The Significance of a Life’s Shape

Dale Dorsey

Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Kansas1445 Jayhawk BoulevardWescoe Hall, rm. 3090Lawrence, KS 66045ddorsey@ku.edu

Lives are full of ups and downs. As Mad Men’s Joan Holloway puts thematter, “That’s life. One minute you’re on top of the world, the next minutesome secretary’s running you over with a lawn mower.” None of this is allthat revelatory. The folk wisdom has always been that in life you take thegood 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 sidewaysglances. Some hold that it’s not simply the case that you hope for moregood than bad, but rather that you should hope that the goods and badshappen in a particular order. The shape of a life hypothesis holds, veryroughly speaking (and in a way to be analyzed further), that a life is betterwhen 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 inthe gutter. This is true, or so the suggestion goes, even when these livesexperience that same total amount of momentary goods: when the highs arejust as high, the lows are just as low. Some who accept the shape of a lifehypothesis claim that it can no longer be the case that the overall quality of alife is understood as an aggregative function of the quality of the individualmoments in a life. Because the temporal organization of goods and badsthroughout a life itself matters, to determine the quality of a life we needmore information than the total, aggregate, good. And there goes the folkwisdom: if we reject an aggregative account of overall life quality, we canno longer simply hope for more good than bads. But we hope for more, andlater, 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 anintrinsic good, but is nevertheless to regard it as a signifier of the presenceof other, long-term and not merely momentary, intrinsic values. My secondgoal is more general. I seek to determine the effect a life’s shape will haveon the folk wisdom in the above paragraph: is it the case that we should

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hope only for more good moments than bad moments? Is the best life theone with the highest aggregate amount of good moments? In §1 I attemptto motivate the shape of a life hypothesis. In §2, I discuss four potentialexplanations of this hypothesis. I critically examine these explanations in§§3-5. And in §6 I argue that the best explanation of the significance of alife’s shape does not of itself threaten the hypothesis that the quality of alife 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, andsports 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 wereconvinced of his guilt and as a result his reputation had been ef-fectively ruined. Following his murder charge, he was held liablefor wrongful death in the same event, and was later convicted ofburglary in Las Vegas, was sentenced to 33 years in prison, andis 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 ofmurder, and was eventually sentenced at the age of 25 for aseries of armed robberies. Following his stint in prison, Nospmiswas released and was given an opportunity to coach footballfor a local boys club. His success at this endeavor, along withhis rapport with players and amazing life turnaround led himto the attention of high schools, later universities. He retiredafter having coached his team to a BCS bowl title, and spenthis remaining years offering insightful pregame commentary onESPN 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 isnevertheless believable, at least to the extent that we can compare the rel-ative quality of such lives. In comparing Nospmis with Simpson, we may

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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 thatis itself intrinsically good that Simpson’s lacks? Even if this isn’t enoughitself to render Nospmis’ life on the whole better, there surely is somethingthat Nospmis has that Simpson doesn’t: Nospmis’s life featured a dramaticturnaround; Simpson’s featured an horrific downfall.

The fact that Nospmis’ life featured a dramatic turnaround as contrastedwith 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 ofintrinsic benefits in a life matters to the overall welfare value ofa life.1

After all, if we’re willing to say that there is something significant that ismaintained by Nospmis’ life that Simpson’s life is lacking, it would appearthat this is best explained by the relative shape of their lives. It seems rightthat the quality of Simpson’s and Nospmis’ lives are significantly influencedby 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 anaggregative function of the welfare value of individual momentswithin a life.

Typically the reasoning from SLH to the denial of ILA runs like this. If theshape of a life is relevant to that life’s quality, then it would appear thatsimply knowing the welfare value of the individual moments in a given life isinsufficient to know the welfare quality of a life. If we assume, for the sakeof argument, a life that consists of two individual moments of welfare, wecannot know the value of this life until we not only know the intrinsic valueof the individual moments (i.e., the individual goods and bads that exist inthose moments), but also know additional facts about how these goods andbads are organized within the life in question, whether the good occurredbefore the bad, or vice versa.

1There is nothing in SLH that requires one to accept the nevertheless common positionthat the temporal sequence of welfare benefits matters insofar as it is better to be on anupward rather than downward trend. This is important, insofar as not all interpretationsof the importance of the shape of a life imply this result.

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2. Competitor Explanations

Even if Simpson’s downward sloping life is a bad thing in comparison toNospmis’ upward sloping life, however, evaluative theory is underdeterminedby intuitive data. Indeed, there seem to me at least four potential expla-nations of this fact, each compatible with a very different approach to thequality of life. Consider the differences between:

Explanation A: Simpson’s life is made worse by a downward tra-jectory because living a life with such a trajectory is extremelypainful, or is otherwise harmful to one’s own subjective happi-ness.

and:

Explanation B : Simpson’s life is made worse by a downward tra-jectory because surely most anyone would prefer to live a lifewith an upward, rather than a downward trajectory.

third:

Explanation C : Simpson’s life is made worse by a downwardtrajectory because this is a signal that his overall life story is afailure.

finally:

Explanation D : Simpson’s life is made worse by a downward tra-jectory because a downward trajectory is of itself intrinsicallybad (and, conversely, an upward trajectory is of itself intrinsi-cally good).

These potential explanations differ along a number of dimensions, and eachof which will treat the significance of a life’s shape in substantially differentways.

To examine each competitor explanation in a little more detail, note,first, Explanation A. A treats the significance of a life’s shape as entirelyinstrumental : instrumental, say, to the pain or unhappiness someone mightfeel as a result of a life with a downward slope. Indeed, that someonewould be unhappy about such an occurrence seems easy to believe. Weoften 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 substantiallymore mental anguish than had I never had the thing in the first place. And

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hence loss seems to be an instrumental bad, which would seem to explainthe relative disvalue and relative value of Simpson’s and Nospmis’s lives, atleast under normal circumstances. Explanation A seems most compatiblewith theories of well-being, such as hedonism, that grant pride of place inliving a life of quality to maintaining positive affective states, such as statesof pleasure or happiness more broadly.2

Explanation B treats the shape of a life as of somewhat greater axiologi-cal significance than A. Indeed, B allows that an upward sloping life could beintrinsically valuable (and a downward sloping life intrinsically disvaluable).But this is solely a result of the fact that most people will desire or prefer tolive such lives. B is obviously continuous with theories of welfare that treatthe satisfaction of one’s desires or other pro-attitudes as significant, perhapsdominant, features of an individual’s welfare.3 However, for B, like A, thesignificance of a life’s shape is entirely contingent, viz., on the contingent af-fective or pro-attitudes maintained by a person at a give time. For A as wellas B, if Simpson is neither pained by the per se downward trajectory of hislife, nor does he possess any intrinsic preference for an upward rather thandownward sloping life, the shape of his life itself possesses no axiologicalsignificance whatever.

