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The Significance of a Life’s Shape

Ethics 125 (2):303-330 (2015)

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  1. All’s Well That Ends Well? A new holism about lifetime well-being.Guy Fletcher - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Is there more to how well a life goes overall (its lifetime well-being) than simply the aggregate goodness and badness of its moments (its momentary well-being)? Atomists about lifetime well-being say ‘no’. Holists hold that there is more to lifetime well-being than aggregate momentary well-being (with different holists offering different candidates for what this extra element might be). -/- This paper presents and defends a novel form of holism about lifetime well-being, which I call ‘End of Life’. This is the (...)
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  • Navigating Uncertainty about Sentience.Hayley Clatterbuck & Bob Fischer - 2024 - Ethics 135 (2):229-258.
    Consider the principle that, given two actions A and B, where A affects some number of (merely) possibly sentient individuals (e.g., shrimp) and B affects some number of clearly sentient individuals (e.g., humans), A and B are morally equivalent if their expected values are equivalent. This recently defended principle can have radical implications. This article considers alternatives to this principle that are based on two kinds of risk aversion—difference-making risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. By rejecting the symmetry between probability and (...)
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  • Expectable Outcome Deontology – A New Theory of Life’s Meaning.Markus Rüther - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-29.
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  • Meaning, Purpose, and Narrative.Michael Zhao - forthcoming - Noûs.
    According to many philosophers, "the meaning of life" refers to our cosmic purpose, the activity that we were created by God or a purposive universe to perform. If there is no God or teleology, there is no such thing as the meaning of life. But this need not be the last word on the matter. In this paper, I ask what the benefits provided by a cosmic purpose are, and go on to argue that thinking of our lives in a (...)
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  • Better Life Stories Make Better Lives: A Reply to Berg.Antti Kauppinen - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (6):1507-1521.
    Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best (...)
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  • Critical-Set Views, Biographical Identity, and the Long Term.Elliott Thornley - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Critical-set views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by subtracting some constant from the welfare score of each life in a population. These views are thus sensitive to facts about biographical identity: identity between lives. In this paper, I argue that questions of biographical identity give us reason to reject critical-set views and embrace the total view. I end with a practical implication. If we shift our credences towards the total view, we should also shift our efforts towards ensuring that humanity survives (...)
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  • Papers in Population Ethics.Elliott Thornley - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    This thesis consists of a series of papers in population ethics: a subfield of normative ethics concerned with the distinctive issues that arise in cases where our actions can affect the identities or number of people of who ever exist. Each paper can be read independently of the others. In Chapter 1, I present a dilemma for Archimedean views in population axiology: roughly, those views on which adding enough good lives to a population can make that population better than any (...)
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  • Do Good Lives Make Good Stories?Amy Berg - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (2):637-659.
    Narrativists about well-being claim that our lives go better for us if they make good stories—if they exhibit cohesion, thematic consistency, and narrative arc. Yet narrativism leads to mistaken assessments of well-being: prioritizing narrative makes it harder to balance and change pursuits, pushes us toward one-dimensionality, and can’t make sense of the diversity of good lives. Some ways of softening key narrativist claims mean that the view can’t tell us very much about how to live a good life that we (...)
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  • Future-bias and intuition shifts between moments and lifetimes.Anh-Quân Nguyen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Proponents of temporal neutrality have challenged the intuitive appeal of future-bias: The intuitive appeal of future-bias is limited to a set of isolated cases that involve only hedonic and self-regarding goods and harms. They suggest that we should treat future-bias as irrational in self-regarding hedonic cases too, or at least not treat the intuitive appeal as evidence for future-bias's permissibility, since hedonic and non-hedonic cases are relevantly similar. This paper defends the rationality of future-bias against this concern. Firstly, hedonic goods (...)
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  • The usefulness of well-being temporalism.Gil Hersch - 2022 - Journal of Economic Methodology 30 (4):322-336.
    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 (...)
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  • The View from everywhere: temporal self-experience and the Good Life.Marya Schechtman - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (3):445-458.
    It is a common thought that our experience of self in time plays a crucial role in living a good human life. This idea is seen both in views that say we must think of our lives as temporally extended wholes to live well and those that say living well requires living in the moment. These opposing views share the assumption that a person’s interests must be identified with either a temporally extended or temporally local perspective. David Velleman has argued (...)
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  • (1 other version)Advance directives and the temporal structure of a good life.Lena Stange & Mark Schweda - 2022 - Ethik in der Medizin 34 (2):239-255.
    Definition of the problemAdvance directives involve evaluative assumptions about the further course of one’s life that can be more or less appropriate and thus call for ethical reflection. This contribution focuses on the basis and criteria of such assumptions. We argue that considerations regarding the temporal structure of a good life constitute a particularly relevant perspective in this context.ArgumentsEmpirical studies on the individual composition of advance directives point to the important role of personal values and life plans that can change (...)
