Philosophy

• Desire Theory (aka the Desire-Fulfillment theory or the Desire-Satisfaction theory) • Compiled by Roholt, 2019. The passages below are quotations by these authors. The numbers are page numbers.

Chris Heathwood1 135. The desire-fulfillment theory of well-being . . . holds, in its simplest form, that what is good in itself for people . . . is their getting what they want, or the fulfillment of their desires, and what is bad in itself for them is their not getting what they want, or the frustration of their desires.

138. . . . whenever someone wants something to be the case, and it is or becomes the case, this is a benefit to the person.

Julia Annas2 46a. Surely having a happy life has something to do with getting what you want, rather than being frustrated and deprived of what you want? We all have desires; the happy person will be the person whose desires are fulfilled. The philosopher's term for this is the 'desire-satisfaction' account.

46b. Why wouldn't a happy life be one of getting what you want? People, after all, can live happy lives in many different ways. We feel that there is something wrong in trying to build any particular content into our notion of happiness such that only people living certain kinds of life could be happy. The idea that happiness is desire-satisfaction seems suitably neutral on the content of happy

lives, allowing happiness to the intellectual and the incurious alike as long as they are getting what they desire. It is possible to think of happiness as desire-satisfaction if we are prepared to think of happiness—in the spirit of the suggestion that it is subjective—as some thing on which each of us is the authority. I am happy if I think I am, since I am getting what I want. For who could be a better authority than I am on the issue of whether I am getting what I want?

46c. Why might we be dissatisfied with this result? We would have to hold that anyone getting what he or she wants is happy, whatever the nature of the desire. Happiness would thus lose any purchase as an idea that could serve to rank or judge lives; Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates, and Madonna, if they are all getting what they want, are all happy, so any comparative judgments about their lives cannot involve the idea of happiness. We might accept this, thinking that there must be something else about lives which can be compared.

46d. One thing the desire-satisfaction account disables us from doing is making judgments about the happiness of people whose desires are in obvious ways defective. Notoriously, some desires are based on radically faulty information or reasoning. Some desires are unresponsive to the agent's reasoning powers because of the force of addiction or obsession. At a deeper level, some desires are themselves deformed by social pressures. Girls who desire less for themselves than for their brothers, poor people who see desire for self-betterment as unimaginable [See Heathwood, below, 144]— these are just two of many kinds of desires that are open to

Chris Heathwood, “Desire-Fulfillment Theory” In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. Edited by Guy Fletcher. Routledge, 2016. 1

Julia Annas, “Happiness as Achievement.” Daedalus, Vol. 133, No. 2 (Spring, 2004). 2

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criticism, despite being honestly expressed and open to modification in the light of reason and information, because they spring from the internalization of ideas that deny the agents themselves proper respect.

47a. Once again, the idea that happiness is desire-satisfaction can absorb these points and even deny their faults, at the cost of shrinking [the concept or phenomenon of] happiness to something where only I am authoritative. Suppose, however, that I am happy if I think I am, because I am happy if I am getting what I want, and I am the authority on whether I am getting what I want. If we take this point seriously, we can see that we have not really moved forward from the smiley-face-feeling conception of happiness [i.e., hedonism]. Happiness is still just a state I am in that I report on: getting what I want, rather than feeling good, but still a state, namely a state of having my desires fulfilled.

Roger Crisp3 4.2a. Historically, . . . the reason for the current dominance of desire theories lies in the emergence of welfare economics. Pleasure and pain are inside people’s heads, and also hard to measure—especially when we have to start weighing different people’s experiences against one another. So economists began to see people’s well-being as consisting in the satisfaction of preferences or desires, the content of which could be revealed by the choices of their possessors. This made possible the ranking of preferences, the development of ‘utility functions’ for individuals, and methods for assessing the value of preference-satisfaction (using, for example, money as a standard).

4.2b. The simplest version of a desire theory one might call the present desire theory, according to which someone is made better off to the extent that their current desires are fulfilled. This theory . . . has serious problems. . . . Consider the case of the angry adolescent. This boy’s mother tells him he cannot attend a certain nightclub, so the boy holds a gun to his own head, wanting to pull the trigger and retaliate against his mother. . . [T]he scope of theories of well-being should be the whole of a life. It is implausible that the boy will make his life go as well as possible by pulling the trigger. We might perhaps interpret the simple desire theory as a theory of well-being-at-at-a-particular-time. But even then it seems unsatisfactory. From whatever perspective, the boy would be better off if he put the gun down.

