 This theory soon ceased to satisfy, and Russell reverted to the problem in “Are All Desires Equally Moral?”, a paper he composed in about 1896 (RoE: 68–70/Papers 1: 242–44). “The Good, for me, at any moment”, he declares, “is what I want” not what will satisfy my wants, since we desire the objects that will satisfy desire and not, “except derivatively”, that those desires should be satisfied. (This last point is distinctly dubious. Isn’t Reid’s desire for our good-on-the-whole in part a second order desire that at least some of our first-order desires should be satisfied? [See Thomas Reid, 1788, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, excerpted in BM: §§ 861–865.] And did not Russell himself believe that this desire was not only real but often unduly predominant in civilized persons, so much so that most of what we do is done for the sake of something else not because we have a spontaneous, first-order desire to do it? See for instance his 1894 paper “Cleopatra or Maggie Tulliver” [RoE: 57–67, Papers 1: 92–98] though the theme is repeated in subsequent writings such as The Principles of Social Reconstruction, first published in 1916.) Thus “X is good”, means “I want X”, a particularly crude kind of subjectivism that goes back to Hobbes (“whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire; that is it which he for his part calleth good”, BM: §25). This theory maintains the link between moral belief and action (naturally we pursue and promote the things that we want!) though it a) reduces moral judgments to “statements of a psychological state” and b) violates the requirement that statements about what ought to be should have nothing to do with what is, since, on this theory, my moral judgments reduce to statements about what is going on inside my head. The theory as stated is a little too crude for Russell however, since it precludes the possibility of moral error. After all, it is difficult to be wrong about what we want. The theory has the further unhappy consequence that we cannot desire what we believe to be bad, let alone what is bad, since from the very fact that I desire something, it follows that for me, at least, it is good. All desires are equally moral since they are all desires for the good.