Skip to main content

Desire Satisfactionism

Wolf Law Building


Utilitarianism tends to retain whatever appeal it has by an illicit back-and-forth between two quite different positions, a corporeal hedonism on the one hand and a more evanescent ethical satisfactionism on the other.


As Nozick emphasized with his hypothetical "experience machine," we value more in life than pleasure. We value more in life than any set of internal states of our own body/mind, states that could be produced by a machine. We value doing and achieving X, not just the illusion that we did it and achieved it.


Heck, this is the moral of the Matrix movies. Even beyond the Cartesian stuff, the point is that if the machines that had taken over the world and confined all humans in tubes were nice enough to give all those humans the most pleasant fantasies, the situation would still be an oppressive one whence revolutionaries would rightly seek to free us.


So we naturally make the move away from hedonism or any hedonistic reading of utilitarianism toward desire satisfactionism. But that, too, has its difficulties. A professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder has offered this thought experiment:










suppose a person (we can call him 'Max the Masochist') suffers from some mental defect that makes him desire pain, failure, illness, humiliation, and early death. Suppose he gets these. [Desire Satisfationism] implies that his life went well for him. But surely his life was a wreck. He would have been much better off if he had different desires and they had been satisfied. The satisfaction of these desires did him no good.

So we have this little argument:
Max the Masochist:
1. Max the Masochist led a miserable life.
2. If Max the Masochist led a miserable life, then DS is false.
3. Therefore, DS is false.
P1: Look at his life. From early on, he was constantly in pain. He failed at everything he did. He was sick and ill. He was constantly humiliated and ashamed of himself and his failures .... And he died young. This is what happened in Max's life. Now, are we going to say this is not a miserable life? If you were asked to describe a life in which the person was not doing well, could you do a better job than to describe Max's? It seems not. So it seems clear that Max's life did not go well for him -- he led a miserable life.
P2: But if Max really did lead a miserable life, then DS can't be true, because DS implies that Max's life went well for him. It implies this because all of these things Max got, he actually wanted! He wanted this misery. He wanted the pain, the humiliation, the illness, the early death.
Maybe you're skeptical about P1. Maybe, you say, if Max really did want those things, then his life was fine. Maybe some people are inclined to think Max's life didn't go so well because they wouldn't want those things.
But can you really swallow this? Suppose you had a close friend just like Max -- your friend had desires just like Max, and he was getting them satisfied. Would you then just sit back and say, "Oh wonderful, I'm so glad things are going so well for my friend?" No -- you'd try to get your friend some help. You'd think things would be better for your friend if he had different desires (say for love, pleasure, friendship, success) and got those things. But if DS is true, what you are saying doesn't even make sense. It doesn't even make sense to say the things he desires are bad for him.




I agree with the professor, Chris Heathwood that that is rather much to swallow.



Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryJanuary 31, 2014 at 8:33 AM

    Max desires pain, but does he desire to desire pain? Or does he instead see normally happy people around him and wish that he could be like them? In other words, does he know that he is mentally ill?

    A depressed person may desire to stay in bed all day, but he usually knows that he is depressed and desires not to be. He desires that he not desire to stay in bed all day.

    I suggest that we define utilitarianism in terms of meta-desires (what one desires to desire), and count only healthy meta-desires. This would be to apply objective criteria in determining whether a meta-desire is healthy, but is there a problem in doing that? Sometimes, as when homosexuality was considered a mental illness, criteria derive from bigotry. But I do not think that there is any bigotry underlying the claim that Max is sick.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ChristopherJanuary 31, 2014 at 9:39 AM

    Henry,

    You seem to be proposing to reform utilitarianism in much the same way John Stuart Mill did. Mill too gave his notion of "higher pleasures" a sort of meta component, though it wasn't precisely what you have outlined.

    I took the above story of Max from Heathwood, as the link indicates, but here is a thought experiment of my own, that may bear on your point.

    Late in a largely quiet life filled with fantasies, Walter Mitty finally decides to have a real adventure. So he heads to central Asia determined to climb Everest. He gets to the top of Mount Everest -- desire achieved.

    But his body reacts badly to the thinness of the air and though he survives, the next day he is saying, "That hurt much more than I thought it would, and didn't give me the thrill I expected."

    In other words, though the desire was satisfied, and though it was a desire he desired to have, he subsequently regrets having had it.

    Does his arrival at the summit of Everest count as good -- despite pain and regret, or not?

    It seems it is at least plausible to say that some of our desires/demands are mistaken, and are discovered to be mistaken later. But if goodness simply IS their satisfaction (even after they have satisfied the meta test you've specified) then this wouldn't be plausible at all.

    ReplyDelete
  3. HenryJanuary 31, 2014 at 1:26 PM

    Suppose that I am a seller of mountain climbing equipment, and I know from experience that customers of Walter Mitty's age and body type will regret climbing Mount Everest. Would I do good if I refuse to sell to him (and all other sellers also refuse), thereby thwarting his desires? I'd have to take into account the frustration that I would cause him to feel if I did not sell to him.

    Frankly, I don't take this issue very seriously, because I think that defining goodness in a unitary way is impossible. Goodness does not have a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. It is merely a adjective, which we apply in various circumstances for various reasons.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more