Getting what you want often brings no pleasure, which shows the two come apart

The argument

Proponents of this account begin from a familiar disappointment. A person works for years towards something they wanted, obtains it exactly as specified, and feels almost nothing. Nothing has gone wrong with the getting; the desire was real and it was satisfied. What is missing is the enjoyment, and its absence is precisely what makes the episode worth remarking on. Proponents argue that an account identifying pleasure with satisfied desire has no room for this, since on that account the pleasure would already have been delivered along with the thing. The mechanism they point to is that wanting and enjoying are separate capacities which usually travel together and sometimes do not. Wanting orients a person towards something not yet had. Enjoying is a quality of what is being had now. Because people mostly want what they go on to enjoy, the two look like one thing, and they come apart only in the cases where the prediction fails: the achievement that lands flat, the holiday endured rather than enjoyed, the food craved and then merely eaten. Proponents argue the reverse case is just as telling. People enjoy a great deal they never wanted, because they did not know it was available to be wanted. An unfamiliar piece of music, an accidental conversation, a view come upon by chance: these are enjoyed without any prior desire they could be satisfying. Taken together the two cases pull in the same direction. Satisfied desire is neither necessary nor sufficient for pleasure, and what is present in every pleasant episode and absent from every flat one is the enjoyment itself.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that the flat achievement is better explained as a desire which had changed without the person noticing, so what was obtained was no longer what was wanted; the rival account then survives intact. They add that an unexpected pleasure may still satisfy a standing desire the person could not have articulated, such as a general wish for novelty or beauty, which would make the case consistent with desire-satisfaction after all. Others object that the account leaves pleasure unexplained rather than explained: to be told that pleasure is enjoyment is to be given a synonym, and the question of what enjoyment consists in simply reopens the original one.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics argue the flat achievement rarely satisfies the desire that was actually held. What was wanted was usually the standing the achievement would confer or the person it would make one, and neither is delivered by the achievement itself, so the premise misdescribes the case. [Rejecting P2] The claim about undesired pleasures is disputed on the ground that desires need not be specific. A standing appetite for novelty, beauty or company is satisfied by an occasion the person could not have named in advance, which makes the surprise a satisfied want rather than a counterexample. [Rejecting P3] Critics object that the premise secures its conclusion by definition. If enjoyment is simply whatever is present when an episode is pleasant, then saying it is always present is true but empty, and the account has still not said what enjoyment is.