Explanations C and D, however, treat the value of a life’s shape as lessdependent upon their contingent pro- or affective attitudes. ExplanationC, while it does not grant intrinsic value to a life’s shape, neverthelessgrants it a special form of extrinsic value, viz., signatory value.4 The factof a downward sloping life is a sign of an underlying negative feature ofa life. For instance, one might believe that an important intrinsic good isthat a life have a certain narrative structure or story. When this story isa good one, this itself is an intrinsic benefit, and a life story or narrativestructure is more valuable when it ends on a high note; in other words, whenthe individually good moments are later rather than earlier. Imagine, forinstance, that I value becoming a successful ad man. I work hard to pursuemy goal, and accomplish it. Thus my life has a certain narrative structure,one that is culminated by success later in life. Thus, or so it would seem,

2On the distinction between states of pleasure and states of happiness, see DanielHaybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ??. For acontrary view, see Fred Feldman, What Is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2010).

3See, for instance, Dale Dorsey, “Subjectivism without Desire” in The PhilosophicalReview ?? (2012).

4Most importantly, this interpretation is accepted by David Velleman, “Well-Being andTime” in The Possibility of Practical Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000), ch. 3.

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the shape of my life has an impact on my welfare, but not an impact in andof itself; its impact is derivative insofar as the shape merely indicates that Imaintained an extraordinarily important welfare good, i.e., a life of a highquality narrative structure.

Explanation D is the strongest, and is, perhaps, the most popular in-terpretation of SLH.5 On this interpretation, the shape of a life is itself anintrinsic value. But, unlike Explanation B, the intrinsic value of the shapeof a life—in particular, an upward sloping life—is not dependent upon any-one’s desires or other pro-attitudes. The fact, for instance, that individualmomentary welfare benefits occur later rather than earlier is itself of intrin-sic value, no matter my attitude toward that fact. Having a good life shapeis a sui generis good. Even if O. J. Simpson never takes any con-attitudetoward the per se shape of his life, it is nevertheless a bad thing for him.

These explanations are, of course, not strictly speaking competitive. Onemight accept that the shape of a life can make an instrumental differenceto the various affective and mental state goods one maintains (ExplanationA), but also claim that the shape of a life is intrinsically valuable in a waythat does not depend on a person’s pro- or con-attitudes (Explanation D).These explanations can be mixed and matched in other ways; indeed, thereis nothing incoherent about the acceptance of all four explanations. In ex-amining the best account of the significance of a life’s shape, therefore, I willfirst consider explanations A and B along the following rubric: are A and Bsufficient of themselves to capture the significance of a life’s shape? I answerthis question in the negative: neither A or B (or both) can fully capture thedifferences we see between the lives of Simpson and Nospmis. I then askwhich of explanations C or D is better-placed to provide the explanationthat is missing from explanations A and B. I argue that explanation D hasa number of counterintuitive features that are plausibly avoided by expla-nation C. And hence, or so it seems to me, we have good reason to acceptthat the significance of a life’s shape is that such a shape possesses, in mostcases, signatory value of a life that maintains substantial welfare goods (inaddition to whatever significance it might maintain as a cause of positive ornegative mental states, or as a per se object of pro- or con-attitudes). In §6,I address whether Explanation C threatens ILA. I conclude that while it canbe interpreted to do so, accepting such an interpretation is not necessary,and hence the axiological significance of a life’s shape need not threaten

5Explanation D is accepted by, e.g., Larry Temkin (Rethinking the Good (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2012), ??), Frances Kamm (“Rescuing Ivan Ilyich: How We Liveand How We Die” in Ethics 11? (2003)), and Joshua Glasgow (“The Shape of a Life andthe Value of Loss and Gain” forthcoming in Philosophical Studies).

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intra-life aggregation.

2. Explanation A

For Explanation A, the significance of a life’s shape is entirely derivative ofits effects on the plausibly beneficial or harmful affective (or other mental)states that a person undergoes during a life, most importantly, the pleasurethe person takes within that life. According to this interpretation, the rea-son that Nospmis’ life’s upward trajectory is an evaluatively good thing isthat it is very like that Nospmis, say, takes pleasure in his life’s shape. Wecan expect (and perhaps even stipulate) that Simpson takes pain in his: itis painful for one to experience the sort of life Simpson had, but then toundergo such a dramatic downfall.

Of course, on this interpretation, the significance of a life’s shape isentirely explainable in terms of the momentary goods within a life: livesthat, say, go “up” contain more momentary goods than lives that go “down”.But when this distinction in momentary goods isn’t present, the shape of alife itself lacks significance. This interpretation is expressed in the followingterms by Fred Feldman. In comparing the welfare value of two mirror-image lives (one on an upward, the other on a downward, trajectory), butthat contain the same amount of pleasure, Fred Feldman writes:

I see no reason to suppose that Uphill’s life in fact is any betterin itself for Uphill than Downhill’s life is for Downhill. After all,Uphill does not get anything out of the fact that his life has thisallegedly attractive shape. He does not enjoy it or take pleasurein it. It does not make him any the happier. Downhill doesnot suffer from the fact that his life is getting worse with everypassing minute. It doesn’t matter to him. So why should wethink Uphill’s life is better for Uphill than Downhill’s life is forDownhill?6

If Explanation A is the right account of SLH—or, put more precisely, ifExplanation A is itself sufficient to explain SLH—SLH does not threatenILA. If we explain the significance of a life’s shape simply in terms of theoverall momentary goods and bads within a life, there’s no reason whateverto believe that the overall quality of a life isn’t simply an aggregative productof the momentary goods within that life.

But I do not think that Explanation A is sufficient to plausibly explainthe evaluative significance of a life’s shape. Imagine, for instance, that we are

6Feldman, 134.

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given the choice to live a life like Simpson or a life like Nospmis. But imaginealso that it is stipulated that Simpson’s life has slightly more pleasure orother beneficial affective mental states than Nospmis’ life. Let’s just saythat this is a settled matter. Imagine now someone saying the following:“I recognize that Simpson’s life has slightly more pleasure than Nospmis’life. But to live a life that ends well rather than poorly is itself somethingthat matters, to me, intrinsically. I value living a life with an upward sloperather than a downward slope. And so I choose to life Nospmis’ life ratherthan Simpson’s.”

