests that hope will typically be a good thing, at least so long as it is directed at appropriate ends. Martin, however, wants to temper enthusiasm for hope, for according to her, hope can easily lead to poor deliberation and a lack of appropriate motivation.

To understand Martin’s concern, we should begin by noticing that hopes often give rise to hopeful fantasies. Consider, for instance, Martin’s example of a high school student who hopes to be accepted into a certain college (Reference Martin2014, 90–91). This hope is likely to give rise to a variety of different fantasies, including visions of the hoped-for outcome – attending classes, living in the dorms, etc. – and the means to achieving that outcome – doing well in her high school classes, writing a compelling personal statement, etc. Fantasizing about the hoped-for goal can reacquaint one with the desirable features of the end, solidifying one’s commitment to the project; and fantasizing about the means can help one to stumble upon new strategies for bringing the hoped-for project to fruition. The trouble with hopeful-fantasies, however, is that we can too easily become lost in them. As Martin points out, it is not rare for a fantasizer to lose touch with reality such that the fantasy is harmful to wise deliberation, and may even lead to no action at all. Thus hoping well involves keeping the real world in mind.

Martin argues that much of the twentieth century self-help literature inadvertently illustrates precisely the sort of dangerous hopes about which she worries. She takes Wallace Wattles (Reference Wattles2011), in particular, to task. Wattles laid the groundwork for the popular ‘law of attraction’, according to which we are able to draw the good things we want toward us by imagining that we already have those things and by banishing any thoughts that we will not be able to obtain them. Martin (Reference Martin2014, 94) quotes Wattles’s injunction: ‘See the things you want as if they were actually around you all the time. See yourself as owning and using them … Do not waiver for an instant in the faith that it is real.’Footnote ¹⁹ Martin’s view is that these purely outcome-oriented fantasies are ‘unmotivating, possibly demotivating’ and that ‘fantasies that go unchecked against reality…produce a degree of motivation unresponsive to the odds’ (Reference Martin2014, 95). The danger of hopeful fantasy, then, leads her to be ‘skeptical of the unquestioningly positive assessment of hope’ (Reference Martin2014, 94).

If the revised standard theory of hope is correct, however, the problem Martin has identified is not with hope as such. To begin, consider two ways in which a hoping agent may end up immersed in fantasies detached from reality. One uninteresting way is when false beliefs about how to fulfill a hope generate misguided and destructive hopeful fantasies. The sort of phenomenon that Martin has in mind, however, is more interesting; the idea is supposed to be that hope itself can sometimes lead us to engage in fantasies inimical to good deliberation and agency. But the self-help literature, on inspection, only illustrates the former phenomenon. The trouble with Wattles is that he believes in a bizarre ‘law of attraction’, according to which imagining that you really have the objects of your desires will in some mystical way draw those things toward you. The sort of hopeful fantasies that Wattles recommends are concerned with the means to achieving goals; they are not, as Martin (Reference Martin2014, 95) suggests, ‘demotivating’. It’s just that his false worldview leads him to recommend fruitless methods of fulfilling our hopes.

But even if the example isn’t very compelling, should we still worry that hope itself (rather than hope rooted in false empirical beliefs) may immerse us in fantasies inimical to good deliberation and action? I don’t think so. According to the revised standard theory, a hope-constituting desire always takes as part of its cognitive base a belief that the object of the desire is possible. In other words, a desire is only a hopeful desire if its influence on our psyche is constrained by the hoper’s belief about the possibility of fulfilling the desire; hopeful desires are in this way yoked to (the hoper’s view of) reality. To illustrate, consider that for many of our hopes, there are ways in which those hopes can be fulfilled that are more or less likely. A person who hopes to go to a decent college, for instance, could fulfill her hope by going to the Ivy League or a good state school. But if for whatever reason she believes that the probability of being accepted at an Ivy League university is less than the probability assignment in the cognitive base of her hope-constituting desire, then it is hard to see why this hope would generate fantasies about attending the Ivy League. Given the cognitive basing relationship between the probability assignment and the desire, it is more intelligible that her hope pulls her toward hopeful fantasies that are (by her own lights) within the bounds of her probability assignment, e.g. going to a state school.

It’s important to keep in mind that some fantasies are not hopeful, but are rather what we might call playful. In the example above, the would-be college student may get lost in fantasies about the Ivy League, perhaps because they are pleasurable fantasies, but these fantasies do not seem to be hopeful. To further illustrate the point, an avid fan of Star Trek may spend large portions of her time fantasizing about engaging in space exploration and intergalactic diplomacy; but, except in unusual cases, these fantasies aren’t based in a hope for such a universe. There may be hopes in the vicinity – e.g. a hope to work at NASA – but those hopes aren’t the direct source of the Star Trek fantasies. Furthermore, these fantasies may get in the way of fulfilling her real hopes, but it is a mistake to identify the hopes as the source of the problem.

The real danger with hope, I suspect, is familiar from everyday discourse about hope, namely that it makes us especially prone to wishful thinking (see Bovens Reference Bovens1999, 678). Wishful thinking occurs when a person’s desires cause her to believe that something is true, or is likely to come true. For example, if Jordan’s desire to be a great author leads her to believe that she is (likely) a great author, then this is wishful thinking. Hope, especially on the revised standard theory, seems to leave us especially prone to wishful thinking. This is because in hoping that P, the desire that P and the belief that P is possible are intimately related. More specifically, the desire takes the probability assignment as part of its cognitive base, and this may facilitate feedback in the other direction whereby the desire that P leads us to increase our estimate that P will occur.Footnote ²⁰