If wellbeing is not pleasure, is it getting what we want, or is it achieving certain objective goods whether we want them or not?
desire-satisfaction and objective list theories of wellbeing, including their advantages over hedonism and their objections
A VCE Philosophy Unit 4 answer on desire-satisfaction and objective list theories of wellbeing. Sets out Parfit's three-way taxonomy, explains each theory and its advance on hedonism, and evaluates the defective-desires and elitism objections.
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What this dot point is asking
VCAA wants you to explain the two main rivals to hedonism as theories of wellbeing, desire-satisfaction theory and objective list theory, locate them within Derek Parfit's standard three-way taxonomy, and evaluate them against each other and against hedonism. The high-band answer uses the experience machine to motivate the move beyond hedonism, then presses the defective-desires objection against desire theories and the paternalism objection against objective list theories.
Parfit's three-way taxonomy
In an appendix to Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit sets out the framework now standard for this topic. What makes a life go well for the person living it (their wellbeing or self-interest)? Three families of answer:
- Hedonistic theories: what is good for you is pleasant experience and the absence of pain.
- Desire-satisfaction (or preference) theories: what is good for you is having your desires satisfied, getting what you want.
- Objective list theories: certain things are good or bad for you whether or not you want them or enjoy them, and the good life consists in having the good ones.
Nozick's experience machine is the standard pivot. If hedonism were true, we should happily plug into a machine guaranteeing a lifetime of pleasant experience. Most refuse, judging that they want to actually accomplish things, be a certain sort of person, and be in contact with reality, not merely have the experiences as of doing so. This refusal is evidence against hedonism and motivates the other two theories.
Desire-satisfaction theory
Desire theory says your life goes well to the extent that your desires are satisfied. It immediately explains the experience-machine intuition: we desire to genuinely write the novel or raise the child, not merely to have the experience, so a machine that delivers only the experience leaves our actual desires unfulfilled. The theory is attractively respectful of individual variation: it does not impose a single template of the good life but lets each person's own preferences fix what is good for them, which fits liberal and economic thinking about welfare. Most versions move to informed desires, the desires you would have if fully informed and rational, to avoid obvious problems.
Objective list theory
Objective list theory holds that some things are good for a person independently of their attitudes to them. A typical list includes knowledge, meaningful achievement, deep personal relationships, autonomy, aesthetic experience and moral goodness. These benefit you because of what they are, not because you happen to want or enjoy them. The theory captures the strong intuition that a life can be impoverished even if the person wants nothing more and feels content, and that some pursuits are genuinely more worthwhile than others, the same intuition Mill reaches for with higher pleasures.
Evaluation
Desire theory's central problem is defective desires. Satisfying a desire does not obviously benefit you if the desire is based on false belief (you want the water that is in fact poisoned), is trivial or self-destructive, or is for something that never affects your life (Parfit's case of wanting a stranger you met once to recover, whose recovery you never learn of). Moving to informed desires helps with the first, but not the trivial or remote ones, and risks circularity: if we explain a fully informed desire as one that tracks what is really good for the person, we have smuggled in an objective standard and abandoned the pure desire theory. There is also the worry of adaptive preferences: people oppressed into wanting very little would, on this theory, count as doing well when their desires are met, which seems wrong.
Objective list theory answers all this by naming the goods directly, so it is not hostage to whatever a person happens to want. But it faces two objections. First, paternalism or alienation: it can pronounce a life good for you even if you neither want nor enjoy any of it, and a benefit that leaves you cold and unengaged seems hardly a benefit to you. Defenders often add an endorsement constraint (the goods must engage you), but that reintroduces an attitude-dependent element. Second, the lists look arbitrary: who fixes the items, and why these rather than others? Without a unifying rationale the theory risks being a bare list backed by intuition.
Judgement: both theories advance on hedonism, which the experience machine undermines. Desire theory respects autonomy but cannot, without borrowing an objective standard, distinguish desires worth satisfying from worthless or ill-informed ones. Objective list theory captures that some things genuinely make a life better regardless of desire, but must answer the charge of paternalism and explain its list. The most defensible position is a hybrid: certain objective goods constitute wellbeing, but they benefit you most fully when you also engage with and endorse them, combining the objectivist's insight with the desire theorist's respect for the person's own perspective.