If Explanation A is sufficient to explain the evaluative significance ofa life’s shape, this person’s reasoning is prudentially irrational: becausethere is not further significance maintained by a life’s shape, the fact thatthis person values an upward sloping life should be entirely defeated by thepresence of additional pleasure, or other mental-state goods, in Simpson’slife. But this is implausible. And, at least for the sake of the currentargument, while we may not regard the contrary choice, i.e., to live a life likeSimpson’s, itself irrational in the face of its downward slope, it is certainlyat least true that if I want my life to end on an up-note rather than a down-note, it’s plausible to say that when it in fact does end in this way, that’s agood thing for me, and can trade-off against individual moments of pleasure.

I can think of two ways a partisan of Explanation A might push back.First, one might say that while the extent to which I value something isrelevant to whether that thing is of value for me, the mere fact that I valueit is insufficient to render it valuable. For instance, Richard Kraut writes:

Imagine a boy who, while walking through the park, sees a duck,and at the same time spots a rock on the ground. Impulsively,he picks up the rock and throws it at the duck. Is it good forhim, to some extent, if his desire to hit the duck is satisfied? Ifind that implausible. Surely he would be no worse off if he hadnever felt an impulse to hit the duck; and once this impulse doesarise, he would be no worse off if it evaporated before he actedon it.7

Kraut supplements this case with additional ones that seek to motivate theclaim that desires do not have the power to render a previously valuelessthing valuable, no matter how much we desire or take a pro-attitude towardthem: “wanting something does not by itself confer desirability on what we

7Richard Kraut, “Desire and Human Good” in Proceedings and Addresses of the Amer-ican Philosophical Association 68 (1994), 41.

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want or getting it.”8 For Kraut, “what makes a desire good to satisfy is itsbeing a desire for something that has features that make it worth wanting.”9

I do not wish to spend time discussing the relative merits of Kraut’s orother similar claims. Though I’m tempted to disagree with the view that ourpro-attitudes cannot render otherwise valueless things valuable,10 I doubtvery much that Kraut’s account (or any other similar account) could providesupport for a purely instrumental interpretation of the significance of a life’sshape. In particular, we are not tempted to say that the desire for one’slife to have a certain shape, including the desire we might have to end ona high note, is anything like the desire someone might have to hit a duckwith a rock, or to systematically rid his metro area of low-hanging icicles.11

We’re talking about an interest in the trajectory of one’s life. Surely thisis not “a senseless passion”.12 I’m not doing anything more than poundingthe table in favor of a particular intuitive response, but it seems to mequite implausible to say to a person who very strongly prefers a life with anupward rather than a downward trajectory, or who takes substantial pleasurein living a life with that kind of shape or structure, that the satisfaction ofthis preference is of no welfare value at all. I find the contrary suggestionunmotivated.

The second way a partisan of Explanation A might respond is via a pre-commitment to a form of hedonism or other strictly mental-state accountof welfare. Famously, hedonism holds that that which is intrinsically valu-able for a person is pleasure. But if only pleasure is valuable, the shapeof a life can at best influence the quality of a life by altering the amountof pleasure in that life. But even in that case, we needn’t know anythingabout the shape of a life to know its quality. We need only know the amountof pleasure taken in the individual moments of a life. Whether these mo-ments of pleasure were caused by a life’s shape are strictly irrelevant to thedetermination of the desirability of such a life.

It’s way beyond the scope of this paper to argue against hedonism. I’vedone so elsewhere.13 But I do want to note that as a reason to reject astronger interpretation of SLH, an appeal to hedonism is dialectically impo-tent. Here’s why. One important challenge to hedonism, a challenge that

8Kraut, 44.9Kraut, 44.

10See, for instance, Dale Dorsey, “Subjectivism without Desire” in Philosophical Review?? (2012).

11Kraut, 41-2.12Kraut, 42.13“The Hedonist’s Dilemma” in Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (2011).

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must be answered by the hedonist, is that the shape of a life can, at leastin some cases, make a difference to a life’s quality. Let’s review Nospmisand Simpson. Let’s say it just so happens that Simpson is, in fact, causedgrave pain by his life’s dramatic downfall, and that Nospmis himself takesgreat pleasure at his life’s dramatic uptick. But given the framing of thecase, it’s also plausible to say that the “highs” of Nospmis’ later life arenot nearly as high as the “highs” of Simpson’s earlier life. And so it couldvery well be that the overall momentary benefits and burdens balance outon the whole. But part of what I find so interesting about the comparisonbetween Nospmis and Simpson is that we do not appear to require this sortof information in being able to say that, at the very least, the shapes of theirlives makes a difference that cannot simply be explained by the momentaryfeelings of pleasure, or momentary desires fulfilled, within that life. Werewe to accept Explanation A, we would have to do a lot more digging thanwe actually do to come up with the conclusion that Nospmis’ life is moredesirable than Simpson’s—or, at least, has a particularly desirable featurethat cannot simply be explained by the total overall momentary benefits.In particular, we have to know, or at least stipulate, that Nospmis’ lifehas a greater degree of overall momentary benefits. But in describing thestories above I most certainly didn’t stipulate any such thing. And hencethis seems to put significant pressure on hedonism as a theory of welfare,an appeal to which in favor of Explanation A would simply beg the question.

3. Explanation B

Explanation B, unlike A, holds that the shape of a life can influence thequality of a person’s life intrinsically. However, the intrinsic value of a life’sshape is contingent: it holds only insofar as the person in question takessome sort of pro-attitude toward the particular shape of a life. Obviouslydifferent theories of well-being will be attracted to slightly different versionsof Explanation B. But I will take as the paradigmatic case a desiderativeinterpretation of a form of subjectivism about welfare. To put this a littlemore clearly, I’m going to assume a view of the following sort: that φ is orwould be desired, under the right cognitive conditions, by x at t is sufficientto render φ valuable for x at t.14 If we accept this sort of a view, the shape

14Notice that this statement of a desiderative view is of the form I call “Hobbesian”:it holds that the desired object itself is of intrinsic value, rather than a conjunctive stateof affairs in which the desire and the desired object co-obtain. (Call this a “Moorean”view. See Dale Dorsey, “Intrinsic Value and the Supervenience Principle” in PhilosophicalStudies 157 (2012).) Strictly speaking, the Moorean view, if it accepts the shape of a life

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of a life is intrinsically valuable, but in a way that fully depends on its beingthe object of a desire.

