Well-being and self-interest:  Personal identity, Parfit, and conflicting attitudes to time in liberal theory and social policy

Steven Smith

Well-being and self-interest: Personal identity, Parfit, and conflicting attitudes to time in liberal theory and social policy

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Abstract

Orthodox liberal accounts of well-being recommend temporal neutrality when pursuing individual self-interest. For Derek Parfit these accounts are inadequate as having a bias attitude to time consistently reflects the human condition and a reductionist view of personal identity. However, his position conflicts with contemporary understandings of well-being, as these are frequently based on non-reductionist views of personal identity which are opposed to Parfit’s reductionism. The alternative proposal here is to resist committing to an either/or proposition concerning personal identity and our attitudes to time, to make better sense of well-being promotion in liberal theory and social practice.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Routledge Handbook of Well-Being
Editors	Kathleen T. Galvin
Place of Publication	Abingdon, Oxon
Publisher	Routledge
Chapter	22
Pages	222-229
Number of pages	8
ISBN (Electronic)	978-1-315-72496-6
ISBN (Print)	978-1-138-85010-1
Publication status	Published - 14 May 2018

Keywords

Well-being
social policy
self-interest
liberalism
derek parfit
disability
old age pensions
adam smith
john rawls
henry sidgwick
rational choice
rationality
time
Identity
distribution
welfare state

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Steve Smith's chapter for Well-Being handbookAccepted author manuscript, 434 KBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

Cite this

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Well-being and self-interest: Personal identity, Parfit, and conflicting attitudes to time in liberal theory and social policy

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Keywords

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