Do time-biases promote or frustrate wellbeing?

Abstract

Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias, another is future-bias, and a third is present-bias. Philosophers are concerned with the normative status of these time-biases. They have argued that, at least in part, the normative status of these biases depends on the extent to which they tend to promote, or frustrate, wellbeing, where “wellbeing” is taken to be of fundamental value. Since near-bias is thought to be associated with impulsivity, lack of self-control, and poor long-term health and financial outcomes, it has often been supposed that it is associated with lower wellbeing. On those grounds, philosophers have argued that near-bias is rationally impermissible. By contrast, philosophical views about the normative status of future-bias have been mixed, with some arguing that future-bias is impermissible because, they think, it frustrates wellbeing, and others arguing that it is at least permissible (and perhaps obligatory) because it is the product of mechanisms whose functioning can be expected to promote wellbeing. However, to date there are no studies that have directly probed how time-biases correlate with wellbeing. Since it's not a settled matter which psychological mechanisms underlie time-biases, it is not uncontroversial which things serve as proxies for these preferences. We directly empirically investigate the connection between time-biases and measures of wellbeing, to see which of these biases is associated with promoting, or frustrating wellbeing. Contrary to expectation, we found no evidence that near-bias or present-bias are associated with frustrating wellbeing on any of the constructs we measured. On the other hand, and contrary to what some philosophers have supposed, we found that future-bias was associated with higher measures of wellbeing on several measures. We consider the implications of these findings for the evaluation of the normative status of these time biases.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

Exploring Arbitrariness Objections to Time-Biases.Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, Jordan Oh, Sam Shpall & Wen Yu - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association.
Exploring Arbitrariness Objections to Time Biases.Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, O. H. Jordan, Sam Shpall & Y. U. Wen - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (3):588-614.
Time Bias and Altruism.Leora Urim Sung - forthcoming - Mind:fzae045.

Analytics

Added to PP
n/a

Downloads
122 (#159,210)

6 months
122 (#41,663)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Andrew James Latham
Aarhus University
Kristie Miller
University of Sydney

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references