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  • What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful lives.Joffrey Fuhrer & Florian Cova - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (3):477-509.
    It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous research have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s theories about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept of a meaningful life by studying people’s third-person attribution of meaningfulness. We draw on hypotheses from the philosophical (...)
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  • (1 other version)Well‐being, part 2: Theories of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Theories of well-being purport to identify the features of lives, and of intervals within lives, in virtue of which some people are high in well-being and others are low in well-being. They also purport to identify the properties that make some events or states of affairs good for a person and other events or states of affairs bad for a person. This article surveys some of the main theories of well-being, with an emphasis on work published since the turn of (...)
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  • Is Humane Slaughter Possible?Heather Browning & Walter Veit - 2020 - Animals 10 (5):799.
    One of the biggest ethical issues in animal agriculture is that of the welfare of animals at the end of their lives, during the process of slaughter. Much work in animal welfare science is focussed on finding humane ways to transport and slaughter animals, to minimise the harm done during this process. In this paper, we take a philosophical look at what it means to perform slaughter humanely, beyond simply reducing pain and suffering during the slaughter process. In particular, we (...)
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  • Prudence and past selves.Dale Dorsey - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (8):1901-1925.
    An important platitude about prudential rationality is that I should not refuse to sacrifice a smaller amount of present welfare for the sake of larger future benefits. I ought, in other words, to treat my present and future as of equal prudential significance. The demands of prudence are less clear, however, when it comes to one’s past selves. In this paper, I argue that past benefits are possible in two ways, and that this fact cannot be easily accommodated by traditional (...)
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  • Narrative, Self-Realization, and the Shape of a Life.Samuel Clark - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (2):371-385.
    Velleman, MacIntyre, and others have argued for the compositional view that lives can be other than equally good for the person who lives them even though they contain all and only the same moments, and that this is explained by their narrative structure. I argue instead for explanation by self-realization, partly by interpreting Siegfried Sassoon’s exemplary life-narrative. I decide between the two explanations by distinguishing the various features of the radial concept of narrative, and showing, for each, either that self-realization (...)
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  • A Good Death.Dale Dorsey - 2017 - Utilitas 29 (2):153-174.
    Largely in response to Epicurus’ famous challenge, philosophers have been quite imaginative in coming up with ways in which death is bad. Most often, death is described as an instrumental bad. Given that I would have obtained additional welfare benefits had I not died when I did, my death causes me to miss out on intrinsic goods I might otherwise have obtained. In this article, however, I argue that the standard account (and its corollaries) misses an important feature of the (...)
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  • The Passing of Temporal Well-Being.Ben Bramble - 2017 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    The philosophical study of well-being concerns what makes lives good for their subjects. It is now standard among philosophers to distinguish between two kinds of well-being: - lifetime well-being, i.e., how good a person's life was for him or her considered as a whole, and - temporal well-being, i.e., how well off someone was, or how they fared, at a particular moment in time or over a period of time longer than a moment but shorter than a whole life, say, (...)
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  • Atomism and Holism in the Philosophy of Well-being.Jason R. Raibley - 2015 - In Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. New York,: Routledge.
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  • The importance of end-of-life welfare.Heather Browning & Walter Veit - 2022 - Animal Frontiers 12 (1):8–15.
    The conditions of transport and slaughter at the end of their lives are a major challenge to the welfare of agricultural animals. • End-of-life experiences should be of a greater ethical concern than others of similar intensity and duration, due to their position in the animal’s life. • End-of-life welfare can have both internal importance to the animals and external ethical importance to human decision-makers. • We should pay extra care to ensure that the conditions during transport and slaughter are (...)
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  • Wellbeing and Changing Attitudes Across Time.Krister Bykvist - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (3):429-443.
    The fact that our attitudes change poses well-known challenges for attitude-sensitive wellbeing theories. Suppose that in the past you favoured your adventurous youthful life more than the quiet and unassuming life you expected to live as an old person; now when you look back you favour your current life more than your youthful past life. Which period of your life is better for you? More generally, how can we find a stable attitude-sensitive standard of wellbeing, if the standard is in (...)
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  • A new well‐being atomism.Gil Hersch & Daniel Weltman - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):3-23.
    Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a (...)
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  • (1 other version)Well‐being, part 1: The concept of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2022.
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  • The good of today depends not on the good of tomorrow: a constraint on theories of well-being.Owen C. King - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (8):2365-2380.
    This article addresses three questions about well-being. First, is well-being future-sensitive? I.e., can present well-being depend on future events? Second, is well-being recursively dependent? I.e., can present well-being depend on itself? Third, can present and future well-being be interdependent? The third question combines the first two, in the sense that a yes to it is equivalent to yeses to both the first and second. To do justice to the diverse ways we contemplate well-being, I consider our thought and discourse about (...)
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  • The Shape of a Life and Desire Satisfaction.Donald W. Bruckner - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (2):661-680.
