The same event is pleasant or not depending only on whether it was wanted

The argument

If pleasure were a property of events, the same event would be pleasant for everyone who underwent it. Proponents of this account point out that it plainly is not. A long afternoon of rain delights the gardener and ruins the picnic; a crowded room is a pleasure to one guest and an ordeal to the next; silence is restful or unbearable depending on who is sitting in it. The events are identical. What varies is what the person wanted. The mechanism proponents identify is straightforward once stated. Pleasure on this account is not a thing added to an experience but a relation between the experience and the person having it, namely that the experience gives them what they were after. This explains the variation without needing a separate story for each case, and it explains the direction of the variation too: the better the fit between what arrived and what was wanted, the greater the pleasure, which is why a long-held wish met exactly is more pleasant than a passing whim indulged. Proponents argue the account also handles the awkward cases that defeat simpler ones. Bitter food, cold water, hard exercise and frightening stories are all unpleasant in themselves and reliably pleasant to people who want them, and the wanting is the only feature those people share. An account that makes pleasure a quality of the sensation has to treat each of these as an exception. An account that makes it the satisfaction of desire treats them as the rule, and predicts in advance which people will find them pleasant: the ones who were looking for them.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue the account mistakes a correlation for an identity. Wanting something certainly makes it likelier to please, because people generally want what pleases them, but that explains the correlation in the opposite direction and leaves pleasure as the prior thing. They add that satisfied desires routinely fail to please, which an identity claim cannot allow: the ambition achieved and immediately hollow is a common enough experience to count against the account rather than as a stray exception. Others object that the account cannot handle pleasures nobody wanted in advance, such as an unexpected kindness or a surprise that could not have been desired because it was not imagined.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics accept the variation and deny the inference. Properties can be relational without being desires: a joke is funny to those who understand it and a view beautiful to those who can see, and in neither case is the variation explained by what the person wanted. [Rejecting P2] The claim that pleasure tracks the fit with the want is disputed as unfalsifiable in practice. Where the fit is good and no pleasure follows, the want is redescribed as having been other than it seemed, which means no outcome could count against the premise. [Rejecting P3] Critics argue the hard cases are better explained by acquired taste than by desire. People come to find bitter food and hard exercise agreeable in themselves through exposure, which is why they then want them, so the wanting is the consequence rather than the cause.