In this little exercise in analytic existentialism, I’m going to contrast two kinds of stories we can live through, and suggest that the transition from one to the other is both something most of us will experience and a major challenge for finding our lives meaningful. » …Read more
It is not rare to see groups of enraged people engaged in destructive behavior when you turn on the news these days. Such behavior is puzzling when we think of the agents as rational choosers, » …Read more
Samuel Scheffler’s original and provocative Tanner lectures, now published as Death and the Afterlife (OUP 2013), have already stirred discussion about the importance of humanity’s continued survival for the value of our own lives. » …Read more
It is an interesting fact about many of our most important choices, such as the choice of what kind of education to pursue, whether and whom to marry, » …Read more
It’s fashionable to call for supplementing traditional
economic measures with measures targeting the impact of policies on well-being.
Leaving aside worries about measuring well-being and implementing policies, » …Read more
Sam Wren-Lewis is organizing a conference on subjective well-being and public policy at Leeds in July that might be of interest to Peasoupers (indeed, several of us are speaking there). » …Read more
Suppose, for simplicity, that the basis for moral desert is virtue and what’s deserved is well-being. According to the Ratio View of Comparative Desert, for two people to get what they comparatively deserve, » …Read more
According to what is now probably the standard view of (transactional) exploitation, it is a matter of someone taking unfair advantage of another (Wertheimer 1996). » …Read more