Should desire satisfactionists learn to read?

Why bother?

According to the desire satisfactionist, your life goes well to the extent that your desires are satisfied. If you want something, and you have what you want, then your life is thereby going better for you. And that’s the whole story of what makes your life go well for you — it’s just a matter of having satisfied desires.

I like desire satisfactionism. I think it’s pretty plausible. But most people don’t think it’s plausible at all. And recently some friends of mine suggested that I look at Russ Shafer-Landau’s critique of desire satisfactionism in his Living Ethics, to see why they think the view is implausible.

Shafer-Landau has a whole bunch of objections, and I want to consider pretty much all of them. But I’m going to start from the objections that trouble me the least, and work my way up to the objections that make the most trouble for desire satisfactionism.

So, here’s the objection I find the least troubling:

We can benefit children in a number of ways, even though we don’t give them what they want and don’t help them get what they want. A parent benefits her five-year-old by teaching him to read, for instance, even though the child doesn’t want to read and doesn’t know enough about the benefits of literacy to find them appealing.

Here we have a case in which you benefit someone, without satisfying their desires. The child does not want to be literate — they just don’t care — but the parent undoubtedly makes the child’s life go better by teaching them how to read. Isn’t this a counterexample to desire satisfactionism?

I don’t think so. Here is how the desire satisfactionist should think about the choice of whether to teach their child to read:

The parent tries to anticipate the child’s future life, and asks: “In which potential life would my child have more satisfied desires — the life of someone who knows how to read, or the life of someone who does not know how to read?” The answer is, very plausibly, the life of someone who knows how to read. As a literate person, they will have a much easier time satisfying their desires for entertainment and knowledge, not to mention their desires to get around in a social world that is largely designed for literate people. So, by teaching their child to read, the parent sets them up to have a life that includes a greater amount of satisfied desires. In that way, they benefit their child by teaching them to read.

A similar response applies to Shafer-Landau’s point about suicide prevention:

The third case is suicide prevention. Those who are deeply sad or depressed may decide that they would be better off dead. They are often wrong about that. Suppose we prevent them from doing away with themselves. This may only frustrate their deepest wishes. And yet they may be better off as a result.

The choice for the desire satisfactionist has the same structure as in the last case:

In which potential life would the presently-suicidal person have more satisfied desires: the longer life, or the shorter life? Very plausibly, the longer life. It is true that, to prolong their life by preventing their suicide, we must frustrate their present desire to die. So the longer life would include one instance of desire frustration that the shorter life would not include. But that’s nothing in comparison to all the many desire satisfactions that the presently-suicidal person could enjoy in a longer life, if only we prevent their life from being cut short. So if we prevent their suicide, we set back their desires in a small way in the short term, and set them up to satisfy a great many more desires in the long term. That is why suicide prevention benefits people.

Shafer-Landau anticipates something like this response, when he writes:

They may, later on, approve of our actions and be pleased that we acted as we did. But this after-the-fact approval is something very different from desire satisfaction.

I’m not so sure that after-the-fact approval really is something very different from desire satisfaction. Suppose that, in a moment of gratitude, I think to myself: “I’m glad my parents taught me to read!” I would describe this as a case in which I desire that my parents taught me to read, and I believe (correctly) that my desire is satisfied. Much depends on what does and does not count as a desire. But to my mind, approval (whether after-the-fact or not) at least typically involves desire.

But this is only a small point. The more important point is that, for the desire satisfactionist, it does not matter whether the benefited person comes to appreciate the action that benefited them. What matters is that their life includes more satisfied desires than it would have included if we had not acted. An ungrateful person might never appreciate the fact that his parents taught him to read. But if his life includes more satisfied desires than it would have included if he were illiterate, then his parents did benefit him by teaching him to read.

These responses to Shafer-Landau don’t actually have all that much to do with desire satisfactionism specifically. Whatever is good for us — whether it be desire satisfaction, or pleasure, or achievement, knowledge, etc. — we can benefit people by reducing it in the short term in order to increase it in the long term. Benefiting others isn’t all about providing instant gratification. And that’s why desire satisfactionist parents should teach their kids to read.