Alexander Pruss's Blog

Hedonic adaptation is the theory that individual humans have different basic levels of subjective life satisfaction (SLS). When major chang...

Desire-satisfaction utilitarianism (DSU) holds that the right thing to do is what maximizes everyone’s total desire satisfaction. This requ...

On desire-fulfillment (DF) theories of wellbeing, cases of fulfilled desire are an increment to utility. What about cases of unfulfilled des...

I have long argued that desire is not the same as consent: the fact that I want you to do something does not constitute consent to your doin...

On divine desire variants of divine command ethics, necessarily an action is right just in case it accords with God’s what God wants. But i...

Some divine “command” theories do not ground obligations in commands as such, but in divine mental states, such as his willings, intentions ...

Earlier in the pandemic, I was very judgmental of students hanging around outside in groups and not respecting six-foot spacing. Fairly quic...

Suppose that Alice is a morally upright officer fighting against an unjust aggressor in a bloody war. The aggressor’s murderous acts include...

Consider three cases: Bob doesn’t care either way whether Alice wants to go out with him. And he wants to go out with Alice if she wants t...

Suppose I have a desire for A , and I act on this desire to get A . There are at least three different stories about my motivations that are...

Back in April , I suggested that there are two possible privation theories concerning evil: every evil is a privation for every evil, wh...

It is tempting to conflate what is worth desiring with what is worth pursuing. But there seem to be cases where things are worth desiring bu...

While listening to a really interesting talk on beauty in Aquinas,I was struck by the plausibility of the following idea (perhaps not Aquina...

Suppose that desire satisfaction as such contributes to happiness. Then it makes sense to pay a neuroscientist to induce in me as many desir...

Could perfect happiness consist of perfect love? Here’s a line of argument that it couldn’t. Constitutively central to love are the desire ...

Consider this naive argument: If the desire-belief theory of motivation is true, whenever I act, I do what I want. Sometimes in acting I ...

On a naive Humean picture of action, we have beliefs and desires and together these yield our actions. But how do beliefs and desires yield...

Consider a Humean package view of rationality where: Then end of practical rationality is desire satisfaction. All the rational motivatio...

Plausibly, having satisfied desires contributes to my well-being and having unsatisfied desires contributes to my ill-being, at least in the...

This morning, I set out to walk to the Philosophy Department. If asked my intention, I might have said that it was to reach the Department. ...