Jacques Lacan has a word for what you’re talking about; it’s called ‘jouissance,’ by which he means a special kind of self-impeding enjoyment. It’s supposed to sound a bit raunchy in French, as ‘jouir’ would be a slangy way to speak of having an orgasm. The term names an excessive enjoyment ‘beyond’ what Freud called the pleasure principle, that quasi-utilitarian logic according to which people economize and maximize pleasure. Lacan would say that the pleasure principle is operated by the law (and is therefore an Oedipalized enjoyment), which enjoins the subject to “enjoy, but only as little as possible.” He’s interested in the (radical?) possibilities of more extreme kinds of pleasure, unregulated by this kind of economizing tendency.

It’s a nice way to think about obsessive behavior or the enjoyment of “unpleasant” activities or cultural forms like tragic drama or sado-masochism or Igor Stravinsky, etc.

A famous anecdote which I tell my students when I teach this stuff: Lacan is in Baltimore in 1966 to attend the famous structuralism conference at Johns Hopkins. An American academic has picked him up at the airport, as one does, and as they are driving into the city, Lacan asks him about a Coca-Cola billboard. What does that mean, ‘Enjoy Coke?’ The American explains, briefly, in French. Lacan is quiet for a moment and then says: “this ‘enjoy’ is not my ‘jouir’.”

Chris Bertram says: “In fact we can rule those out by stipulating that I’m rational, fully-informed”. I don’t believe that people are rational. Even those who may seem rational on the surface are a mass of conflicting irrational desires below the facade. But it’s just a stipulation, ok. Turning to the sport example: “the probability of winning must itself be uncertain if I’m to get the necessary satisfaction.” I take to mean an upset win where an underdog defeats a stronger team. The win is a surprise that we didn’t see coming. Sort of like the structure of a joke where the punch line is unexpected. Jokes aren’t very funny if you know the punch line in advance.

I can see how that might relate to having children. They are very expensive, stressful and an emotional drain. But in the end many people feel that children are worth it. If one analyzed the prospect of having kids rationally I suppose no one would have any. The payoff is further down the line and not immediately apparent. It isn’t so much a surprise as a deeper satisfaction. Our internal reward system has differing weights. Your child saying “I love you” seems to cancel out a lot of sleepless nights.

RB - I should have made it clear that I was thinking of the extreme, sorry.

Wouldn’t risky behavior fall under “wanting not to get what you want”? Or perhaps one could say there is a dynamic tension between what I really want and what I say I want. Our conscious desires are not the whole story.

Yes, the point was to question the importance of preference-satisfaction in an account of an ndividual’s good. It can’t be to eliminate it entirely, if it’s relevant to one’s good to have desires about events after one’s death or about situations one can’t know about fulfilled. But I think many self-styled preference-theorists are, at bottom, in large part hedonists. Think of the key examples motivating informed-desire theories: they’re ones where you won’t get felt satisfaction or pleasure from the thing you now desire, and wouldn’t desire it now if you knew that. So what’s really driving the argument is a concern with self-satisfaction.

Btw, last time I looked Dick Arneson had an objective account of the good (yay!).

The trick here is in knowing what you want. It’s often preferable not be aware of what that is.

One way to generalize this might be to say that I have a desire not to get food poisoning, but that I also want the freedom to have other desires that might contradict that one. However, I don’t think this quite gets at what I mean.