Imagine Jim is preparing to move and is selling his home. Imagine further that he lists his house at a price which, while perhaps not the maximum amount for which he could sell it, would be nevertheless be sufficient and satisfactory. Is this decision irrational? Is his ability to be satisfied with less than the most money he could potentially get for his house irrational?

If you can answer those questions in the negative, you subscribe to the possibility of what philosophers and economists sometimes call rational individual satisficing, that is, the idea that it is possible for a rational individual to simply have modest desires.

In the moral domain, the philosopher Michael Slote offers the following example:

A medic attending the wounded on the battlefield may attend to the first (sufficiently) badly wounded person he sees without considering whether there may be someone in even worse shape nearby, and from a common-sense moral standpoint such behavior seems perfectly acceptable.

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John Stuart Mill was an early and influential proponent of utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism that is classically concerned with maximizing happiness. What this means is that a course of action is considered good by utilitarian standards if its consequences provide more happiness for all the people they affect that would any other available alternative courses of action.^*

Who wouldn't want that, right? But the devil's always been in the details for utilitarianism, and this is complicated by a set of prior commitments that come with a design engagement.

Since that's what we care about here, I'll just talk about a long-standing problem for utilitarianism that's particularly relevant under the auspices of design. Namely, utilitarianism's seeming inability to account for personal projects.

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