A distinctive feature of this interpretation is that the intrinsic value ofa life’s shape is more-or-less restricted to its impact on the welfare valueof individual moments in a person’s life. This is because the desire for aparticular life shape lacks any distinctive status qua desire. If I happen todesire a particular life shape and, as it turns out, I live a life with that shape,this means that at the particular moment when I have the desire, my lifeis improved by its shape. To put this in a slightly different way, the valueof a life’s shape is not “spread out” in time, but is instead constrained toindividual moments, just as the value of the satisfaction of any other desireis.

Insofar as this interpretation limits the value of the shape of a life toits impact in terms of individual desire-satisfaction, it would appear that,like Explanation A, ILA is not threatened by Explanation B.15 But I thinkthis feature of the current explanation view also limits its appeal. When itcomes, say, to the difference in the quality of Simpson and Nospmis, it justdoesn’t feel right to say that the impact of the shape of their lives is bestconfined to a simple desire that they may have or have had at a particulartime, just as they might have desired to have a cup of coffee or to watch anhilarious sitcom. Rather, when we are evaluating the quality of their lives, itis strongly tempting to say that perhaps the most significant element of theirrelative value or disvalue is their differing shapes. Here’s a bit of evidence forthis claim. Take each life individually, without explicitly comparing them.Take, e.g., J. O. Nospmis. We might be taken to evaluating its quality. Butit seems right to say that in coming to a considered judgment about thequality or desirability of his life, its shape seems to play a very strong role,perhaps even a dominant role. Whatever we think about its shape (good orbad), the fact that Nospmis was able to turn his life around for the betteris itself something that would loom large. The same holds, very likely with

at all, will involve something more akin to Explanation A: at best, the shape of a life itselfis a component of an intrinsic value, and is not itself an intrinsic value. But I leave asidethis proposal, insofar as there are plausible reasons to reject a Moorean interpretation (cf.“Intrinsic Value and the Supervenience Principle”), and insofar as the critique offered herewill apply to both views.

15This suggestion might be challenged if, for instance, a desire-satisfaction view cannotprovide an acceptable account of momentary welfare benefits. See, for instance, BenBradley, Well-Being and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 1. I arguethat there is no reason to believe that a desire-satisfaction view has this problem in“Desire-Satisfaction and Welfare as Temporal” forthcoming in Ethical Theory and MoralPractice.

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an opposite valence, for Simpson. When we start to evaluate their lives, wedon’t begin by trying to figure out how many of their various momentarydesires were satisfied. When a shape like this is pronounced, the shape itselfappears to be perhaps the single most significant feature of its quality.

This is not to say that momentary benefits matter little, or that thedesires Nospmis and Simpson satisfied are meaningless or irrelevant. Surelyquite the opposite! If Simpson’s early heights were far less “high”, as itwere, and his lows were much “lower”, we would treat that as itself muchworse, even if the overall shape remains the same. But the fact that his lifewas marred by such a tremendous downfall appears to worsen it to a sub-stantial degree, in comparison to Nospmis, whose life displays a substantialturnaround. In any event, that’s the way it feels to me. One might putmy critique in the following relatively simple terms. Explanation A failedbecause it could not allow that the shape of a life was ever anything morethan purely instrumentally valuable. But Explanation B, while it grantsthe shape of a life intrinsic value (at least for those who value a particularshape), does not appear to grant the shape of a life the axiological weight itseems to have in coming to understand a life’s quality. Though the shape ofa life is an intrinsic good, it is no more significant than any other desired ob-ject (assuming that the desires maintain the same relevant structure). Butindependently of the character of someone’s desires, it seems right to saythat the shape of a life plays a much more significant role than the potentialimpact of other desired goods. And this fact cannot be explained purely interms of Explanation B.

The previous argument has left unchallenged a further element of Expla-nation B, viz., that the shape of a life is not significant for those who fail todesire it. But this feature of Explanation B is itself eminently challengable.Let’s say that we learn that neither Nospmis nor Simpson maintained anydesires (pro or con) the objects of which involved the per se shape of theirlives. In other words, let’s say that Nospmis, while he desired to get outof prison, desired to win a BCS game, wants to be a successful coach, etc.,never actually desired to have a life that maintained an upward direction.Furthermore, let’s say that while Simpson desired not to have his reputa-tion sullied, and desired not to end up in the custody of the Nevada stateauthorities, he doesn’t actually take any sort of specific con-attitude towardthe shape of his life itself. Rather, his con-attitudes are toward things likebeing in prison, etc. Would we say, in these cases, that we would refuse togrant the fact that Simpson’s life was such a tremendous downfall, and thatNospmis’s life was such a magnificent turnaround no further evaluative sig-nificance when coming to a judgment about the value of their lives? I think

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the answer here is almost assuredly no. Or, at least, this is my consideredjudgment.

5. Explanations C and D

Neither A or B was able to explain the significance of a life’s shape. Andwhile the evaluative proposals they offer may be independently plausible,and may form part of the story of why a life’s shape is itself significant forits quality, they require supplementation. This section considers the finaltwo interpretations together. I do this in part because, or so I shall claim,the problems with Explanation D can be directly explained by the successof Explanation C ; and hence it helps to have both on the table.

Explanation C holds that the significance of a life’s shape is derivative ofother substantial goods—including goods that occur not simply at individualmoments—that themselves are intrinsically valuable. Thus Explanation Cholds that the shape of a life is not intrinsically valuable, but is not strictlyinstrumentally valuable, either. Rather, the shape of a life is a signatoryvalue: valuable as a sign of substantial intrinsic goods. To see how thismight work, consider the proposal that an essential ement of welfare is theachievement of a long-term project. If this is correct, the value of suchachievements will help to explain the evaluative significance of a life’s shape.Generally speaking, though not always (as will become more clear in §5.4),valuable achievements or goals are those that one works toward throughoutthe course of a life, and at which success comes later. And hence an upward-sloping life is a sign that an individual’s projects were a success. Thisapproach is advocated by David Velleman, who writes:

Why would a person care about the placement of momentarygoods on the curve that maps his changing welfare? The answer,I believe, is that an event’s place in the story of one’s life lends ita meaning that isn’t entirely determined by its impact on one’swell-being at the time. A particular electoral victory, providinga particular boost to one’s current welfare, can mean either thatone’s early frustrations were finally over or that one’s subsequentfailures were not yet foreshadowed, that one enjoyed either flee-ing good luck or lasting success—all depending on its placementin the trend of one’s well-being. And the event’s meaning is whatdetermines its contribution to the value of one’s life.