    It is widely accepted by philosophers of well‐being that the shape or narrative structure of a life is a significant determinant of its overall welfare value. Most arguments for this thesis posit agent‐independent value in certain life shapes. The desire theory of well‐being, I argue, has all of the resources needed to account for the value that many philosophers have identified in lives with certain shapes. The theory denies that there is any agent‐independent value in shapes and, indeed, allows that (...)
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  • Pulling Apart Well-Being at a Time and the Goodness of a Life.Owen C. King - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5:349-370.
    This article argues that a person’s well-being at a time and the goodness of her life are two distinct values. It is commonly accepted as platitudinous that well-being is what makes a life good for the person who lives it. Even philosophers who distinguish between well-being at a time and the goodness of a life still typically assume that increasing a person’s well-being at some particular moment, all else equal, necessarily improves her life on the whole. I develop a precise (...)
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  • When the Shape of a Life Matters.Stephen M. Campbell - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (3): 565-75.
    It seems better to have a life that begins poorly and ends well than a life that begins well and ends poorly. One possible explanation is that the very shape of a life can be good or bad for us. If so, this raises a tough question: when can the shape of our lives be good or bad for us? In this essay, I present and critique an argument that the shape of a life is a non-synchronic prudential value—that is, (...)
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  • Zwischen Bagatellisierung und Pathologisierung: Gesundheitsversorgung im Alter und die Zeitstruktur guten Lebens.Mark Schweda, Eva Hummers & Evelyn Kleinert - 2023 - Ethik in der Medizin 35 (1):77-91.
    Zusammenfassung Steigende Lebenserwartung, sozialer Wandel und medizinische Innovationen fordern traditionelle Sichtweisen auf das Alter(n) heraus. Was einst als eine „normale“ Alterserscheinung galt, wird heute im Lichte veränderter Lebensentwürfe und neuartiger Interventionsmöglichkeiten oft schon als Erkrankung aufgefasst und behandelt. Altersbezogene Gesundheitsstandards und Behandlungsziele geraten in Bewegung. Es eröffnet sich ein Spannungsfeld zwischen Bagatellisierung und Pathologisierung von Alterungsprozessen, das der ethischen Reflexion bedarf. Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, wie individuelle und gesellschaftliche Vorstellungen des Alter(n)s im Kontext der modernen Medizin ethisch zu (...)
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  • Being “in-tact” and well: metaphysical and phenomenological annotations on temporal well-being.Norman Sieroka - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (3):413-428.
    Well-being depends not only on _what_ happens but also on _when_ it happens. There are temporal aspects of well-being, and to a large extent those aspects are about relative timing—about being “in-tact.” On the one hand, there is a perspectival aspect about being in-tact with one’s past, present, and future or, in a less involved sense, with one’s life as a whole. On the other hand, there is a synchronization aspect of being in-tact; and this aspect occurs on different levels: (...)
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  • Growth and the Shape of a Life.Ian D. Dunkle - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3):581-605.
    Why does it seem better to be a pauper who becomes a king rather than a king who becomes a pauper even when each life contains an equivalent sum of goods to the other? Many argue that only the pauper-to-king life can be told as a redemption story and that it is good for you to live a redemption story. This paper calls that explanation into question and proposes an alternative: upward-trending lives reveal growth. I argue that growth is a (...)
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  • Is it unjust that elderly people suffer from poorer health than young people? Distributive and relational egalitarianism on age-based health inequalities.Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen - 2019 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 18 (2):145-164.
    In any normal population, health is unequally distributed across different age groups. Are such age-based health inequalities unjust? A divide has recently developed within egalitarian theories of...
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  • (1 other version)Gesundheitliche Vorausverfügungen und die Zeitstruktur guten Lebens.Lena Stange & Mark Schweda - 2022 - Ethik in der Medizin 34 (2):239-255.
    Patientenverfügungen und andere Arten gesundheitlicher Vorausverfügungen wie Advance Care Planning und in gewisser Hinsicht auch Vorsorgevollmachten und Betreuungsverfügungen schließen evaluativ gehaltvolle Annahmen und Werturteile über den weiteren Verlauf des eigenen Lebens ein, die sich als mehr oder weniger angemessen erweisen können und daher einer ethischen Klärung und Reflexion bedürfen. Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach den Grundlagen dieser Annahmen und Urteile nach und argumentiert, dass für ihre Analyse eine strebensethische Perspektive auf Vorstellungen eines guten Lebens in der Zeit besonders geeignet (...)
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  • Self‐Authorship and the Claim Against Interference.Ryan W. Davis - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (2):220-242.
    We can imagine agents who would have the moral status to demand contractualist justification but still lack an especially strong claim against interference. In contrast, agents who can conceive of their lives in a temporally unified way have a distinctive, strong interest in non‐interference. This contrast helps illuminate the moral importance of self‐authorship. The upshot is that ordinary persons have a more general and less variable right against interference than is often supposed. Self‐authorship can also help appreciate the sense in (...)
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