Desire Satisfaction and Temporal Well-Being: Time for a New View

Abstract

It is common to think that well-being has a temporal dimension—that people can be benefited and harmed at times. However, accounting for when a person benefits is not always a clear matter for desire satisfactionism, which holds that a person benefits if their desires are satisfied. This is because there are many cases in which a person desires something at some time, but the desired state of affairs obtains only at some other time when the person lacks the desire. What should desire satisfactionists say about such cases in which the person’s desire and the desired state of affairs do not overlap temporally? When does the person benefit (if they do)? To address this, I advance a new view called no-future time-of-desire: in a case in which a person’s desire and the desired state of affairs do not overlap temporally, (a) the person cannot benefit if the desired state of affairs obtains after the desire, but (b) the person can benefit if the desired state of affairs obtains prior to the desire, and the benefit is incurred at the time they have the desire. I argue that this view is superior to other views in the literature, such as unrestricted time-of-desire, time-of-object, later-time, fusion, and concurrentism.