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The shape of a life and the value of loss and gain

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Abstract

We ordinarily think that, keeping all else equal, a life that improves is better than one that declines. However, it has proven challenging to account for such value judgments: some, such as Fred Feldman and Daniel Kahneman, have simply denied that these judgments are rational, while others, such as Douglas Portmore, Michael Slote, and David Velleman, have proposed justifications for the judgments that appear to be incomplete or otherwise problematic. This article identifies problems with existing accounts and suggests a novel alternative theory: what best accounts for our preference for an uphill over a downhill life (and many other episodes) is that losses of momentary value are themselves bad and gains in momentary value are themselves good.

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Notes

  1. If we construe hedonism as a theory that includes an additive principle of lifetime well-being, then rejecting additive theory requires rejecting hedonism. But, in order to allow for the shape of a life to matter to lifetime well-being, the key thing is to avoid an additive theory of lifetime—or more generally inter-momentary, episodic—well-being. Thus hedonism might be retained as the true theory of momentary well-being and combined with some other, non-additive theory of episodic well-being as components in an overall theory of well-being.

  2. Feldman here evaluates a case where the two agents either do not notice or do not care about their life-arcs. Thus he only considers two kinds of cases: those where the people involved experience nothing as a direct result of the different trajectories of their additively equal lives (and which Feldman therefore maintains are equally good lives), and cases where the agents experience the trajectory and as a result have different levels of momentary well-being. This omits cases where the agents might notice and care about the trajectory but nonetheless end up with identical amounts of momentary well-being, which seems to be the kind of case that Velleman asks us to consider.

  3. To say that the slope of an episode matters to episodic well-being is not to deny that other elements of an episode besides either slope or total momentary well-being can also affect its value. Both Brentano (Chisholm 1986, p. 71) and Velleman (2000, p. 59, n. 9), for instance, suggest that variety matters, too, and Velleman also favors intensity. But I am not making any claims, one way or the other, about those other elements; I am only making a claim about the value of slope. (For an examination of the relevance of variety and other factors to a life’s meaningfulness, see Kauppinen forthcoming.) Note that slope is determined not only by the difference between amounts of momentary well-being contained at the zenith and at the nadir but also the rate at which the distance between them is closed. For evidence that the velocity of changes can affect our preferences, see Hsee and Abelson (1991).

  4. It follows from this that we don’t always prefer the uphill when other things are not equal. As Diener et al. (2001, p. 127) observe, surely many people who evaluate narratives of short wonderful lives more highly than narratives of longer lives whose wonder is followed by mere tranquility would, if given the choice to live longer with mild pleasantness or die at the peak, choose to continue on and thereby accept a downhill episode. Again, here the goal is to give reason to our preferences for the uphill in choice-scenarios where all else is equal.

  5. This thesis, that losses and gains themselves affect lifetime well-being, is similar to what is briefly proposed by Beardman (2000, pp. 105–109) and endorsed by Gustafson (2000, p. 114). However, in addition to adding some key elements in the main text, I should note a few important differences between my account and Beardman’s. First, Beardman (2000, p. 103) suggests that values are constituted by desires, but my account makes no commitments as to the constituents of value. Second, Beardman thinks that our preference for shape is rendered not-irrational by virtue of our psychological constraints (p. 106), which is a step I do not take; I only mean to claim that gains are good and losses are bad. Finally and most crucially, while Beardman allies her account with a modified version of Velleman’s narrative account of well-being (p. 108), we will shortly see that we must distinguish Velleman’s account from the Loss/Gain Account.

  6. It might seem that very small or very brief losses and gains of momentary well-being would not affect episodic well-being. I believe that there are such effects, but that they can be so microscopic as to be unnoticeable. If, by contrast, you believe that there is no such effect, you could restrict the Loss/Gain Account so that it merely makes claims about larger or longer gains and losses of momentary well-being. Such a modification does not impact the fundamentals of the Loss/Gain Account.

