How to Resist Bramble's Arguments against Temporal Well-being?

2021

When I say that I am better off today than I was two weeks ago, I make a claim about my well-being at particular points in time, or at timespans that are shorter than my life as a whole. Thus, I talk about temporal wellbeing. Ben Bramble (2018) argues that there is no such thing as temporal well-being. He says it’s okay for us to keep talking that way, but we should keep in mind that welfare at a time—say a day, a week or a year—doesn’t really exist. Bramble suggests that most normal people wouldn’t assume the existence of temporal welfare; it’s mainly philosophers who make this mistake. I am highly suspicious about this empirical statement, since I hear non-philosophers talk about temporal well-being quite frequently. Bramble doesn’t present any support for his empirical claim, and I’m not going to discuss it any further here. Instead, I’m going to evaluate and reject his ontological claim that there is no such thing as temporal welfare. What, then, are Bramble’s arguments against ...

We commonly make judgments about people’s well-being, welfare, or quality of life: how well or badly things are going for them, or how good or bad their lives or parts thereof are on balance—not in some impersonal or absolute sense, but for them. Many of these judgments assume that things can go well or badly for a person at particular times and get better or worse for her over time: a person’s well-being can, for example, decrease with the onset of an illness and increase when she recovers, so that things go worse for her during the illness than they do before or after. Because well-being is a temporal phenomenon, philosophical theories of it should do more than explain what makes entire lives go well for the people living them. They should also explain (i) in virtue of what people have the amounts of well-being that they do at particular times and (ii) how a person’s lifetime amount of well-being is related to how well off she is at different times. I will consider how the main theories of well-being might approach the first task before turning, near the end of the article, to the second.

The present article aims to provide evidence to advance in the comprehension of the multiple relationships between temporality and wellbeing by exploring the relationship between time perspectives and subjective wellbeing in Chile. In so doing, it presents a critical stand of the current operationalisations of the 'balanced time perspective' (BTP). This article supports the theoretical premise that individuals' time perspectives possess a contextual nature and that the BTP is socially relative. As a result, the article proposes a novel method to define and operationalise BTP. Using data from the United Nations Development Programme's 2011 Human Development Survey for Chile (N = 2,535), an empirical analysis is carried out on the relationship between time perspectives and vital satisfaction, positive affects, negative affects and depressive symptomatology scales. The results show that in Chile a negative orientation towards the past exerts the most significant effect on subjective wellbeing and malaise, and the time perspective which most favours subjective wellbeing in Chilean society is that in which there is a low orientation towards Present and Past-Negative, a high orientation towards Past-Positive, and a medium orientation towards Future. This relationship between time perspectives and subjective wellbeing constitutes an advance in the study of the subjective dimension of temporality in Chile, and contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussions on time perspectives on an international level.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1991

Beyond Price

A person can fare well either over an extended period or at a particular moment. We evaluate how well a person fares over an extended period when we speak of him as having a good day, a good year, or a good life, or when we speak of such a period as going well for him. We evaluate how a person fares at a particular moment when we say that he is doing well just then. We favor different idioms in these two kinds of evaluation: we are more inclined to speak of a person as having a good life than as having a good moment; and, conversely, we are more inclined to use the terms 'welfare' or 'well-being' to express how well things are going for him at a particular moment than to evaluate how well his life goes as a whole. Nevertheless, evaluations of both kinds are judgments of relational value-of what's good for the person or good in relation to his interests-and so they are both judgments of the person's welfare. 2

In the first part of this paper, we revisit some concepts proposed by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Without attempting an overall interpretation of Georgescu’s reflection, and without any intent of philological completeness, we want to show the strength and the suggestiveness of some of his insights, with the aim of setting a conception of human well-being that is intrinsically permeated by subjective time. We argue that an important part of human well-being simply depends on our being able to live-in-time. The Georgescu-Roegen’s conception of personal time as an irrevocable flow of living suggests that the right perspective in analysing the use of time made by persons in their never-ending search of well-being is a diachronic one. In the second we discuss the consequences of adopting a diachronic perspective in the study of relationships between time use and well-being and try to suggest a coherent empirical approach.

Journal of European Social Policy

This article explores the relationship between time and well-being as a social policy question. Although the research on time and well-being is extensive, few have dealt with them together from a comparative institutional perspective. Based on data from the third European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) of 2012, regarding 34 mostly European countries, in different welfare regimes, we explore two issues: (1) What are the effects of welfare regimes on the uses of time and subjective well-being? and (2) What are the effects of different uses of time on subjective well-being? We find that the institutional structure – the welfare regime – affects the way people use their time. Furthermore, the findings documented that uses of time have a direct effect on well-being when controlling for individual level as well as country-level variables. These findings may have important implications for policymaking.

The Journal of Positive …, 2010

Journal of European Social Policy , 2019

This paper explores the relationship between time and well-being as a social policy question. Although the research on time and well-being is extensive, few have dealt with them together from a comparative institutional perspective. Based on data from the third European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) of 2012, regarding 34 mostly European countries, in different welfare regimes, we explore two issues: 1) What are the effects of welfare regimes on the uses of time and subjective well-being? 2) What are the effects of different uses of time on subjective well-being? We find that the institutional structure – the welfare regime – affects the way people use their time. Furthermore, the findings documented that uses of time have a direct effect on well-being when controlling for individual level as well as country-level variables. These findings may have important implications for policymaking.

Journal of Research in Personality, 2012

We examined whether the empirical differences between affective well-being (AWB) and cognitive well-being (CWB) might be due to (a) the use of different time frames in measures of AWB and CWB or (b) structural differences. In Study 1, a multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis indicated that levels of different components are more similar but do not converge completely when the same time frame is used. In Study 2, we found that people are more likely to consider global life circumstances (as opposed to specific events and activities) when they evaluate their CWB, regardless of the specific time frame. In both studies, the time frame did not moderate the associations between AWB and CWB and important correlates (personality, life circumstances).