The meaning attached to a quantity of momentary well-beingis determined only in part by its place in the overall trend. The

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meaning of a benefit depends not only on whether it followsor precedes hardships but also on the specific narrative relationbetween the goods and evils involved.16

According to Velleman, a crucial intrinsic value of a person’s life is its mean-ing, or narrative. Having a valuable narrative is an intrinsic prudentialbenefit. How we determine the good or bad narratives is neither here northere for our purposes, but suffice it to say that, generally speaking (again,quite generally speaking) the shape of one’s life helps to impact its overallnarrative structure. Take Nospmis. Though he experienced lows, his lowsare part of an overall tale of redemption and “making good”. Not so forSimpson. His lows are more indicative of a narrative of disgrace, shame,disappointment. Insofar as the former narrative is more valuable, it seemsright to say that his “upward trend” is significant for the quality of his life.Though the mere trend is not itself intrinsically good, it does seem to indi-cate the presence of an inflationary benefit: a good life story. (The same,roughly speaking, holds of views that explain SLH with reference to, say,achievement or the satisfaction of long-term goals or projects.17)

Compare this to Explanation D. This is the strongest interpretation ofthe significance of a life’s shape. In essence, this interpretation says thatthe right temporal ordering of momentary intrinsic benefits within a life isitself intrinsically valuable. The inflationary, intrinsic view is plumped forby Larry Temkin18, Frances Kamm19, Joshua Glasgow:

Reflect on how we feel about the losses of well-being that wesuffer. They are regrettable, they disappoint. We are inclinedto sadness or even hopelessness and depression when we reflecton the more significant losses. Losses are, not coincidentally, a‘downer.’ If Dora loses a loved one, it is bad for her not just

16David Velleman, “Well-Being and Time” in The Possibility of Practical Reason (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 63. The inflationary, non-intrinsic view is alsoadvocated by Douglas Portmore in “Welfare, Achievement, and Self-Sacrifice” in Journalof Ethics and Social Philosophy 3 (2007).

17Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the best interpretation of the nature of a long-term goal or project just is as the sort of thing that provides a unifying narrative threadthrough a number of individual segments of a life. See, for instance, Dale Dorsey, TheBasic Minimum: A Welfarist Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),39-44.

18Larry S. Temkin, Rethinking the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 111-112.

19Frances Kamm, “Rescuing Ivan Illyich: How We Live and How We Die” in Ethics 113(2003), 222-223.

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that she has lost a loved one, and that she is saddened by thefact for very many moments, but also that her momentary well-being has been so significantly diminished. It is bad to be worseoff than you used to be. Additive theories say otherwise. Foradditive theories, a loss of momentary well-being is bad-for-a-lifeonly to the extent that the momentary well-being enjoyed at thenadir contributes a relatively low amount to lifetime well-being.For the rest of us, there is also badness in the losing: when Igo from a high level of momentary well-being to a low level ofmomentary well-being, that itself is bad for me.20

and Michael Slote.21

I want to challenge this Explanation D. I offer four arguments here. Onenote before I begin. So far SLH doesn’t say anything about what the “right”trajectory is. However, just for the sake of argument, I’m going to presumethat Explanation D will say that the right trajectory is an upward one,rather than a downward one; this seems to match the considered judgmentsof its proponents, even if it is not an essential feature of the view. Nothingwill turn on this assumption, however.

5.1. The Lost Weekend

The inflationary, intrinsic interpretation of SLH must say that the fact thatgood moments within a life occur in the right order is itself a good-makingfeature of a life. But I think there is very little reason to suggest that thisholds simply across an entire life rather than also holding that it occursacross individually temporally extended segments within a life. Put lesstechnically, if we wish to say that a life with an upward trajectory is betterthan a life with a downward trajectory, other things equal, then we shouldsay, for instance, that a year with an upward trajectory is also better than ayear with a downward trajectory, and a weekend with an upward trajectoryis better than a weekend with a downward trajectory, other things equal.

But the latter claim, it seems to me, is very implausible. Take thefollowing two cases. First:

The Lost Weekend : On Friday, I went over to a friend’s houseto watch a Friday Night Football game, had a great time, but

20Joshua Glasgow, “The Shape of a Life and the Value of Loss and Gain” forthcomingin Philosophical Studies.

21Michael Slote, “Goods and Lives” in Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1983).

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drank rather too much. As a result, I was feeling very bad onSaturday, and recovered only slightly on Sunday.

Second:

The Found Weekend : I went to a party on Thursday night, anddrank rather too much. As a consequence, I had a very very badFriday, recovered slightly on Saturday, but was feeling fine onSunday, when I went over to a friend’s house to watch SundayNight Football, and had a great time.

In both of these cases, I’m interested in considering only the temporal seg-ment Friday-Sunday (call this “the weekend”). In the case of the lost week-end, my weekend took a downward trajectory. Friday was great, but Satur-day was awful, and though Sunday was slightly better, it was still part of anoverall downward trajectory from Friday. In the case of the found weekend,however, Friday starts out quite poorly, improves slightly, and gets muchbetter, ending up with a Sunday that was just as good as the lost weekend’sFriday.

Is it plausible to say that the found weekend is better than the lost week-end, if we assume that the lows are just as low and the highs are just ashigh? I think not. The mere fact that one was sick on Friday and Saturdayrather than Saturday and Sunday seems to me to make very little differenceto the overall quality of the Friday-Sunday temporal segment. But accord-ing to the inflationary, intrinsic interpretation of SLH, the found weekendmust be preferable. After all, it takes an upward trajectory rather than adownward trajectory. Of course, I’m simply reporting my intuition. ButI think the inflationary, intrinsic interpretation starts to look less plausiblewhen we focus on short temporal segments than when we step back andfocus on a life in its entirety.

Two responses to this argument are worth considering. First, the par-tisan of the current interpretation might suggest that there is no reason tobelieve that the significance of a life’s shape must also extend to the signif-icance of a weekend’s shape. But I find this response implausible and adhoc.22 In particular, we could imagine a life that simply consisted of a week-

22Kamm writes that one potential explanation for the intrinsic value of a life’s shape isthat “Decline within a life emphasizes vulnerability, of both a higher state and retention ofwhat one has already had, within life. Ending on the high point means that only death, notlife itself, in fact ends the good,” (Kamm, 222-3). But even if we accepted this explanation(indeed, Kamm offers a further explanation that is compatible with believing that the lostweekend is worse than the found weekend), this explanation would also support the valueof the found weekend if life ended on Monday. But this is no more plausible.

