The usefulness of well-being temporalism

ABSTRACT

It is an open question whether well-being ought to primarily be understood as a temporal concept or whether it only makes sense to talk about a person’s well-being over their whole lifetime. In this article, I argue that how this principled philosophical disagreement is settled does not have substantive practical implications for well-being science and well-being policy. Trying to measure lifetime well-being directly is extremely challenging as well as unhelpful for guiding well-being public policy, while temporal well-being is both an adequate indirect measure of lifetime well-being, and an adequate focus for the purposes of improving well-being through public policy. Consequently, even if what we ought to care about is lifetime well-being, we should use temporal measures of well-being and focus on temporal well-being policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporal well-being
• lifetime well-being
• well-being measurement
• well-being policy

Acknowledgment

I thank Karen Kovaka, Colleen Malley, Deborah Mayo, Wendy Parker, and Eric Schliesser for helpful comments, as well as audiences at the 2021 International Network for Economic Method Conference, the 2022 Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society Meeting, and at the University of Kansas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Several authors have set out to deny Bramble’s claim that there is no such thing as temporal well-being (Bradley, 2021; Rosati, 2021; Višak, 2021).

2 Bramble does think that that adopting his lifetime well-being view has practical implications for well-being measurement and policy:

Summing up, policy should indeed be aimed at maximising well-being (at least some of the time), and so we need to know how to measure well-being. The fact that only lifetime well-being exists, then, is a critical insight. (Bramble, 2018, pp. 57–8)

3 For a more in-depth discussion of anti-aggregationism, relationism, and narrativism see (Hersch & Weltman, forthcoming).

4 For a detailed discussion of the plausibility of this view see (Hersch & Weltman, forthcoming).

5 For more discussion on this see (Hersch, 2018) and (Alexandrova & Fabian, 2022).

6 The focus of this article is on lifetime well-being in the measurement and policy context, and it does not purport to deny that there are other contexts in which lifetime well-being might be important and useful. It is possible that we might find the value of the concept of lifetime well-being in how it lends itself to ethical investigation, personal prudential decisions, or any other use the concept of well-being is generally used.

7 If we think that posthumous events can affect one’s overall (rather than lifetime) well-being (Bradley, 2009), then it is in principle impossible to measure one’s overall well-being, even after they died, because it is indeterminate whether future events might be relevant to their well-being. Viewing posthumous events this way seems more reasonable once we consider that many of us share the intuition that how good one’s life was depends, at least to some extent on their legacy (Ben-Porath, 2021).

8 This example was chosen because it represents one of the most extreme cases – an intervention moments after a person is born (more extreme would be prenatal interventions).

9 There are other aspects of how we might view lifetime well-being as being more or less adequate for the purposes of well-being science and policy than temporal well-being is, such as the extent to which they allow us to carve up the causes and effects of well-being or discuss well-being as something that increases and decreases as a consequence of various actions and policies, yet going into such depth is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, I take the feedback cycle speed to be at least a crucial, if not decisive reason to prefer focusing on temporal well-being rather than lifetime well-being, and this section is aimed at motivating such a focus.

10 Moreover, there are practical limits to long-term forecasting in general and for public policy in particular (Taleb, 2007; Tetlock & Gardner, 2015).

11 Short term planning need not be viewed as an in principled problem, merely as a pragmatic one. It is possible to find long term policy planning in countries where the political leadership is stable over decades, though these tend to be authoritarian dictatorships.

12 Chang (2004) also touches on the issue of indirect measures when he discusses what he calls the ‘problem of nomic measurement.’ The challenge Chang discusses arises when ‘Quantity X is not directly observable, so we infer it from another quantity Y, which is directly observable’ (59). Nevertheless, Chang does not expand on what he means by direct observation. For a discussion of Chang’s problem of nomic measurement in the context of well-being see (Hersch, forthcoming). See also (Tal, 2013) for a broader discussion on measurement.

13 Kyburg does not take a stand on how good an indirect measure IQ is of intelligence, only that it meets the requirements mentioned bellow. There are many criticisms of IQ as a measure of intelligence (e.g. (Mackintosh, 2011) for a wide variety of reasons, and I also take no stand on its appropriateness here.

14 In Hersch and Weltman (forthcoming), we propose a well-being atomism that can accomplish this.

15 One might draw an analogy to the paradox of hedonism, according to which the only way to attain happiness is to aim at something else:

But I now thought that this end [one's happiness] was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness [… .] Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way [… .] Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. (Mill, 1909, p. 94)

Similarly, in the case of public policy and lifetime well-being – in order to increase lifetime well-being (which is what we truly want) we should aim at increasing temporal well-being (even if this is a vacuous concept).

16 It is not entirely clear that doing so would conflict with Bramble’s position, since he writes that:

It is important to note that my claim here is not that temporal well-being, if it were to exist, could not have normative significance for us. It could have such significance. It is just that this significance could not be intrinsic. It could have normative significance for us only to the extent that it happened to bear on our lifetime well-being. It would not be worth promoting or seeking for its own sake, or independently of any such implications. (Bramble, 2018, p. 15)

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Gil Hersch

Gil Hersch is an Assistant Professor at the Virginia Tech Department of Philosophy and a Core Faculty member at the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Hersch's primary focus is on ethical and methodological questions at the intersection of economics, policy, and business, especially as they relate to happiness and well-being.