The Significance of a Life's Shape Dale Dorsey Department Of

The Significance of a Life's Shape Dale Dorsey Department of Philosophy University of Kansas 1445 Jayhawk Boulevard Wescoe Hall, rm. 3090 Lawrence, KS 66045 [email protected] Lives are full of ups and downs. As Mad Men's Joan Holloway puts the matter, \That's life. One minute you're on top of the world, the next minute some secretary's running you over with a lawn mower." None of this is all that revelatory. The folk wisdom has always been that in life you take the good times with the bad, and hope there's more of the good than bad. But this bit of armchair folk wisdom has come in for some sideways glances. Some hold that it's not simply the case that you hope for more good than bad, but rather that you should hope that the goods and bads happen in a particular order. The shape of a life hypothesis holds, very roughly speaking (and in a way to be analyzed further), that a life is better when the bads happen before the goods. A life that starts in the gutter, but that ends on top is better than one that starts at the top and ends in the gutter. This is true, or so the suggestion goes, even when these lives experience that same total amount of momentary goods: when the highs are just as high, the lows are just as low. Some who accept the shape of a life hypothesis claim that it can no longer be the case that the overall quality of a life is understood as an aggregative function of the quality of the individual moments in a life. Because the temporal organization of goods and bads throughout a life itself matters, to determine the quality of a life we need more information than the total, aggregate, good. And there goes the folk wisdom: if we reject an aggregative account of overall life quality, we can no longer simply hope for more good than bads. But we hope for more, and later, good. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I argue that the best interpre- tation of the significance of a life's shape is not to treat that shape as an intrinsic good, but is nevertheless to regard it as a signifier of the presence of other, long-term and not merely momentary, intrinsic values. My second goal is more general. I seek to determine the effect a life's shape will have on the folk wisdom in the above paragraph: is it the case that we should 1 hope only for more good moments than bad moments? Is the best life the one with the highest aggregate amount of good moments? In x1 I attempt to motivate the shape of a life hypothesis. In x2, I discuss four potential explanations of this hypothesis. I critically examine these explanations in xx3-5. And in x6 I argue that the best explanation of the significance of a life's shape does not of itself threaten the hypothesis that the quality of a life is an aggregate of the quality of a life's individual moments. 1. The Shape of a Life To see the issue I'm interested in discussing more clearly, contrast O. J. Simpson: O. J. Simpson was a celebrated college and pro- fessional football running back, film actor and producer, and sports commentator. In his mid-40s, in the midst of his success, Simpson was put on trial for murder. And though he was ac- quitted after a lengthy and highly publicized trial, many were convinced of his guilt and as a result his reputation had been ef- fectively ruined. Following his murder charge, he was held liable for wrongful death in the same event, and was later convicted of burglary in Las Vegas, was sentenced to 33 years in prison, and is currently serving his sentence at Lovelock Correctional Center, Nevada. with J. O. Nospmis: J. O. Nospmis grew up in the midst of gang- related violence and crime, was suspected at an early age of murder, and was eventually sentenced at the age of 25 for a series of armed robberies. Following his stint in prison, Nospmis was released and was given an opportunity to coach football for a local boys club. His success at this endeavor, along with his rapport with players and amazing life turnaround led him to the attention of high schools, later universities. He retired after having coached his team to a BCS bowl title, and spent his remaining years offering insightful pregame commentary on ESPN College Gameday. As we all know, O. J. Simpson experienced one of the most dramatic down- falls in American public life. Nospmis is fictional, but lives a life that is nevertheless believable, at least to the extent that we can compare the relative quality of such lives. In comparing Nospmis with Simpson, we may 2 be tempted to ask: who had the better life? And some may be tempted, as I am, to say: Nospmis! But even if the matter is not quite so clear, we can at least ask ourselves: is there something about Nospmis' life that is itself intrinsically good that Simpson's lacks? Even if this isn't enough itself to render Nospmis' life on the whole better, there surely is something that Nospmis has that Simpson doesn't: Nospmis's life featured a dramatic turnaround; Simpson's featured an horrific downfall. The fact that Nospmis' life featured a dramatic turnaround as contrasted with Simpson seems enough to explain our considered judgment that Simp- son's life, overall, is worse. This fact seems to support the following Shape of a Life Hypothesis (SLH): The temporal sequence of intrinsic benefits in a life matters to the overall welfare value of a life.1 After all, if we're willing to say that there is something significant that is maintained by Nospmis' life that Simpson's life is lacking, it would appear that this is best explained by the relative shape of their lives. It seems right that the quality of Simpson's and Nospmis' lives are significantly influenced by the fact that the former's life has a downward shape, the latter an upward. Many have held that an important corollary of SLH is the denial of: Intra-Life Aggregation (ILA): The welfare value of a life is an aggregative function of the welfare value of individual moments within a life. Typically the reasoning from SLH to the denial of ILA runs like this. If the shape of a life is relevant to that life's quality, then it would appear that simply knowing the welfare value of the individual moments in a given life is insufficient to know the welfare quality of a life. If we assume, for the sake of argument, a life that consists of two individual moments of welfare, we cannot know the value of this life until we not only know the intrinsic value of the individual moments (i.e., the individual goods and bads that exist in those moments), but also know additional facts about how these goods and bads are organized within the life in question, whether the good occurred before the bad, or vice versa. 1There is nothing in SLH that requires one to accept the nevertheless common position that the temporal sequence of welfare benefits matters insofar as it is better to be on an upward rather than downward trend. This is important, insofar as not all interpretations of the importance of the shape of a life imply this result. 3 2. Competitor Explanations Even if Simpson's downward sloping life is a bad thing in comparison to Nospmis' upward sloping life, however, evaluative theory is underdetermined by intuitive data. Indeed, there seem to me at least four potential explanations of this fact, each compatible with a very different approach to the quality of life. Consider the differences between: Explanation A: Simpson's life is made worse by a downward trajectory because living a life with such a trajectory is extremely painful, or is otherwise harmful to one's own subjective happi- ness. and: Explanation B: Simpson's life is made worse by a downward trajectory because surely most anyone would prefer to live a life with an upward, rather than a downward trajectory. third: Explanation C : Simpson's life is made worse by a downward trajectory because this is a signal that his overall life story is a failure. finally: Explanation D: Simpson's life is made worse by a downward trajectory because a downward trajectory is of itself intrinsically bad (and, conversely, an upward trajectory is of itself intrinsically good). These potential explanations differ along a number of dimensions, and each of which will treat the significance of a life's shape in substantially different ways. To examine each competitor explanation in a little more detail, note, first, Explanation A. A treats the significance of a life's shape as entirely instrumental: instrumental, say, to the pain or unhappiness someone might feel as a result of a life with a downward slope. Indeed, that someone would be unhappy about such an occurrence seems easy to believe. We often lament lost goods; the fact that I lost something that matters to me (such as a job I valued or, e.g., my public reputation) causes substantially more mental anguish than had I never had the thing in the first place. And 4 hence loss seems to be an instrumental bad, which would seem to explain the relative disvalue and relative value of Simpson's and Nospmis's lives, at least under normal circumstances.

Load more