PyramidHead
Contributor
My answer to the question posed in the title is no. If I really want to eat a banana, and then I do, how am I better off than someone who never wanted to eat a banana, all other things being equal?
To put it another way: suppose Bob is walking down the street and has no desire for a banana. Suddenly, he is zapped by an experimental Banana-Wanting-Beam created by a local inventor, causing him to want a banana. Luckily, there is a banana nearby, which he eats, thus satisfying his want for a banana. Did the local inventor do Bob a favor by giving him a preference he didn't have before, which was immediately satisfied? Or is Bob no better off than he was before getting zapped?
I would say he is no better off. The value of a thing is completely reducible to how much it is wanted, and acquiring something is only valuable if you want it. It may be objected that certain instances of acquiring things are accompanied by great pleasure. Maybe it seems logical to look at someone devouring a plate of lobster, and think: I wish I liked lobster, it looks like that person is really enjoying it. But this would be a mistake. In that scenario, the object of want is not the lobster, but the enjoyment of eating something one finds delicious. We could imagine a person (admittedly an oddball) who has no desire for delicious food, and compared to such a person, the one enjoying the plate of lobster is not obviously better off.
If this is true, it casts the pursuit of goals in a different light, doesn't it? I would speculate that most people think the accumulation of fulfilled aspirations over one's lifetime is additive, in that each met goal raises one's level of well-being higher than it was before. But if reaching a goal is X, and merely not formulating this goal at all is Y, there is no way to justify the statement that X > Y in terms of overall well being. Rather than a steadily inclining slope that steepens with each satisfied preference, the actual situation is akin to bumping into a ceiling that represents both X and Y--both the satisfaction of a want and the absence of that want. We can never get higher than the ceiling, so to speak, but we can certainly get lower; inevitably, nobody gets everything they desire. For a given object, not having a preference for it is the better strategy, as one would therefore never move from the ceiling.
What do you think about this?
To put it another way: suppose Bob is walking down the street and has no desire for a banana. Suddenly, he is zapped by an experimental Banana-Wanting-Beam created by a local inventor, causing him to want a banana. Luckily, there is a banana nearby, which he eats, thus satisfying his want for a banana. Did the local inventor do Bob a favor by giving him a preference he didn't have before, which was immediately satisfied? Or is Bob no better off than he was before getting zapped?
I would say he is no better off. The value of a thing is completely reducible to how much it is wanted, and acquiring something is only valuable if you want it. It may be objected that certain instances of acquiring things are accompanied by great pleasure. Maybe it seems logical to look at someone devouring a plate of lobster, and think: I wish I liked lobster, it looks like that person is really enjoying it. But this would be a mistake. In that scenario, the object of want is not the lobster, but the enjoyment of eating something one finds delicious. We could imagine a person (admittedly an oddball) who has no desire for delicious food, and compared to such a person, the one enjoying the plate of lobster is not obviously better off.
If this is true, it casts the pursuit of goals in a different light, doesn't it? I would speculate that most people think the accumulation of fulfilled aspirations over one's lifetime is additive, in that each met goal raises one's level of well-being higher than it was before. But if reaching a goal is X, and merely not formulating this goal at all is Y, there is no way to justify the statement that X > Y in terms of overall well being. Rather than a steadily inclining slope that steepens with each satisfied preference, the actual situation is akin to bumping into a ceiling that represents both X and Y--both the satisfaction of a want and the absence of that want. We can never get higher than the ceiling, so to speak, but we can certainly get lower; inevitably, nobody gets everything they desire. For a given object, not having a preference for it is the better strategy, as one would therefore never move from the ceiling.
What do you think about this?
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