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Desire satisfaction, death, and time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Duncan Purves
Duncan Purves*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA Environmental Studies and Bioethics, New York University, New York, NY, USA
*
Email: duncan.purves@gmail.com
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Abstract

Desire satisfaction theories of well-being and deprivationism about the badness of death face similar problems: desire satisfaction theories have trouble locating the time when the satisfaction of a future or past-directed desire benefits a person; deprivationism has trouble locating a time when death is bad for a person. I argue that desire satisfaction theorists and deprivation theorists can address their respective timing problems by accepting fusionism, the view that some events benefit or harm individuals only at fusions of moments in time. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the timing problem for deprivationism because it locates death’s badness at the same time as both the victim of death and death itself, and it accounts for all of the ways that death is bad for a person. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the problem of temporally locating the benefit of future and past-directed desires because it respects several attractive principles, including the view that the intrinsic value of a time for someone is determined solely by states of affairs that obtain at that time and the view that intrinsically beneficial events benefit a person when they occur.

Keywords

Deathtimethe timing problemwell-beingdesire satisfaction theory
Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , 2017 , pp. 799 - 819
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2017

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