Three Essays on Desire Satisfaction

This dissertation consists of three essays defeuding and developing the desire-satisfaction theory of well-being, according to which your life goes well to the extent that your desires are satisfied, and your life goes badly to the extent that your desires are frustrated.

In the first essay, "Hidden Desires: A Unified Strategy for Defending the Desire- Satisfaction Theory". I defend the desire-satisfaction theory against the problem of prudential neutrality and the problem of remote desires. According to former, the theory cannot avoid saying that, from the point of view of prudence or self-interest, you ought to be neutral between satisfymg an existing desire of yours and replacing it with an equally strong desire and satisfying the new desire. According to the latter, the theory regards as directly relevant to your well-being even desires whose objects are intuitively too irrelevant to (or 'remote' from) your life to affect your welfare. I argue that desire theorists can answer both objections by appealing to hidden desires-ones that it is psychologically realistic to attribute to the agents in the cases on which the two problems are based, even though they are not mentioned in descriptions of those cases.