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DEATH AND WELL-BEING

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... Had she not died at this time, she would have maintained a high level of synchronic well-being and died at 118 Even if we did posit some further dimension of well-being, the Chaplin problem would rear its ugly head there as well. 119 To my knowledge, the most explicit statement of this view is found in Bigelow, Campbell, and Pargetter (1990), Section 3. These authors allow that death can also affect synchronic well-being in some cases, though only in cases where the individual has the relevant psychological attitudes about death (see Section 5). ...
... 74-78. 125 Bigelow, Campbell, and Pargetter (1990), p. 121. our interests even if there is no time T at which, because of it, we are worse off at T than we would have been otherwise." ...
... This would explain why some philosophers who pursue the second strategy have targeted it for criticism, often giving little or no discussion of Average. See, for instance,Bigelow, Campbell, and Pargetter (1990) andVelleman (1993). In any case, whatever the motivation, many philosophers have felt the pull of the second source. ...
Article
What is it for something to be good for you? It is for that thing to contribute to the appeal of being in your position or, more informally, ???in your shoes.??? To be in one???s position or shoes in the broadest possible sense is to have that person???s life. Accordingly, something is good or bad for a person in the broadest possible sense if and only if it contributes to or detracts from the appeal of having her life. What, then, is a prudentially good life, or a life that goes well for the one living it? It is an appealing life. More precisely, it is a life such that having it is worthy of appeal, in and of itself. This dissertation is a defense and exploration of this way of understanding prudential value. I call it the "appealing life analysis." In Chapter I, I argue that this analysis fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity, and envy; yields promising analyses of the concepts of well-being, luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice, and paternalism; and succeeds where three rival analyses fail. I also examine how this analysis bears on the relationship between prudence and morality and the debate between subjectivists and objectivists about prudential value. Chapter II draws upon the appealing life analysis to interpret a long-standing puzzle about prudential value and time. I highlight various ways in which this interpretation is informative and moves us closer to a solution to the puzzle. Chapter III provides a preliminary investigation and defense of an ethical theory that I call "prudentialism," which prescribes maximizing the appeal of having one???s own life. On certain conceptions of the appealing life, this theory has the virtue of avoiding the charge of being either too morally demanding or not morally demanding enough. I examine the structure of this theory, sketch a partial, substantive account of the appealing life, and discuss how the prudentialist can respond to various objections.
... Other times, the suggestion is that a thing might impact one's 'lifetime well-being' or 'diachronic well-being' without impacting that individual's 'synchronic well-being' at any time. (These terms are defined in Section 1.) SeeBigelow, Campbell, and Pargetter (1990); Velleman (1993);Glasglow (2013), 666; and Bramble (2014). ...
... See also McMahan (2002), 180, and Portmore(2007), 25-26.15 Bigelow, Campbell, and Pargetter (1990) argue against this view. They make the case that the properties that determine one's mental well-being and physical well-being 'will include a host of relational properties that link the person to events or states, some of which will be at that very same time, but many of which will be at other times' (133-34). ...
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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, something that can be good or bad for us in a way that is not good or bad for us at any particular time. After distinguishing two interpretations of ‘the shape of a life’, I argue that the first type of shape can be good or bad for us at particular moments while the other cannot be good or bad for us at all. This suggests that the shape of a life gives us no reason to posit non-synchronic prudential values.
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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 part defined in terms of unstable attitudes? In this paper, I introduce an ‘attitudinal matrix’ framework that will help us clear up the problems posed by changing attitudes across time. In particular, it will help us see what is at stake, which principles that can or cannot be combined, and what might be the best solution. I defend a very plausible candidate constraint on a solution to the challenge of changing attitudes, which I call ‘diagonalism’. It is argued that among the three main forms of substantive attitude-sensitive wellbeing theories – the attitude-version, the object-version, and the satisfaction-version – it is the satisfaction-version that can both satisfy diagonalism and provide the best account of temporal and lifetime wellbeing.
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In nine lively essays, bioethicist J. David Velleman challenges the prevailing consensus about assisted suicide and reproductive technology, articulating an original approach to the ethics of creating and ending human lives. He argues that assistance in dying is appropriate only at the point where talk of suicide is not, and he raises moral objections to anonymous donor conception. In their place, Velleman champions a morality of valuing personhood over happiness in making end-of-life decisions, and respecting the personhood of future children in making decisions about procreation. These controversial views are defended with philosophical rigor while remaining accessible to the general reader. Written over Velleman's 30 years of undergraduate teaching in bioethics, the essays have never before been collected and made available to a non-academic audience. They will open new lines of debate on issues of intense public interest.
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Chapter
In this chapter, I want to develop a comprehensive theory to account for: (1) the badness of the death event, (2) the badness of premature death, and (3) posthumous harms. For the purpose of this book, I will specifically address the justification of (1).
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I defend a theory of the way in which death is a harm to the person who dies that (i) fits into a larger, unified account of harm (so that death is not a special kind of harm but is harmful in the same way that any harmful event is harmful); and (ii) includes an account of the time of death's harmfulness, one that avoids the implications that death is a timeless harm and that people have levels of welfare at times at which they do not exist. © 2014 University of Southern California and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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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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