The problems of defective desires, dead sea apples, and intrinsically quirky desires for unrestricted non-mental state actualist desire theories of welfare
Mariqueo-Russell, Atus (2019) The problems of defective desires, dead sea apples, and intrinsically quirky desires for unrestricted non-mental state actualist desire theories of welfare. Masters thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Abstract
Unrestricted non-mental state actualist desire theories of welfare claim that it is the fulfilment and frustration of our actual desires that determines how well our life goes for us. This paper defends this theory against a set of arguments that are often taken to reduce it to absurdity. It is sometimes claimed that unrestricted non-mental state actualist desire theories are unviable because some of our actual desires seem to be an intuitively inadequate, repugnant or bizarre basis for welfare determination. In response to this problem, some desire theorists have abandoned the actualist theory in favour of an idealisation theory of welfare. Other desire theorists have preserved the premise that the fulfilment and frustration of actual desires determines welfare and have augmented the theory with a ‘restricted’ desire theory in response to these problematic desires. The desires that serve as counterexamples to the claim that actual desires determine welfare have been referred to by different names in the literature on this topic. However, I have opted to go for the umbrella terms defective desires, Dead Sea apples, and intrinsically quirky desires to categorise the different arguments, based on the identification of intuitively inadequate, repugnant or bizarre desires, leveraged by critics as undermining the unrestricted non-mental state actualist desire theory. This paper claims that upon inspection none of these desires need undermine the unrestricted non-mental state actualist desire theory. Therefore, while there may be reasons to adopt an idealisation over an actualist account, or a restricted over an unrestricted account, these reasons are not to be found in the counterexamples presented by defective desires, Dead Sea apples, and intrinsically quirky desires.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | Date of PhD award confirmed as 2019 by registry |
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Aug 2019 13:37 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Nov 2023 14:04 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40425 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00040425 |
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