Welfare and felt duration

Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

GPI Working Paper No. 14-2023

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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 freedom of future people – Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)

What happens to liberal political philosophy, if we consider not only the freedom of present but also future people? In this article, I explore the case for long-term liberalism: freedom should be a central goal, and we should often be particularly concerned with effects on long-term future distributions of freedom. I provide three arguments. First, liberals should be long-term liberals: liberal arguments to value freedom give us reason to be (particularly) concerned with future freedom…

Can an evidentialist be risk-averse? – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent – that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. …