Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing (CUP, 2025)
Peter Carruthers
3. Pleasure and desire
Much of the remainder of the book evaluates the standard model of action-explanation itself. Chapter 5 discusses decision making in light of one’s beliefs and desires, resulting in intentions to act. Here there is much that the standard model gets right, albeit while failing to recognize the near-ubiquitous role of valence (pleasure and displeasure) in decision making. Then Chapter 6 discusses pleasure and its relationship to affective forms of desire (which had been shown in the previous chapter to be quite distinct from the goal states with which many philosophers conflate them), with Chapter 7 going on to discuss belief, judgment, and knowledge. Today I will focus on pleasure and desire.
Some philosophers have analyzed pleasure as an intrinsic phenomenal component of (some) experiences that is intrinsically attractive / motivating (Morillo 1995; Smuts 2011). I think they are right that pleasure (and also displeasure) has a phenomenology when conscious (albeit a subtle and easily missed one), but pleasure can also be unconscious – as is the case for the reward-signals of sugar and fat received in sub-cortical structures from the gut (Small & DiFeliceantonio 2019). But I argue (drawing on Carruthers 2024) that pleasure and displeasure are best seen as representations of adaptive value and disvalue respectively. Like the sensory qualities to which they often attach, they are representational in nature. They don’t represent adaptive values as such, of course. But it is the fact that they carry information about adaptive values and disvalues that explains the roles that they play in decision-making and evaluative learning, and so that provides them with their correctness-conditions. From the perspective of the subject they just manifest as analog-magnitude qualities that figure in a space of more-or-less similar qualities, and that possess a particular sort of functional role. (Here I borrow an idea from Rosenthal 2010.)
The dominant view among philosophers, however, is that pleasure and displeasure should be analyzed in terms of desire. (For two prominent examples, see Korsgaard 1996; Parfit 2011.) Pleasures are experiences that one wants to have or to continue, whereas displeasures are experiences that one wants not to have, or wants to cease. There are a number of problems with this idea. One is that it can’t adequately account for the distinction between pleasures that are consummatory (present-tensed enjoyment of something) and those that are anticipatory (future-directed). For it is quite unclear what it could mean to desire something one is aware of already possessing. It seems that desires, by their nature, are distally directed – either to the future, or to the past, or to counterfactual situations. Nor can it be replied that present-tensed pleasure is really a desire that the object of pleasure should continue. For when one takes pleasure in the completion of an onerous task, as one often does, one rarely wants it to continue or to undertake another one.
I also show that the desire-theory of pleasure gets things exactly back to front. Rather than pleasure being explained in terms of desire, desire needs to be explained in terms of pleasure. A desire is a representation of an action or outcome with pleasure built into it, and a repulsion is a representation of an action or outcome with displeasure built into it. To desire something is to represent it as positively valenced (pleasurable). Indeed, this is how prospective reasoning works: one envisages doing something, and representations of the outcome and its immediate consequences are received as input by affective valuation networks, which respond with some degree of pleasure or displeasure. The latter gets bound into the representations of the events in question making them, in effect, representations of future pleasant (or unpleasant) events.
Given this scientifically-supported account of the nature of desire, it follows that philosophers are also mistaken in claiming (as they generally do) that desires are propositional attitudes. They are not. Desires are always constituted, in part, by analog-magnitude representations involving some degree of pleasure or displeasure. And for the same reason, philosophers are mistaken in claiming that desires have world-to-mind direction of fit. On the contrary, they have correctness conditions (just as beliefs do), since they represent the adaptive value or disvalue of the options under consideration (correctly or incorrectly). The role of desire in decision-making is to contribute to computations of expected value, and it is only the resulting intentions that have world-to-mind direction of fit.
(Actually, a bit of nuance is required here, since desires – like all other affective states – are partly comprised of an automatic motor-urge component. This will issue in action unless inhibited, and is designed to bring about changes in the world. So the motor-urge really does have world-to-mind direction of fit. But it is not this component of desire that figures directly in decision making, interacting with one’s other desires and beliefs about means and likelihoods to issue in a decision to act. It is the valence component that does that. The urge-to-act component only figures indirectly in decision making, since it can be effortful – and hence unpleasant – to repress it.)
Yet again the moral is: if the goal is to understand the nature of the states and processes that comprise the mind, then one has to enter into rich engagement with the science.
Korsgaard, C. (1996). The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press.
Morillo, C. (1995). Contingent Creatures. Rowman & Littlefield.
Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters. Oxford University Press.
Rosenthal, D. (2010). How to think about mental qualities. Philosophical Issues, 20, 368–393.
Small, D. & DiFeliceantonio, A. (2019). Processed foods and food reward: Processed foods compromise the fidelity of gut-brain signaling of food reinforcement. Science, 363, 346–347.
Smuts, A. (2011). The feels good theory of pleasure. Philosophical Studies, 155, 241–265.