The Passing of Temporal Well-Being

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 (momentary well-being) or over a period of time longer than a moment but shorter than a whole life, say, a day, month, year, or chapter of a life (periodic well-being). Many theories have been offered of each of these kinds of well-being. A common view is that lifetime well-being is in some way constructed out of temporal well-being. This book argues that much of this literature is premised on a mistake. Lifetime well-being cannot be constructed out of temporal well-being, because there is no such thing as temporal well-being. The only genuine kind of well-being is lifetime well-being. The Passing of Temporal Well-Being will prove essential reading for professional philosophers, especially in moral and political philosophy. It will also be of interest to welfare economists and policy-makers who appeal to well-being

Introduction 1.1. The Thesis 1.2. My Target The Normative Significance Argument 2.1. The Argument 2.2. Seven Arguments for SSLW 2.3. Seven Objections to SSLW 2.4. An Objection to SNOG 2.5 The Composition Objection The No Credible Theory Argument 3.1. The Argument 3.2. Hedonism 3.3. Objective-List Theories 3.4. Desire-Based Theories Six Objections 4.1 The Construction Objection 4.2 The Value For Us of Events Objection 4.3 The Meaningless Concept Objection 4.4 The Ubiquity Objection 4.5 The Vindication Objection 4.6 A Life Worth Living Conclusion and Implications Index

Ben Bramble is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.