Jacob Barrett – “A Simple Solution to the Scope Problem”

In this post, Jacob Barrett discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Jacob’s article can be found here.

What makes your life go better or worse? One popular answer is that your life goes well when, and to the extent that, you get what you want. This is called the desire-satisfaction theory of welfare, and it has a lot going for it.

Unlike hedonistic theories that focus only on pleasure and pain, it allows that what happens outside your conscious awareness can affect your welfare. Someone systematically deceived into thinking that they have deep friendships may be worse off than someone who genuinely has them. And unlike objective list theories, which assume that the same goods are valuable for everyone, it allows for individual differences. If I care a lot about finding a romantic partner, but the prospect leaves you cold, then romance may be good for me but not for you.

Unfortunately, the desire-satisfaction theory faces a problem: we desire all sorts of things that, intuitively, have nothing to do with our welfare. Suppose you meet a stranger on a train, learn that they are ill, and develop a desire that they recover. Years later, unbeknownst to you, they do. Has your life gone better as a result? That’s hard to believe. Or suppose you care about others’ welfare and on balance desire to donate most of your income to charity. Does donating really benefit you—making this not a case of self-sacrifice after all? That also seems wrong. Or, again, if you desire that a war in a distant country end, would its ending really improve your welfare? This, too, seems implausible.

These examples (adapted, respectively, from Derek Parfit, Mark Overvold, and Wayne Sumner) illustrate the “scope problem” for desire-satisfaction theories. If satisfying any desire counts as benefiting you, then the desire-satisfaction theory is implausibly expansive. It includes far too much in its scope.

I believe that a surprisingly simple solution to this problem is available. But to make it work, we first need to back up and consider an intuitive but overlooked claim about the structure of desire.

Philosophers typically treat desires as having three components: an agent (the desirer), an object (what they desire), and a strength (how much they desire it). But, as Stephen Darwall has observed, desires seem also to have a fourth component: a target for the sake of whom you hold the desire.

Consider a woman up for a prestigious award. There’s a real difference between her father wanting her to win for his sake—so he can bask in vicarious parental glory—and him wanting her to win for her sake. The agent is the same (the father), the object is the same (the daughter winning the award), and the strength can be the same too. What differs is the target: for whose sake does the father want this?

Once we notice this feature of desire, it shows up everywhere. When engaged in a group project, you might want it to succeed for your own sake or for your partner’s sake. If a friend’s child is ill, you might desire their recovery for your friend’s sake, their child’s sake, or in an impersonal way—for no one’s sake in particular or, perhaps, “for the sake of the world”.

With this richer picture of desire in hand, the solution to the scope problem becomes straightforward: simply modify the desire-satisfaction theory to say that something is good for you when you desire it for your own sake. This handles all the typical problem cases. You desire the stranger’s recovery for their sake, so it doesn’t affect your welfare. You desire to do the right thing for others’ sake (or impersonally), so self-sacrifice remains genuinely sacrificial. You desire a distant war to end for the sake of those involved, so its resolution doesn’t benefit you.

At the same time, the account handles cases where your welfare does seem to be affected by what happens to your close friends or relations. One remarkable feature of loving someone is that you come to desire their welfare not just for their sake, but also (to some extent) for your own. And this explains why your child or partner thriving can make you (to that extent) better off.

Is this too easy? Consider three objections.

First, is the solution ad hoc? Not at all. The case for desires having targets can be made independently, without reference to the scope problem. It is needed to capture a real psychological distinction.

Second, is it incomplete? Don’t we need a deeper explanation of what it is to desire something for someone’s sake? I don’t think so. It’s plausibly a primitive psychological fact about desires that they come with targets, just as they plausibly come with objects and (as I have argued elsewhere) strengths.

Third, is it circular—perhaps because desiring something “for someone’s sake” just amounts to desiring it insofar as you think it is good for them? This objection also misses the mark, since you can desire something for someone’s sake without thinking it promotes their welfare. For example, a parent can want their child to be morally upright for the child’s sake, even while acknowledging that this would make the child worse off.

The desire-satisfaction theory is one of the most compelling accounts of what makes someone’s life go well. The scope problem has long been considered a serious strike against it. But if we make a small and independently motivated revision to our understanding of the theory—grounded in the idea that desires have targets as well as agents, objects, and strengths—the problem dissolves.

Sometimes a simple solution is all we need.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/7429/.

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