Abstract

Adaptive Preference

Martha Nussbaum argues that preference welfarism, the doctrine that a person's good consists in the satisfaction of her informed desires, fails to explain our intuitions in cases of "adaptive preference," where the preferences of individuals in deprived circumstances are formed in response to their restricted options. Intuitively, it is better for individuals to get what they want than to adjust their wants to be satisfied by what they can get. Preference welfarism however cannot mark this difference as morally significant.

I argue that given a reasonable account of preference as it figures in utilitarian accounts, cases of the sort she describes are not examples of adaptive preference and do not undermine the preference utilitarian's account of what is good for people. The problem is not, as Nussbaum suggests, that the preferences of deprived individuals have been "distorted" but rather that they are not satisfied.