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end of this kind. Why not think about the cases above simply as lives that“pop into existence” on Friday, and then pop out of existence on Sunday?Surely this is a coherent possibility. In this case a weekend’s shape just is alife’s shape. But even in this case, it seems wrong to think that the foundweekend is better than the lost weekend. Second, and more importantly, aperson’s life just is a collection of moments strung together by a relation ofpersonal identity (whatever that is). But to say that the value of the longercollection of moments maintains a certain feature (i.e., its shape) but notthe shorter collection of moments just seems to me entirely without indepen-dent motivation. If a feature of the value of one collection of moments is itsshape, it is hard to see how the value of a different collections of moments,or sub-collections of moments, will not be affected by a similar feature.23

Second, it might be suggested that I’ve cooked the books by adding thatthe found weekend includes a party on Thursday night. Here’s why. Byincluding this, it would appear that the found weekend and lost weekend arereally the same in terms of their activities, it’s just that the found weekendbegins, more or less, on Thursday, the lost weekend, more or less, on Friday.According to SLH, the temporal ordering of one’s momentary goods matters,but it doesn’t matter whether a particular temporal sequence of goods beginson Thursday or Friday. Response: this objection misses the point of theobjection. A life can be carved up into many different temporal segments.But Explanation D seems unable to distinguish the application of the valueof the ordering of momentary goods within a life to within any particulartemporal segment. And if this is correct, the value of Friday through Sundayfor both weekends should not be influenced by what I did Thursday; afterall, this temporal segment has either an upward or downward slope, andhence the inflationary, intrinsic view must say that the found weekend isbetter for its upward slope. But this, once again, seems wrong.

Notably, however, Explanation C seems to have no problem with thiscase whatsoever. After all, part of the explanation of the significance of alife’s shape for this view is that it generally has a tendency to signify thepresence or absence of large scale intrinsic values, such as a valuable nar-rative, life story, or set of achievements. But whether or not one was hungover on Friday and Saturday rather than Saturday and Sunday surely hasvery little to do with the extent to which a given person achieved his or herlong-term goals, or maintained a life with a valuable narrative or story. Andhence the inflationary, non-intrinsic view appears to be able to distinguishlong-term trends from short-term trends in a way that the inflationary, in-

23Glasgow.

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trinsic view, plausibly, cannot.

5.2. The Experience Machine24

Another feature of Explanation D is that it is intrinsically good for some-one to have the right sort of trajectory of momentary goods, no matterwhat those momentary goods are. But this, it seems to me, is extremelyimplausible.

Take, for instance, two lives in an experience machine. The only intrinsicbenefits that they maintain are momentary instances of sensory pleasure.No plausible theory of welfare will claim that the pleasure experienced insuch a machine is not of intrinsic value. But we might now compare twodifferent experience machines. The first machine has computer software thatis designed to start a person’s life at a neutral level; no pleasure, no pain.Gradually, say, twice a year, the pleasure is increased in a linear fashion.The second machine is precisely the opposite: it starts out with quite alot of pleasure. Gradually, also twice per year, the software decreases thepleasure in a linear fashion, such that both machines, over the course of alife of the same duration, will generate the same amount of bare, sensorypleasure.

According to the inflationary, intrinsic view, the first machine produces abetter life than the second. But this seems to me, once again, quite implau-sible. If I live my entire life in an experience machine, simply undergoingsensory pleasure, how could it possibly matter when the pleasure occurs?

Of course, this is just another one of my considered judgments. Perhapsyou disagree. But recall, again, the cases in which SLH seemed more plau-sible. Take, e.g., Simpson and Nospmis. In those cases we are talking abouta person whose agency is extended over time, who undertakes projects thatcan end up being a success or a failure. For most people, it is important tothem that their lives are stories of success rather than tragedy; but successitself is the sort of thing that has a tendency to have a “upward” swing;success ends well—tragedy ends poorly. But if we abstract from the angleof success or failure, and instead simply focus on welfare goods that do notfeature this sort of extended agency, it seems much less plausible to me tobelieve that the ordering of these goods could in and of itself matter.

Once again, Explanation C holds serve. Because the only intrinsic val-ues that are or are not present for a person in the experience machine are,

24This argument is also given in Dale Dorsey “First Steps in an Axiology of Goals” inInternational Journal of Wellbeing 1 (2011).

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well, momentary experiences there is no chance of either person developinga life with any sort of story or narrative at all; neither life maintains anyachievements or projects, or fulfills any long-term goals. Thus an upwardor downward trend for individuals who are simply in an experience machinemakes no difference.

5.3. The Consistently Well-Off

Another thing that seems to lend plausibility to SLH is consideration oflives, like those of Simpson and Nospmis, for which the highs are pretty highand for which the lows are pretty low. But what if we abstract from thisfeature of the cases on display, and instead assume that, no matter whathappens, the person in question is going to be doing very well?

Imagine, for instance, two people whose lives are equally successful, theyachieve all they set out to achieve, and do so with a high degree of ac-complishment. Further, assume that their degree of success is more or lessconstant throughout their lives, so that there are no marked “highs” or“lows” earlier or later in life (at least in terms of their own levels of suc-cess).25 Also assume that these individuals appreciate the pleasures of finewine, and take the same aggregate amount of pleasure in wine throughouttheir lives. But now assume that the extent to which both individuals takepleasure in fine wine decreases and increases, respectively; the first startshis career by taking substantial pleasure in wine, but less pleasure as theyears go on; opposite for the second person. If we assume that everythingelse is equal, we should also assume that the first person’s life, on the whole,gets worse as the life goes on, the second person’s life, on the whole, getsbetter as it goes on. After all, the degree of success throughout their lives isconstant and equal. What changes is simply the pleasure they take in finewine, surely an intrinsic, momentary good if ever there was one.

Once again, it seems to me implausible to believe that the first life isworse than the second, simply because the first person’s pleasure in winedecreases, the second person’s increases. What I think this argument bringsout, much like the argument of the previous section, is the result that Expla-nation D seems more plausible when we are comparing success with tragedy.No one would believe that the loss of one’s ability to appreciate fine wineover the course of an entire life amounts to anything like a tragedy. And

25I don’t mean to insist here that success is itself a per se intrinsic value; one couldexplain the relative quality of a successful life in many different ways; I remain ecumenical,at least for present purposes.

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no one would believe that it would be more or less enviable than someonewho starts out unable to appreciate it and whose appreciation gradually in-creases over time. When we assume that both lives in question are relativelywell-off even in their lowest moments, it seems less plausible to believe thatthe mere shape of a life could itself affect a life’s intrinsic value.

