ABSTRACT
Agents who seem perverse like Satan and self-haters implausibly turn out to be closet lovers of the good, as indeed do some other pathological agents. Anscombe reconstructs Satan as a lover of the good. When Satan substitutes moral evil for moral good as his goal in action, he must nevertheless conceive of the new goal as good in some way. Satan, a pre-eminent Archangel, refuses to accept God's appointment of His Son as Commander of Heaven and, having rebelled, refuses to repent. Perversity Lost rules out as impossible genuine perversity in action that is, action like Satan's that is directed at the entirely bad. In his initial account of identification, Bratman is less than fully clear about how we are to understand the notion of treating a desire as setting an end. Bratman's early account of identification with a desire appeared in the paper Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason.
