ABSTRACT
This chapter presents one of the behaviorist’s argument, or the lack thereof. It offers the author's argument for why awareness of the future as future in a desire is not as morally relevant as some suppose. To understand the importance of the above for Belshaw, let us just briefly consider a typical argument for nonhuman animals having future-oriented desires. On the opposite side of this debate, authors have perhaps given too much to nonhuman animals to compensate for the behaviorist camp. The reason why temporal extension was supposed to be different was because it relies on concepts to make sense of it. This was the distinction between thwarting a nonhuman animal’s desire to avoid present pain and thwarting a human desire to forgo some present pleasure for greater pleasure in the future.
