When is a desire that p satisfied? That's the question that's been bugging me this week.
On a simple view:
1) S's desire that p is satisfied at time t iff S desires at t that p and it is true at t that p.
However, (1) does not seem to capture the concept of desire satisfaction as employed in common sense. For one thing, common sense seems to require, in addition to the conditions laid down in 1, that S knows (or at least, justifiably and truly believes) that p. For example, if I desire that Obama win the election, but the result is announced while I am walking in the Scottish Highlands, away from all news broadcasts, then my desire is not satisfied at the precise moment that the result is announced. Instead, my desire is satisfied only when I finally learn that Obama won the election. Common sense thus seems to require a recognitional element for desire satisfaction.
However, it is hard to see how the common sense notion of desire satisfaction, if it includes this recognition condition, squares with a second component of common sense, namely, that people may have desires that are satisfied only after their deaths. Examples of such desires abound, but to continue with my previous theme, I suspect there were many people who desired that there would one day be a black president of the US, but who did not live to see the moment. And yet, common sense seems to suggest that their desires were recently fulfilled.
I've picked up on this difficulty in the common sense view of desire-satisfaction only for the sake of having a definite problem to talk about. But I'm sure this doesn't come close to exhausting the problems of (1).
- Geoffrey Ferrari's blog
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My instinct here - and it's
Toby Wardman on Thu, 11/13/2008 - 2:50pmMy instinct here - and it's nothing more than an instinct - is to bite the bullet. I would say that your desire for Obama to win the election is satisfied at the moment the election is won - you just don't know about it until you get back from the highlands. Equally, your desire for your estate to be distributed equally among your surviving relatives is satisfied after your death - you just don't know about it.
There is no reason to assume that our common sense concept of desire-satisfaction is completely coherent, but actually in this case I think my account gets a little support from common sense. After all, if we meet in the Scottish highlands the day after the US elections and I ask you, "Has your desire for Obama to win the election been satisfied?", aren't you more likely to say, "I don't know yet", and not "No, because I haven't heard about the result"?
Desire-satisfaction accounts of welfare
Geoffrey Ferrari on Sat, 11/15/2008 - 9:53amThanks for your response, Toby. My question is prompted by what are usually called "desire-satisfaction" accounts of welfare. I'm trying to understand these accounts further by looking in more detail at what it is to satisfy a desire. I assume that the truth of p is at least a necessary condition of the desire that p being satisfied. So my question concerns its sufficiency.
You ask:
I'm inclined to think that both of these answers could be reasonable, and this in turn leads me to suspect that the question can be understood in different ways. If your question is understood, "Has what I desire come true?" then my answer should clearly be that I don't know. But if you're asking whether my desire has been satisfied, in what I think of an ordinary sense of that question that is stronger than the previous sense, then I think I could reasonably say that it hasn't yet been satisfied, precisely because I don't know whether what I desire has come true. However, I certainly accept that intuitions might divide here, and I'm really only exploring the possibilities for a stronger account of desire satisfaction. Let me try to articulate some reasons for wanting a stronger account.
We can think of the simple account of desire satisfaction (proposition 1 above) as claiming that satisfying is a desire is a combination of an internal condition and an external condition. (For present purposes, I'll read internal as "within the bounds of a person's skin"). So, S's desire that p is satisfied iff (internal condition) S desires that p and (external condition) p is true. Now let's combine this with a desire satisfaction account of welfare. There are several such views on the market, so just consider the simplest one, according to which what makes S's life go well is having his present desires satisfied. Better accounts might refer (i) not to actual desires, but to desires S would have under conditions of perfect information and perfect rationality, and (ii) not merely to present desires, but to desires had over the course of a life. They might also restrict the set of relevant desires e.g. to one's deepest desires or life projects. For present purposes I don't think any of these refinements matter. All I'm interested is what it is for those desires in the relevant set to be satisfied.
Now, I think my problem with the desire satisfaction accounts of welfare is that they have a very externalist component to them. Suppose S has a desire that p that is unsatisfied. On desire satisfaction accounts of welfare, having an unsatisfied desire is either neutral for one's welfare or it counts negatively, reducing the subject's well-being. However, all that is required for S's welfare to improve (at least in gross terms) is that p should change from being false to being true.
No doubt some will think that the externalist component of the simple view of desire satisfaction is a good thing. For example, it can help to explain why veridical experiences are more important for our welfare than non-veridical one's. As Nozick writes, "We want to do certain things and not just have the experience of having done them". The desire-satisfaction account helps to explain why, if I want to win an Olympic medal, my welfare is increased only if I do in fact win the medal, and not just have the experience of winning it (as would be offered by a virtual reality machine).
Dialectically, then, I think the situation is this. Desire satisfaction accounts, with their strong externalist component of welfare, are offered as a response to the very internalist accounts of welfare that are offered by simple versions of hedonism. This prompts two questions for me. First, is there a view of welfare that is more of a compromise account of welfare that lies between the strong internalism of simple hedonism and the strong externalism of the desire-satisfaction accounts (when these include a simple view of desire satisfaction).?And second, is it plausible to arrive at the required compromise account of welfare by adjusting the account of desire-satisfaction to include a further internalist component, namely, the recognition component that I described in my initial post?
Well, I'm rambling. I'll be glad to hear anyone's thoughts on this topic.