Controlling hope

This paper considers the kind of control we exercise over hope. In doing so, we situate our discussion against the backdrop of the growing literature on hope's nature. Several important analyses of hope have the implication that, once the relevant desires and beliefs for hope are present, an agent can (sometimes) directly control whether they hope. But we argue against the possibility of direct control. This is because hope bears systematic relationships with fear and despair; and the view that we can directly control hope makes wrong predictions about the extent to which we can control fear and despair. Throughout the paper, we explain how prominent theories of hope can be amended to better reflect the ways in which hope is controllable. In this way, the paper identifies an underexplored fault line in the philosophy of hope, one which cuts across more familiar ways of cataloguing theories of hope.