ABSTRACT
Adaptive preferences are present when people perpetuate, or content themselves with, their own oppression and deprivation. Such preferences pose problems for approaches to development that take people’s own values and judgments as providing important information about what would improve their lives. Two debates about adaptive preference are discussed in this chapter. The first is about whether adaptive preferences should be defined as deficits in autonomy or well-being. I claim that defining adaptive preferences as autonomy deficits is especially likely to promote discounting of the first-person perspectives of the deprived and suggest that it is possible to define adaptive preferences with reference to a concept of well-being that allows for cultural variation in conceptions of the good life.
The second debate is about whether and how the concept of adaptive preference encourages unjustified paternalistic intervention in people’s lives. I discuss claims that what appear to be adaptive preferences are actually just culturally different conceptions of the good-life or self-interested welfare-maximizing responses to bad conditions. I argue that an acceptable theory of adaptive preference must take the risk of such confusions seriously and can do so by attending to structural barriers and the epistemic difficulties of cross-cultural moral judgments, as well as by assuming that people generally desire their own flourishing. I also discuss relationships between adaptive preference and adjacent concepts such as false consciousness, internalized oppression, and diminished agency.
