In order to start up a group we need five members. Members are responsible for a $25 membership fee and should plan to attend the required one meeting a year. A PST chapter is expected, but not required to sponsor or co-sponsor events, which TUPS will gladly team up with! Students who want to be members of PST but either do not meeting the eligibiliity requirement or do not wish to pay the dues are welcome to join as associate members–which is still quite the honor!

For those of you interested in publishing your work, PST also has a journal it publishes twice a year which would be a great way to expose students to academic writing. Book reviews, as well as articles, are welcome.

Each PST must have a president, vice president, secretary and treasurer in addition to our faculty advisor.

PST is open to majors, minors, non-majors, undergraduate and graduate students who meet the following eligibility status: students must have completed three semesters of college courses, rank in the upper 35% of their class and have completed or are registered in at least two semester courses in philosophy with a mean overall grade which is greater than the second highest grade on the working scale.

I hope you guys are as excited as I am about getting this started–I’m happy to get as much as the leg work completed as possible. If you are interested in being a member (which, hopefully you all are!) and/or if you are interested in running for office please contact me back ASAP!

Phi Simga Tau would offer an added distinction and competitive edge to the Philosophy department as it offers students who have enjoyed and performed well in the philosophy department the opportunity to be rewarded for their academic achievements; let us not let this opportunity pass by

If you are interested please email tuphilosophysoceity@gmail.com! If you feel comfortable leaving your name and temple email in the comments you’re free to do that as well!

Cheers!

Changing Desires as a problem for Desire Satisfaction Theory of Welfare. Essentially desire satisfaction theory of welfare says what matters in the evaluation of whether a person lived a good life or not is the desires satisfied outnumbers the desires unsatisfied.

Objections to this theory include the problem of changing desires or what to do when a person’s preferences change. Here is an example:

At age forty your employer asks you to choose between the following two options maintaining your present salary and retirement benefits or opting for a lower salary with greater retirement benefits. Option for 1 will give you a higher standard of living for the next twenty-five years. Choosing 2 will enable you to retire comfortably at age sixty.

If you choose 1 you will not be able to retire until you are sixty-eight. You know all the facts and your preference is rational. You will live to be eighty and you know this, so you should prefer 1 to 2.

If you choose 1 then when you become sixty you will regret having chosen 1 when you were forty. If you choose 2 then for the next twenty years you will regret having chosen 2.

How should you weigh the different preferences that you have at difference times?

A certain sort of response to this gives absolute weight to the preferences a person as a the time s/he acts (Overvold’s theory). Welfare then is best promoted by what the ideal preferences are at the time of choice—in this case it depends on my present ideal preferences.

This theory though gives heavy weight o the present time of action and can still cause tensions with previous desires and can cause constant regret.

According to Carson, the objection of changing desires applies only a more conventional theory of rationality or full-information theory is used. This means that idealized self desires at one time can conflict with what is desired at some other time. Carson’s response is as follows:

A rational individual might prefer X at Y but then a t2 one might prefer Y to X.  In determining one’s welfare or the value of one’s life the rational preferences that one has at one time are no more or less important those that one has at any other time. Assuming that e preferred version of the desire satisfaction theory is a global rather than summative theory we should view my choice between X and Y as a choice between the life I will have if I choose X and the life I will have if I choose Y.

Suppose that my ideal global preferences with respect to X and Y change; at some times my ideally rational self prefers the life in which I choose X at other times my ideally rational self prefers the life in which I choose Y. Other things equal, if my ideal preference for life I will have if I choose X over Y is stronger than my ideal preference for the life I will have if I choose Y over X then I’m better of choosing X. Other things equal, if there are more times when my ideal self would prefer X to Y than Y to X then I am better off choosing X.

Did Carson solve the problem of changing desires?

Note: I do not claim any original thought in this–most, if not all, is directly lifted from the Carson reading (see cite).

Work Cited
Carson, Thomas. Value and the Good Life. University of Notre Dame Press: 2000.

David Shuttleworth
The Nature of Multidisciplinary Studyand Philosophy

and

Special Temple University Guest Speaker.

All are welcome to attend.
Refreshments, pizza and tomato pie will be served.

This is the second in a series of monthly lectures hosted by the recently reanimated Temple Undergraduate Philosophy Society.

TUPS

The Philosophers’ Carnival is a project which “aims to showcase the best philosophical posts from a wide range of weblogs.”

We look forward to continuing to keeping an open community at Temple.

Until Later,

TUPS