Past Desires and Well-being 2013 Carnegie-Uehiro-Oxford Ethics Conference: Happiness and Well-Being

Some desires are conditional on their persistence and some are not. I aim to show that desire fulfilment theorists should reject the view that fulfilment of some of a person's past desires for the present contribute to her well-being. Some desires are conditional on their persistence and some are not. Call the former 'Pconditional desires' and the latter 'P-unconditional desires.' There are desires that a person had in the past but has already lost. Call these desires 'past desires'. There are past desires that have as their object what happens at the present. Call them 'past desires for the present.' Some desire fulfillment theorists of well-being, such as H.E. Baber, take the view that fulfillment of a person's past P-unconditional desires for the present contributes to her well-being. The aim of this presentation is to show that desire fulfillment theorists are forced to reject this view. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/