Depression and the Problem of Absent Desires

IN HIS ESSAY, "DEPRESSION, TOO, IS A THING with Feathers," Andrew Solomon paints a particularly vivid picture of what it is like to suffer from depression: I didn't feel very excited or enthusiastic about any of the things that had previously filled me with joy and pleasure. I remember particularly that, coming home and listening to the messages on my answering machine, I would feel tired instead of being pleased to hear from my friends, and I'd think, That's an awful lot of people to have to call back." I was publishing my first novel at the time, and it came out to rather nice reviews. I simply didn't care. All my life I had dreamed of publishing a novel, and now here it was, but all I felt was nullity. That went on for quite a while. Then the sense of life's being effortful kicked in. Everything began to seem like such an enormous, overwhelming effort. I would think to myself, Oh, I should have some lunch. And then I would think, But I have to get the food out. And put it on a plate. And cut it up. And chew it. And swallow it. And it all began to seem like the stations of the cross (Solomon (2008)). It is plain that Solomon's life, when suffering from depression, is going very badly for him. Yet, surprisingly, depression--a paradigmatic state of ill-being--has not been much investigated by philosophers thinking about welfare. In part, this may be because theories of ill-being have received less attention from philosophers than theories of wellbeing have (Kagan (2015)). But whatever its explanation, this lacuna in the literature is unfortunate, for depression has much to teach us about what makes our lives go well--and poorly. In fact, I argue that certain cases of severe depression provide a counterexample to desire-based theories of welfare. A desire-based theory of welfare (which I will also refer to as the "desire view" or the "desire theory") cannot explain why severe depression is bad for us; instead, such a theory implies, implausibly, that certain severely depressed individuals are no longer even subjects of welfare. For these reasons, desire-based theories of welfare should be rejected. In order to demonstrate this, I first show that the cases of severe depression I highlight pose a problem for a simple version of the desire theory (what I will call the "Simple View"), which I characterize in section 1. After explaining why severe depression is a problem for the Simple View, I go on, in section 3, to consider more sophisticated versions of the desire theory, which one might hope could avoid the problem I have identified. However, either these modified accounts fail to solve the problem or else they generate other objections that render them unacceptable. As a result, no version of the desire theory is found to be acceptable. This result is both surprising and important. The desire-satisfaction theory is often seen as the "theory to beat" in the wellbeing literature (Haybron (2008: 3)). Moreover, though many objections have been leveled against desire-based accounts of welfare, the problem discussed in this paper is, to my knowledge, a novel one. My conclusion, if true, also points to a more general moral--one stressed recently by Shelly Kagan--that philosophers interested in wellbeing would do well to also attend to instances of our lives going poorly. 1. Desire-Based Theories of Welfare Desire-based theories of wellbeing have a long history and numerous defenders (Hobbes (1994/1651); Brandt (1966); Singer (1979); Heathwood (2006; 2011)). Chris Heathwood describes their core commitments as follows: The desire-fulfillment theory... holds, in its simplest form, that what is good in itself for people and other subjects of welfare is their getting what they want, or the fulfillment of their desires, and what is bad in itself for them is their not getting what they want, or the frustration of their desires (Heathwood (2015: 135)). Thus, for instance, if I want my favorite song to come on the radio and it does, my life goes better for me. …