CFP: Workshop on Well-Being, Time, and Prudence

Many people think the only way for your life to go better is for it to contain more good things. But others deny this, and hold that the relations among the parts of your life, or perhaps some features of your life as a whole, can also make a difference to how well it goes. 
 
This debate between atomists and holists about well-being has implications for self-interested rational choice, or prudence. If holistic considerations do matter, it might make sense to choose a shorter or otherwise worse future, if doing so would have a positive impact on the value of the life as a whole. To some, this is a ludicrous suggestion. Matters are also complicated by the fact that our views of what is valuable (either at a time or over a lifetime) often change. Philosophers differ on whether it is prudential for a young idealist to make future-affecting choices which she realizes she will regret as an old cynic.
 
This workshop aims to explore questions such as the following: Is well-being atomistic or holistic? If holistic features matter, which ones do and why? Is it prudentially rational to take past events or whole-life features into account when making life choices? Does rationality require us to give weight to what we may come to prefer or value in the future? Confirmed speakers include Dale Dorsey (Kansas) and Jason Raibley (Long Beach).

If you are interested in presenting at the workshop, please send an abstract of 2-4 pages on these or related issues to Antti Kauppinen ([email protected]) by April 7. We expect to be able to include 1-3 contributed papers, and aim to make the decisions within a few days of the deadline. Please indicate if you would be interested in chairing a session and providing brief comments on a paper, in case we're not able to include your own paper. (You can also volunteer to comment without sending a paper.)