Gil Hersch Publishes on The Usefulness of Well-Being Temporalism

Gil Hersch, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and PPE Core Faculty member, published an article with the title, “The Usefulness of Well-being Temporalism.” The article appeared in the Journal of Economic Methodology.

Here is a link to the article and abstract. It is an open question whether well-being ought to primarily be understood as a temporal concept or whether it only makes sense to talk about a person’s well-being over their whole lifetime. In this article, I argue that how this principled philosophical disagreement is settled does not have substantive practical implications for well-being science and well-being policy. Trying to measure lifetime well-being directly is extremely challenging as well as unhelpful for guiding well-being public policy, while temporal well-being is both an adequate indirect measure of lifetime well-being, and an adequate focus for the purposes of improving well-being through public policy. Consequently, even if what we ought to care about is lifetime well-being, we should use temporal measures of well-being and focus on temporal well-being policies.