Notice that I’ve designed the case in question assuming that the nar-rative structure of their lives, i.e., their long-term goals and projects, areequally successful. The only thing that changes between these lives is themomentary goods they enjoy—the pleasure taken in fine wine. And so, forExplanation C, there is no reason to believe that this particular trend isvaluable. However, we might imagine a different story. Let’s say that twoindividuals are extremely well-off in terms of their momentary achievements.Both maintained substantial happiness and pleasure throughout their lives.However, the first person’s projects or achievements were marked up sub-stantial failure, which explains, for her, a marked downward trend. Thesecond person, on the other hand, worked for years to accomplish her goals,and instead found herself on an upward trend. In this case, it seems right tosay that the latter person lives a more enviable life, or at least more enviablein one respect. And it isn’t the trend per se, but rather the extent to whichthis trend is illustrative of the achievement of goals, rather than their failure.

5.4. The Manager and the Fullback

As a final argument, consider a potential response the partisan of Expla-nation D might have in response to Explanation C. According to the latterview, there is no on particular shape of a life that is better than another.Indeed, depending on the nature of an individual’s project, or the overallnarrative structure of a person’s life, it could be that a downward -slopinglife possesses all the relevant intrinsic goods. But this is implausible, or soit may be claimed. The shape of a life hypothesis is plausibly motivatedby noting that upward sloping lives are better. And hence Explanation Ccannot capture this evaluative fact, and hence must be supplemented withExplanation D.

However, I think that Explanation C delivers precisely the right resultin refusing to commit, except as a general tendency, to the signatory valueof a per se upward-sloping rather than a per se downward-sloping life. Taketwo examples:

Jack McKeon: Jack McKeon is a career baseball man whoseplaying days were entirely in the minor leagues, but who grad-

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ually showed success in the minors as a manager. In 1973 hewas promoted to manage the Kansas City Royals, and went onto manage in and out of the majors with moderate success until2003, when he took over for the under-performing Florida Mar-lins and led them to a World Series title, retiring from baseball,at the age of 75, in 2005.

Compare McKeon with:

John Riggins: John Riggins was a professional football fullbackand primary ball carrier for the Washington Redskins duringthe late ’70s and early ’80s. Riggins was a crucial member of thehigh-powered 1982 and ’83 offense, which included his iconic “70Chip” touchdown run in Super Bowl XVII, widely regarded asone of most significant plays in American professional football.Riggins retired from football in 1985, and after flirting with acareer in acting, eventually settled down as a regional sportsbroadcaster, providing occasional commentary. He is currentlythe host of “The John Riggins Show” on Radio WTOP.

Though there are a number of unknowns about the lives of John Rigginsand Jack McKeon. But one thing is relatively certain: barring some massiveunforseen set of circumstances, John Riggins’ life peaked substantially earlierthan McKeon’s. McKeon’s greatest success came as a baseball manager wellinto his 70s. Not so with Riggins; the highlight of his career, his life’s highestpoint (or so we can assume for the sake of argument) came at the age of33. And though neither McKeon nor Riggins have had anything like thedramatic downfall of O. J. Simpson or the dramatic rise of J. O. Nospmis, wecan generally assume that McKeon’s life has an upward trajectory, Riggins’a downward.

Without a heck of a lot more information we won’t be able to say any-thing definitive about the relative quality of these lives. But we can wonderabout the following question: is the fact that McKeon’s greatest momentcame in his 70s itself a reason to favor his life rather than Riggins’, thegreatest moment of which came in his 30s? I think not. And the explana-tion, I think, sheds considerable light on why, ultimately, the significance ofa life’s shape is best captured by Explanation C. For both Jack McKeon andJohn Riggins, their lives have an extremely desirable or valuable narrative:McKeon’s of the successful baseball manager, Riggins’ of the Hall of Famerunning back. Just because the high points of the latter occur earlier inlife than the high points of the former seem to me no reason to favor one

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narrative or story rather than the other. They are both excellent stories,composed of valuable achievements, projects, and the fulfillment of goals.

Given the cases as stated, it seems that Explanation C is more plau-sible than Explanation D. Where Explanation C is more restrained in itstreatment of the significance of a life’s shape is precisely where we shouldbe more restrained. We should not hold that the shape of a life makes aper se difference to a life’s quality; a life’s shape is not itself a sui generisintrinsic value. But what a life’s shape can very often, though not always,be an indicator of an underlying long-term value, the value of which neednot await vindication by a given person’s desires or pro-attitudes.

6. Does ILA Fail?

Explanation C is the best interpretation of SLH. But the final task of thispaper is not yet complete. Does SLH threaten ILA? Is our folk wisdom, i.e.,that one should hope, in life, for “more good than bad” true, or must weamend this to hope also for good and bad in a certain temporal order?

My general claim, for which I shall argue presently, is that whether ornot ILA stands or falls on the basis of SLH is fully dependent on whether ornot one already accepts ILA. And hence SLH can provide no independentreason to accept or to reject ILA. But, or so it seems to me, given that ILAis itself independently plausible, we have at least some, perhaps defeasible,reason to deny the claim that SLH causes any problems for ILA.

The first step in my argument for this claim is to consider the characterof the welfare goods for which the shape of a life maintains signatory value.These are long-term goods, goods that are rightly said to occur across time.The value of any individual moment of that long-term good (say, a valuablenarrative or a long-term project) will, of course, depend on further moments.If, for instance, Jack McKeon was never able to win the World Series, or waslater regarded as a managerial failure, one might think less of the strugglehe had to endure to get to that point. Perhaps it was not “redeemed” in theright way.26 Or perhaps this renders his earlier moments simply one amongmany struggles in a more general narrative of frustration. Or somethinglike that. And hence it would seem that when looking at such goods, thevalue of any particular moment within that good will surely depend on thepresence or absence of other individual moments.

Velleman treats this as a reason to reject ILA. He writes:

Intuitively speaking, the reason why well-being isn’t additive is

26See, for instance, Portmore.

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that how a person is faring at a particular moment is a tempo-rally local matter, whereas the welfare value of a period in his lifedepends on the global features of that period. More specifically,the value of an extended period depends on the overall order orstructure of events—on what might be called their narrative ordramatic relations.27

Velleman, once again, glosses this as a claim about the “meaning” of anyindividual moment. Because the meaning of each moment can change de-pending on the global structure of a temporal sequence of moments, it isimpossible to determine the global value of the whole simply by addingup the value of the individual moments. This is because the value of thewhole will in part be determined by its narrative structure. The value of themoment will be determined, strictly speaking, by the moment itself. Illus-trating this claim, Velleman speaks about the value of learning from one’smisfortunes:

[C]onferring instrumental value on a misfortune alters its mean-ing, its significance in the story of one’s life. The misfortunestill detracted from one’s well-being at the time, but it no longermars one’s life story as it formerly did. A life in which one suffersa misfortune and then learns from it may find one equally well-off, at each moment, as a life in which one suffers a misfortuneand then reads an encyclopedia. But the costs of the misfortuneare merely offset when the value of the latter life is computed;whereas they are somehow cancelled entirely from the accountsof the former. Or rather, neither misfortune affects the valueof one’s life just by adding costs and benefits to a cumulativeaccount. The effect of either misfortune on one’s life is propor-tionate, not to its impact on one’s continuing welfare, but to itsimport for the story. An edifying misfortune is not just offset byredeemed, by being given a meaningful place in one’s progressthrough life.28

We should be careful in our language here. Moments are not intrinsicallygood or bad. Rather, moments are “derivatively” good, i.e., in the sense ofcontaining individual intrinsic goods or bads. If I’m kicked in the shins atnoon, noon is a bad moment for me, not because noon itself is intrinsically

27Velleman, 58.28Velleman, 65.

