Philosophy Research Seminar series
Welfare and Felt Duration
Abstract: We seem to be able to distinguish between objective duration and subjectively experienced duration, and, to many, it seems intuitive that it is subjective duration that modulates how good or bad a pleasant or unpleasant experience really is from the perspective of an individual's welfare. If so, this might significantly affect our assessment of the lifetime welfare of different kinds of animals with high or low internal 'clock-speeds', and potentially also the welfare of minds run on digital hardware that might exist in future. However, I argue that we know of no way to make sense of what subjective duration consists in on which it turns out to be plausible that the durations of pains and pleasures should be measured in subjective time when determining their contributions to well-being or ill-being. Moreover, some plausible theories of what subjective duration consists in strongly suggest that subjective duration is irrelevant in itself.