Reflective blindness, depression and unpleasant experiences
Abstract This paper defends a ‘Desire Account’ of unpleasant experiences. That is, it defends the claim that what makes an experience unpleasant is the subject non-derivatively desiring for that experience to stop. It defends the account by addressing one of its most prominent counterexamples: subjects who experience depression. A proper understanding of depression and its symptoms reveals two important mistakes that philosophers make about it. The first mistake is that depressed subjects need always have a low mood, the second is a conflation of two of depression’s most paradigmatic symptoms: depressed mood and anhedonia. This paper corrects these mistakes, and does so in a way that both demonstrates support for the Desire Account and teaches us lessons more generally about the way we treat the example of depression in meta-ethics.