Dr Guy Fletcher: All’s Well that Ends Well? Why the shape of a life doesn’t matter.

Distinguish how well someone’s life is going at a particular point - their momentary well-being - from how well their life went as a whole, their lifetime well-being. How are these related? 

 

The simplest answer is that lifetime well-being is just aggregate momentary well-being. Theories that deny this are forms of holism about lifetime well-being. Recent discussions of holism, inspired by David Velleman, have focused heavily on one particular species of it, the so-called 'shape of a life' hypothesis. This is the claim that having an “uphill” distribution of momentary well-being contributes to lifetime well-being and does so over and above the instrumental effects that such a distribution might have upon momentary well-being.