Welfare and felt duration
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 14-2023
How should we understand the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, insofar as its duration modulates how good or bad the experience is overall? Given that we seem able to distinguish between subjective and objective duration and that how well or badly someone’s life goes is naturally thought of as something to be assessed from her own perspective, it seems intuitive that it is subjective duration that modulates how good or bad an experience is from the perspective of an individual’s welfare. However, I argue that we know of no way to make sense of what subjective duration consists in on which this claim turns out to be plausible. Moreover, some plausible theories of what subjective duration consists in strongly suggest that subjective duration is irrelevant in itself.
Other working papers
The Hinge of History Hypothesis: Reply to MacAskill – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Some believe that the current era is uniquely important with respect to how well the rest of human history goes. Following Parfit, call this the Hinge of History Hypothesis. Recently, MacAskill has argued that our era is actually very unlikely to be especially influential in the way asserted by the Hinge of History Hypothesis. I respond to MacAskill, pointing to important unresolved ambiguities in his proposed definition of what it means for a time to be influential and criticizing the two arguments…
A paradox for tiny probabilities and enormous values – Nick Beckstead (Open Philanthropy Project) and Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
We show that every theory of the value of uncertain prospects must have one of three unpalatable properties. Reckless theories recommend risking arbitrarily great gains at arbitrarily long odds for the sake of enormous potential; timid theories recommend passing up arbitrarily great gains to prevent a tiny increase in risk; nontransitive theories deny the principle that, if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A must be better than C.
Are we living at the hinge of history? – William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
In the final pages of On What Matters, Volume II, Derek Parfit comments: ‘We live during the hinge of history… If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period… What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history.’ This passage echoes Parfit’s comment, in Reasons and Persons, that ‘the next few centuries will be the most important in human history’. …