The problems of defective desires, dead sea apples, and intrinsically quirky desires for unrestricted non-mental state actualist desire theories of welfare
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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