Thank you, Agar Mayor Gai-Makoon, for this intriguing question.
The more I reflect upon it, the more mysterious it is that people are made happy by the fulfillment of their interests. I don’t think I have a good explanation for this; all I can do is hazard a few hypotheses. I will understand “happy” to mean “experiencing pleasure,” and “interests” to mean “desires.” So, the question is, why is it pleasurable to have one’s desires satisfied?
One answer is that desire is a sort of painful longing for the desired object. When our desire is fulfilled, we experience that as relief from pain, which is pleasurable to us – think about how pleasurable it can be take a deep breath after holding it for an extended period. While this theory seems plausible in some cases, such as hunger, thirst, even lust, it doesn’t seem true to experience in other cases. For example, suppose I want an ice cream even though I am not particularly hungry. It just doesn’t seem true that I experience my desire for ice cream as a kind of pain. If anything, I experience both the anticipation of eating the ice cream and the satisfaction of my desire as pleasures.
Perhaps it is not the satisfaction of desire itself that is pleasurable, but rather our experience of its object. For example, when I eat my ice cream, my desire for ice cream is satisfied. But this does not seem to be the source of my pleasure; rather, it is the experience of eating the ice cream that provides satisfaction, in virtue of ice cream’s power to produce sensual pleasure. To test this hypothesis, we can compare the experience of eating ice cream when we want it with the experience of eating it when we don’t. If the pleasure of the desire satisfaction derives wholly from the experience of the desired object, then the pleasure of both experiences should be the same. However, this does not seem to be the case. In addition, there are many objects the experience of which is not particularly pleasurable, yet the experience of satisfying our desire for them is nonetheless pleasurable. For example, suppose I purchased an item that I now want to return to the store. The experience of returning the item might not be pleasurable in itself, but there may yet be satisfaction in fulfilling my desire to return it.
We might try to answer the question in a different way, by providing an evolutionary explanation for the link between pleasure and desire-satisfaction. Perhaps we evolved to experience pleasure when our desires were fulfilled so that we would be more strongly motivated to fulfill them. Now, there is a danger of infinite regress here. “Being motivated” just means having a desire. So, one way of understanding this evolutionary just-so story is that when we desire something, we also have a desire that this desire be fulfilled in virtue of our anticipation of the pleasure of its fulfillment. But then this second order desire should be accompanied by a higher-order desire that the former be fulfilled, and so on to infinity. Furthermore, there is something odd about positing a causal explanation for the link between pleasure and desire. It seems possible to imagine, for example, a world where sexual intercourse wasn’t pleasurable; this is what makes it plausible that evolution linked pleasure and sex so as to motivate us to engage in the latter. But it’s not easy to imagine desire-fulfillment without pleasure. This suggests a conceptual, not a causal link.
In the end, we might just have to accept that part of what it is to care about something is for it to be pleasurable to have one’s care fulfilled. There may be no deeper explanation.
What do you think? Does satisfying your desires make you happy? If so, why? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: Desire and Satisfaction, by Jan Toorop (1893) (credit)
I received my BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and my PhD from the University of Notre Dame. I specialize in ethics, with a particular focus on the nature of normative reasons and the ethics of hypocrisy in its myriad forms. My favorite philosopher is Henry Sidgwick, since I believe—to borrow a line from Alfred North Whitehead, speaking about Plato—that much of analytic ethics in the 20th century is a series of footnotes to Sidgwick.