Could you elaborate? I'm interested. By "first order desires", do you mean complete barbarism, such as seeing someone with an ice cream cone, and killing them

Could you elaborate? I'm interested. By "first order desires", do you mean complete barbarism, such as seeing someone with an ice cream cone, and killing them on the spot so you can have the ice cream? And where do you feel second-order desires come from? Are you talking about the idea that humans can acquire new goals without even being aware they have done so? [1] Or something else? [1] "We do, as shown by decades of research on operant conditioning. When a neutral potential goal is associated with a stimulus of positive affect, we acquire new goals, and we can be unaware that this has happened:" from http://lesswrong.com/lw/5sk/inferring_our_desires/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/5sk/inferring_our_desires/