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bad, but rather because I got kicked in the shins at noon. But with thislanguage in mind, we can state Velleman’s argument as follows:

1. The value of individual moments is derivative of the intrinsicvalue of welfare goods that occur at those moments.2. The “meaning” of individual moments is a function of therelationship between those moments and other moments.3. This “meaning” can itself be a good-making feature of a lifeor a temporal sequence of a life.4. The “meaning” of an individual moment cannot effect thevalue of that moment.5. Hence it is not the case that the value of individual momentsfully determines the value of a life.

For my dialectical purposes, the essential question is whether any of theabove premises could sensibly be denied. And I think the answer is quiteclearly “yes”. And this is because it is perfectly possible to hold that the“meaning” of an individual moment within a life, and hence the intrinsicbenefits or burdens that occur within a life, can themselves affect the valueof that individual moment. In other words, one could deny (4). Take, forinstance, Velleman’s claim that we ought to learn from our misfortunes. Onecould claim that the fact that one learned from one’s misfortunes rendersone’s misfortunes less bad than they otherwise would have. In retrospect,the fact that one’s misfortunes were learned-from “redeems” them, but this“redemption” itself affects their momentary value.29

Such a claim might sound mysterious but it isn’t. Take an analogy.Consequentialist moral theories hold that the moral value of a particularaction at a particular time is a function of the consequences of that action.No matter how the action seemed at the time of the action, its moral statuscould be affected positively or negatively by things that happen later, i.e.,if they led to disaster or bliss, for instance. A similar suggestion could bemade here. One of the important evaluative aspects of individual welfaregoods or bads is their place in an overall valuable narrative. Of course, onecannot determine, simply by looking at the moment, the overall value thatthis intrinsic benefit confers. Instead, one has to wait for its place in anoverall narrative, just as one cannot determine the value of the morality ofan action at the moment, at least according to a consequentialist.

Nothing about this suggestion says that we must deny (4). I do notintend to suggest that this is how one ought to understand the evaluative

29I advocate this suggestion on behalf of a desire-satisfaction theory of welfare in “Desire-Satisfaction and Welfare as Temporal” forthcoming in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.

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phenomenon of the place of a moment in an overall global narrative orstructure. But the general point is that one can deny (4), and come to aperfectly coherent understanding of the manner in which narrative affectsvalue, i.e., by allowing the “meaning” of a particular momentary good, andits place in an overall narrative or structure, to affect its momentary intrinsicvalue. For Jack McKeon, had he not won the World Series, his strugglethrough baseball mediocrity would have just been that: struggle, whichis captured by those particular moments of pain or frustration he surelyexperienced as he was brought in and out of the majors, etc. But becausehe won the World Series, the negative value of this struggle was decreased,because the “meaning” of this struggle formed part of an overall desirablenarrative. A similar thing can be said of O. J. Simpson, though in reverse.The fact that his early triumphs were marred by an historic downfall lessensthe overall momentary value of those “highs”, in a way that is explained bytheir meaning, their presence in a narrative or life story that is decidedly,on the whole, undesirable.

Alternatively, one could accept (4), and say that the value of the mean-ing of a particular moment isn’t captured in the value of the moment itself,but is instead captured by a sui generis good, i.e., the good of maintaininga valuable life story or narrative, that isn’t itself locked down to any partic-ular time in a life. But the crucial point is this: why might someone acceptor reject (4)? We have seen that it cannot depend solely on whether he orshe would choose to accept the importance of the meaning of a given eventin a life story. This is because the meaning of an individual event in a lifestory can be evaluatively assigned to the momentary welfare value of thatvery event. It seems to me that the primary motivation for accepting (4)or denying it just is whether one wishes to accept ILA, or the claim thatthe value of a life is an aggregative sum of the value of individual momentswithin a life.30 And if this is correct, insofar as the welfare goods uponwhich the significance of the shape of a life supervenes can be interpretedas compatible with ILA, SLH itself has no independent power to rule out orin the aggregative interpretation of the welfare value of a life. ILA may be

30Of course, some may claim that there are particular challenges for one or the othermethod of interpretation of the value of a life story. One might say that welfare should,in fact, be assignable to times. After all, if a welfare good didn’t happen at a particulartime, this is tantamount to saying that it didn’t happen. Alternatively, one might suggestthat it is important to assign the momentary value of welfare goods based on the intrinsicproperties of individual moments. (Cf. Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 1.) Both objections, however, seem to me to simplypound the table against either interpretation, and hence shouldn’t be taken particularlyseriously. See Dorsey, op. cit.

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threatened, but it is not threatened simply by SLH.31

7. Conclusion

In this paper I have examined the significance of a life’s shape and cometo the following conclusions. First, it is a mistake to hold that the valueof a life’s shape is solely deflationary. Though the value of a life’s shapecan, in fact, be responsible for an uptick in individual momentary benefits(i.e., either by being an instrumental value or by being an intrinsic valueconditional upon a momentary desire, say), this is not enough to capture thebroader significance of a life’s shape. Nevertheless, it is also implausible tosay that the overall shape of a life is itself an intrinsic value. More plausibleis the suggestion that the shape of a life maintains signatory value, value asa sign of a more fundamental good, i.e., a good narrative, a fulfilled project,an accomplished lifelong goal.

But if the inflationary, non-intrinsic interpretation of the significance ofa life’s shape is correct, we can sensibly interpret this position as eithercompatible or incompatible with ILA. Which interpretation we should take,however, depends on whether we wish to be committed to ILA or do not.And hence there is no independent reason to be found strictly within SLHto reject or embrace ILA. SLH itself is aggregation-neutral.

31For additional threats to ILA not to be found in the shape of a life, see Temkin,Rethinking the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. ??.

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