Paradoxes of Desire Satisfactionism and Hedonism
Fred Feldman (Pleasure and the Good Life) and Chris Heathwood (“The Problem of Defective Desires”) point out the following paradox for desire satisfaction theory, which seems to have been first suggested by Richard Kraut. People sometimes desire to be badly off. Desire satisfactionists say that A’s desire to be badly off is satisfied iff A’s desires are on the whole not satisfied. This leads to paradox, at least in certain cases. If having a desire satisfied is good for you, then satisfying the desire to be badly off makes you better off; and in some cases, the result will be that you are not badly off; which means that the desire is not satisfied after all, so you are badly off. Paradox. (For a clearer formulation of the paradox, read Chris’ paper.)
Chris suggests in his paper that the paradox for desire satisfactionism flows merely from a paradox about desire. Paradox arises just from the desire to have one’s desires frustrated – whether or not desire satisfactionism is the right theory of welfare. If you have a favorite way to resolve those paradoxes, the desire satisfactionist can just employ your solution and save his theory of welfare.
I’m not sure Chris is right about this. Consider the sometimes paradoxical desire to have one’s desires be, on the whole, mostly frustrated. Suppose that the solution to this paradox is to say that this is an impossible desire. If desire satisfaction were true, this would entail that it is also impossible to desire one’s life to go badly on the whole. (Or at least that desire could never be satisfied.) But that desire is not paradoxical, and it seems like it could be satisfied. So there’s a cost to desire satisfactionism here – it entails that certain desires are paradoxical or unsatisfyable, while other theories of welfare would not. (I realize this is a bit sketchy, but this is after all just a blog post. Feel free to hammer away with de re/de dicto distinctions and such in the comments.)
I think this sort of paradox creates problems for other theories of welfare too, including Feldman’s “Truth-Adjusted Intrinsic Attitudinal Hedonism.” (Feldman doesn’t seem to endorse TAIAH in the end, but he seems sort of sympathetic to it.) Very roughly, the idea behind TAIAH is that pleasures are more valuable when taken in propositions that are true. (Better to be pleased that others like you when they actually do like you than when they hate you, etc.) Just to make the view sufficiently precise, let’s suppose that pleasures taken in truths (“true pleasures”) are twice as valuable as similar pleasures taken in falsehoods (“false pleasures”). Here’s a variant on one of Chris’ examples. Suppose that A’s life contains more pain than pleasure, so that his life has intrinsic value of –15 (pending what else happens). A then takes pleasure to degree 10 in the fact that he’s had a bad life. Call this pleasure P. Is P a true pleasure or a false pleasure? If it’s a true pleasure, then its intrinsic value is +20, which means A’s life has intrinsic value of +5, which means P is not a true pleasure after all. If P is a false pleasure, then P has intrinsic value of +10, which means A’s life has intrinsic value of –5, which means P was in fact a true pleasure. Paradox.
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