Time and Identity

12 Ex Ante Desire and Post Hoc Satisfaction

Seven years, My lord have now past since I waited in your outward Rooms or was repulsed from your Door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of Publication without one Act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. . . . The notice which you have been pleased to take of my Labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known, and do not want it. —Dr. Johnson to Lord Chesterfield L. W. Sumner argues that the informed desire satisfaction account of welfare is unsatisfactory because, since desires precede the states of affairs that satisfy them, satisfying desires may fail to satisfy their agents (Sumner 1996). I argue that the temporal gap between our desires and the states of affairs that satisfy them poses no special problem for the desire theory. Even if getting what we want fails to satisfy us, we are, ceteris paribus, better off for having got it. 1 Desires for States That Aren’t Like Anything for Us According to desire satisfaction accounts of welfare, a state of affairs is good for a person to the extent that it satisfies her (informed, rationally considered) desires. The rationale for rejecting hedonistic accounts of well-being in favor of desire theories is the intuition that states of affairs that aren’t “like” anything for us can harm and benefit us. Many of us would hesitate to jump onto Nozick’s Experience Machine because we believe that living in a fool’s paradise is not a good thing. Life on the Experience Machine may be better than a life of palpable misery but it is 12 Ex Ante Desire and Post Hoc Satisfaction H. E. Baber 250 H. E. Baber not so good as a life of genuine activity and achievement, we believe, because we desire things other than feely psychological states and, intuitively , getting those things contributes to our well-being. On the desire satisfaction account, “feely” psychological states also contribute to our well-being to the extent that we want them. Most of us want the knowledge that we have achieved our goals and the pleasant phenomenal state that goes along with that as well as the fact of achievement. “Good feels,” even without achievement, are good to the extent that we desire them, and achievement without good feels is good insofar as we desire it; but good feels together with achievement are best of all. A minority of subjects aver that they would plug into the Experience Machine, but we cannot conclude that this is an expression of their hedonistic intuitions : they may just rank good feels very highly in their preference orderings and be prepared to incur substantial opportunity costs to get them. The desire theorist in any case holds that states of affairs that do not include any phenomenal component, including those that are wholly extrinsic to us, can benefit us. We can desire any possible state of affairs, and perhaps even some logically impossible ones, including the admiration of people we do not know and a place in history after our deaths. According to the desire theorist the satisfaction of such desires benefits us. The desire theorist’s intuition that states of affairs that make no difference to our experience can harm or benefit us is not universal. Sumner, however, suggests that even if we grant the desire theorist’s fundamental assumption that they can make a difference to our well-being, the prospective character of desire, which opens a temporal gap between desires and the states of affairs that satisfy them, undermines the account. States of affairs that satisfy my desires may not satisfy me. (1) Getting what I wanted may turn out not to be like what I thought it would be like for me, so that even though my desire is satisfied I am disappointed. (2) Worse still, my tastes, preferences, and goals may change so that by the time I get what I wanted I might wish that things were otherwise.1 (3) Worst of all, my desire may come to be satisfied only after I am dead and not around to get any satisfaction out of it at all.2 These cases...