4.2c. We should move, then, to a comprehensive desire theory, according to which what matters to a person’s well-being is the overall level of desire-satisfaction in their life as a whole. A summative version of this theory suggests, straightforwardly enough, that the more desire-fulfillment in a life the better. But it runs into Derek Parfit’s case of addiction. Imagine that you can start taking a highly addictive drug, which will cause a very strong desire in you for the drug every morning. Taking the drug will give you no pleasure; but not taking it will cause you quite severe suffering. There will be no problem with the availability of the drug, and it will cost you nothing. But what reason do you have to take it? 4.2d. A global version of the comprehensive theory ranks desires, so that desires about the shape and content of one’s life as a whole are given some priority. So, if I prefer not to become a drug addict, that will explain why it is better for me not to take Parfit’s drug. But

Roger Crisp, “Well-Being.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2017 Edition. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 3

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now consider the case of the orphan monk. This young man began training to be a monk at the earliest age, and has lived a very sheltered life. He is now offered three choices: he can remain as a monk, or become either a cook or a gardener outside the monastery, at a grange. He has no conception of the latter alternatives, so chooses to remain a monk. But surely it might be possible that his life would be better for him were he to live outside?

4.2e. So we now have to move to an informed desire version of the comprehensive theory. According to the informed desire account, the best life is the one I would desire if I were fully informed about all the (non-evaluative) facts. But now consider a case suggested by John Rawls: the grass-counter. Imagine a brilliant Harvard mathematician, fully informed about the options available to her, who develops an overriding desire to count the blades of grass on the lawns of Harvard. . . . Some will believe that, if she really is informed, and not suffering from some neurosis, then the life of grass-counting will be the best for her.

4.2f. [A] desire theorist and a hedonist may agree [—may, but they may not agree] on what makes life good for people: pleasurable experiences. But they will differ . . . [about what makes pleasure good for people]: the hedonist will refer to pleasantness as the good-maker, while the desire theorist must refer to desire- satisfaction. (It is worth pointing out here that if one characterizes pleasure as an experience the subject wants to continue, the distinction between hedonism and desire theories becomes quite hard to pin down.)

Chris Heathwood 138a. . . . another line of reasoning in support of the desire- fulfillment theory begins with the intuitive idea that getting what you want is at least a good thing for us, and then subjects the strengthened, unified hypothesis that it is the only good thing to scrutiny, attempting to falsify it; the argument then claims that the unified hypothesis survives the scrutiny, and we are thus justified in accepting it. Hedonism can be argued for on similar grounds. But desire theorists may claim that the desire-fulfillment hypothesis is more plausible than the hedonistic hypothesis. [Here is the reasoning:] if we consider someone who is familiar with pleasure and doesn't want it as much as she wants other things, there is some plausibility to the claim that it is better for her to get the other things. This intuition favors the desire theory over hedonism.

138b. When it comes to putative objective goods, such as knowledge or friendship, the desire theorist may note that such goods are desired by virtually everyone. The desire theorist can thus explain why they might seem to be universal, objective goods. And when we imagine a strange person who truly has no interest them, the desire-theoretic commitment that they are of no benefit to that person may be at least as plausible as the objectivist insistence that they are. . . Desire fulfillment may be the common denominator on the scene in cases of apparent objective and hedonic goods, the factor that indeed explains the value in these cases.

139a. The ill-informed desires criticism. There is a cherry pie before me and I am dying for a slice. Unbeknownst to me, I have recently developed a severe allergy to cherries and so it would in fact not be in my interests to satisfy my desire to eat the slice. This

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appears to conflict with the unadorned desire-fulfillment theory, according to which any desire fulfillment benefits a person.

139. Reply. About such cases, it might often be true that if the person knew all the facts, he would not have the problematic desire. The informed desire theory holds . . . that what is good in itself for us is our getting what we would want if we knew and vividly appreciated all of the non-evaluative facts. If l knew how eating the pie would affect me, I probably wouldn't want to eat it.

144. Adaptive Preferences Criticism. There are other objections to the desire approach worthy of our attention. When someone can't get what he really wants, he may adapt his preferences to his predicament. If he succeeds in doing this, he is now getting everything he wants. This seems like an unfortunate situation, but the desire theory may be unable to accommodate this intuition. [See Annas, above, 46d.]

145a. Euthyphro Criticism. [W]hen we are thinking just about 4

ourselves and our interests, don't we want the things we want because they are good for us? But the desire theory suggests the opposite, that these things are good for us because we want them.

145b. Advertising Criticism. There are objections from manipulated or non-autonomous desires: if subliminal advertising brainwashes us into wanting some silly gadget, does it really benefit us to get it?

The Euthyphro is a dialogue by Plato in which he employs this structure of reasoning but about piety.4

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