Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: According to desire satisfactionism, well-being consists in getting what you desire. Recently, several theorists have suggested that this view should be extended to claim that ill-being consists in getting what you are averse to. I argue that both of these paradigmatic claims are false. As I show, desire and aversion are indeed both relevant to well-being and ill-being – in fact, perhaps surprisingly, each attitude has unique effects on both our well-being and ill-being. However, these effects are a matter of the unique feelings that desire and aversion produce. The paradigmatic desire satisfactionist approach – and, I argue, a surprisingly wide variety of desire satisfactionist views – cannot properly capture the relevance of these feelings, and thus the relevance of desire and aversion, to well-being and ill-being, and should therefore be abandoned.
Source: Analysis
Author: James Fanciullo
Institution: Lingnan University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,866
OpenAlex ID: W4416378802