 Some consequentialists have hoped that basing their theory of obligation on a “desert-sensitive” theory of intrinsic value will make their theory immune to certain common objections. To get a sense of what these philosophers hope to accomplish we will need a more detailed statement of a theory of intrinsic value. We will make use of the notion of individual welfare, or well-being. Talk of someone’s well-being is talk of how good their life is for them. We may speak of how good someone’s life is at a particular moment, or how good their life is as a whole; our focus here is on welfare-values of entire lives. Let us assume, as is common in discussions of desert, that welfare is a quantitative notion. We can choose a unit for measuring welfare; then for each person there is, relative to that choice of unit, a number that represents how good that person’s life is for them. One simple (non-desert-sensitive) theory of intrinsic value for possible worlds says that the (number representing) the intrinsic value of a world is equal to the sum of the numbers representing the “welfare values” of the lives of the people in that world. 