  7. Slote objects to views that imply that the goods of childhood or senescence are not very good, on the grounds that this evaluation makes the activities we pursue as children or seniors irrational. My view is not committed to denying the rationality of pursuing goods that might be disproportionately pursued in childhood or senescence. All that it is committed to is that shuffleboard and soapbox car victories normally generate less momentary well-being than significant mid-life successes. We can imagine many people for whom tranquil final years spent mastering shuffleboard would constitute the cap to a rational, and uphill, run.

  8. A helpful recent account of meaningfulness that builds in part on (and partly departs from) Velleman’s views, is (Kauppinen, forthcoming).

  9. Kauppinen (forthcoming) also uses cases that are structurally similar to the marriage cases to argue that considerations of narrative meaning matter to well-being. However, like Portmore, he utilizes cases that confound considerations of meaning with considerations of mere timing to show that “temporal ordering of benefits is not what matters” and that meaningfulness is what matters. Kauppinen contrasts a case in which the subject’s life improves in superficial ways due to sheer luck with a person whose life declines but only because it is the result of a failure of noble efforts; he judges that the latter life is better. But this intuition is consistent with timing mattering to well-being, so long as its impact on well-being can be outweighed by the impact of narrative meaningfulness on well-being. The lesson, again, is that showing that narrative considerations matter is not sufficient to show that trajectory does not also matter.

  10. Kamm (2003, p. 223) also critiques Velleman’s Narrative Account on the grounds that some meaningless gains (e.g., winning a lottery after a bad marriage) can be good, and while my argument here dovetails with hers as far as that goes, she also rejects the idea that narrative redemption can explain the value of some upward trajectories. That second step is one that I do not take, as I grant—this was the part that was right in Portmore’s analysis—that narrative structure can add value to a life. Dorsey (2011, p. 177) offers a pair of cases that are meant to operate similarly to the final-year cases, but to the opposite effect that I use the final-year cases. In his thought experiment, though, the two lives are entirely contained in experience machines with opposing trajectories of pleasure. Since the non-veridical nature of these lives might distort our value judgments, the final-year cases seem to be more appropriate tests of our intuitions. Again, though, Dorsey, in his cases, has the opposite intuition that I have and thus rejects the thesis that meaningless gains have value; like every deployment of thought experiments, I hope that the cases I am using will resonate with the reader to at least some degree. It is noteworthy that preferences for the meaningless uphill appear to be widely operational. For instance, in their search for a “preference for happy endings,” Ross and Simonson (1991) presented people with two possible sequences of gains and losses, such as either losing $15 and then winning $85 or winning $85 and then losing $15. Whether the end result was an overall gain (as in the just-mentioned sequences) or an overall loss, 73% responded that the sequence that ends in a gain would make them happier. (For a helpful overview of the vast and fascinating social scientific literature on preferences for the uphill, as well as discussion of other influences on our episode preferences, see Ariely and Carmon (2003); several relevant studies are collected in Kahneman and Tversky (2000a).) Beardman (2000, p. 108) sees this kind of case as containing a “primitive” narrative structure “that a dog could appreciate: it was bad, and it got better.” But this does not capture the kind of narrative that Portmore and Velleman have in mind, as the later events do not affect the meaning of the prior events.

  11. At one point, in passing, Velleman (2000, p. 57, n. 5) renders a similar judgment about a similar case.

  12. For an extended critique of Velleman’s principle, see Bradley (2009, pp. 148–154).

  13. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for making this point.

  14. Note that the claim here is not that non-adjacent hedonic gains and losses matter for episodic well-being while conscious because of the effects these changes have on us when we are aware of them. The principle, instead, is that non-adjacent meaningless gains and losses are episodic-welfare-irrelevant when non-conscious, while they are relevant while conscious (whether or not we are aware of them).

  15. I am grateful to Ben Bradley for raising this case and suggesting the derived principle proposed shortly.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ben Bradley, Dale Dorsey, Antti Kauppinen, Doug Portmore, Dave Shoemaker, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful discussion of previous drafts of this article.

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Correspondence to Joshua Glasgow.

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Glasgow, J. The shape of a life and the value of loss and gain. Philos Stud 162, 665–682 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9788-0

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