Desire, Reward, Feeling: Commentary on Three Faces of Desire

The three faces of desire are, in a nutshell, that desires are motivating, that satisfying desires is usually pleasurable, and that desires determine what will count as rewards and punishments. Schroeder's view of how these knit together goes like this. Pleasure and displeasure are a result of desires so cannot be what desire consists in. We can desire without being motivated and vice-versa; this double dissociation entails that providing motivation cannot be what desire consists in, either. That leaves the link to rewards and punishments. Schroeder maintains that, because it is the reward system in the brain that determines what is pleasurable and what is motivating, “desires are realized . . . by the biological reward system” (p. 37). As he says in the crucial fifth chapter, “to desire is to be so organized that tokened representations of . . . well-being, if they occur, will contribute to the production of reward signals”(p. 134). More generally, determining what will count as rewards and punishments is “the essence of desire” (p. 178). Even more generally, what a desire is is determined by what it does.