Wanting, Liking, Being Pleased

If you were running an organization, would you spend money to reward deeds that your employees are already motivated to perform? Is a special incentive bonus appropriate to induce people to visit Paris in the spring? Sounds like a waste of your money. There could be complex reasons for rewarding people for doing what they enjoy doing anyway, but prima facie it makes no sense.

This simple observation points to a complexity in motivational attitudes that not many ethicists and aestheticians fully take on board. Take the difference between wanting and liking. When you are hungry, you want to eat. But it’s also the case that you enjoy or enjoy eating (at least, when you are hungry). Wanting is a motive that causes you to eat. Liking is a reward for eating.

But wait a minute . . .

. . . given that you were hungry, you were already going to eat. You wanted to. What’s the point of rewarding you with the enjoyment generated by liking the food—rewarding you for doing something that you were already going to do? What role does liking to eat play in your psychic economy? Why are organisms constructed with this seeming duplication of function? And are animals like dogs as strongly bifurcated as humans are in this respect? Do they both want to eat and like eating?

This puzzle is somewhat masked by any approach to liking that connects it analytically to wanting. The relationship between wanting and liking is, of course, not mutual entailment: it is conceivable that you want something you don’t like and vice versa. Nonetheless, wanting and liking could be parts of a logically connected web of concepts. Thus, it might odd or require special explanation when you want something that you don’t like, or vice versa. If so, the puzzle articulated in the previous paragraph would be suspect. The claim would be that describing a person as wanting food is closely connected with describing her as liking food when she gets it. These descriptions are not discrete and unconnected in the way that would allow you to say, without logical discomfort, that pleasure in eating is supererogatory with respect to being motivated to eat.

Ryle was attracted by a logical web view. He says, quite rightly, that enjoying a game of golf is being reluctant to stop. This puts pleasure in its right place: it arises after one has begun the game of golf, and is not the motive that led one to play in the first place. But then he overstates his position:

to enjoy doing something, to want to do it and not to want to do anything else are different ways of phrasing the same thing.

This suggests that one could enjoy the game of golf before one started to play (since one wants to play before one starts to play).

Ryle thinks that pleasure is sometimes not simply wanting to continue an activity, but a “mood signifying an agitation”—a thrill of delight, as he puts it. It cannot be a sensation, he says, because one can always ask whether one enjoyed a joke or the feeling it produced. But it makes no sense to ask if pleasure gives one pleasure. So, he suggests, pleasure is not a discrete “feeling”—not even pleasure of the "thrill of delight" kind—but simply a pro-attitude of a certain type.

Neuroscience seems to go in a different direction than Ryle, at least in the case of what one might call “elemental” motivations, such as hunger, thirst, and sexual arousal. For science (and here the leader is Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan) suggests that wanting—the psychological condition in which one is motivated to eat or drink or mate—is the product of a system driven by dopamine. By contrast, liking or being pleased— the condition in which one is reluctant to stop eating, drinking or mating—is driven by opioids. The two states are, additionally, mediated by different receptors.

This sharpens the puzzle recounted earlier. Let’s suppose that hunger is triggered by some sort of nutritional deficit. This gets you to eat. After a while, satiation occurs. Not only does the dopamine triggered wanting drive cease to operate, but also a stop reaction kicks in. These two reactions are jointly sufficient for generating the desired behaviour, and for modulating it. Why do we need an “I am enjoying it” response in addition? On the evidence that I am citing, this is not just a question about a logically entwined response. It has to do with a whole other motivational system.

Of course, not all pleasure and not all drives are elemental. What is true of extremely basic appetites may not be true of very sophisticated motivations. Hunger and sex are hormonally mediated. The same is presumably not true of my desire to lose myself in a good novel when I get home from work, or the enjoyment I hope to get from it. Perhaps Ryle and the logical web idea are right about these pleasures, and the neuroscientists are right only about the elemental pleasures.

But this raises yet another fascinating question. How are sophisticated intellectual pleasures of the mind related to the elemental pleasures? When I say I want to read a book and take pleasure in doing so, am I talking about a motivational system completely discrete from, and even structurally different from the hunger drive and pleasure in eating?