  Talk of preference, rather than desire, tends to dominate the literature of decision theory. The decision theorist sees human beings as making choices between options, and these choices express preferences among the options. If the human being is rational, her preferences are consistent and allow one to determine the expected utility of any given choice for her. The expected utility of an action, in turn, is the pleasure (or relief from suffering) it can be expected to bring, according to one (mostly older) approach, or is the degree to which the agent would (ideally) be inclined to choose it, according to the other (more modern) approach to utility (see, e.g., Skyrms 1990 for a discussion).