Abstract
Sometimes people desire that their lives go badly, take pleasure in their lives going badly, or believe that their lives are going badly. As a result, some popular theories of welfare are paradoxical. I show that no attempt to defend those theories from the paradox fully succeeds.
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Acknowledgement
Thanks to Jordan Dodd and Matt Skene for their comments in my seminar on intrinsic value at Syracuse University in Spring 2005; thanks to JC Beall, Campbell Brown, Richard Chappell, James Dreier, Fred Feldman, Chris Heathwood, Mark Lukas, Kris McDaniel, Nishi Shah, David Sobel, Jussi Suikkanen, and Scott Wilson for helpful comments and discussion. Some of their comments can be found at <http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2005/03/paradoxes_of_de.html# comments>. Thanks also to a number of anonymous referees who made extremely helpful and detailed comments.