The Value and Risks of Hope

This chapter considers the value and risks of hope. It defends the priority of first-personal assessments of the value of hope, suggesting that it is often hopeful people themselves who are best positioned to understand the value of their hopes. But since hope can lead us astray, an evaluative framework for hope is needed. While most philosophers who theorize hope’s value tend to focus on assessments of epistemic and prudential rationality, this chapter argues that hope can also be evaluated as fitting and morally appropriate. Recognizing the full range of evaluative dimensions of hope is important for answering the all-things-considered practical question of whether and for what one should hope. This chapter defends Victoria McGeer’s framework for what it means to hope well to capture how the evaluative measures for hope work in practice, while orienting the rationality-of-hope question as a social and political question about the value of hope in community with others.

The Possibility of Temporal Bias

This chapter discusses whether prudential rationality ought to permit of temporal biases: biases toward goods in the near future in comparison to the far future, and goods in the future in comparison to the past. I argue that there are strong rationales for such biases and that extant arguments offered by Meghan Sullivan, David Brink, Meghan Sullivan and Preston Greene, and Tom Dougherty against such biases fail.

Temporal Neutrality and The Demandingness of Prudence

This chapter provides a rationale for temporal neutrality that succeeds against the rationales for temporal biases provided in Chapter Eleven. I argue that temporally biased agents display unsavory attitudes toward temporally located goods that should not be permitted by an acceptable theory of prudential rationality. Following this, I discuss the demandingness of prudence in light of temporal neutrality, and argue that while prudence may be a significant source of self-regarding reasons, it needn’t be the only such source.

The rationality of political experimentation

Theorists from John Stuart Mill to Robert Nozick have argued that citizens can gain insight into the demands of justice by experimenting with diverse forms of political life. I consider the rationality of such experimentation, arguing for three distinct but related claims. First, rational citizens will not be highly incentivized to conduct experiments in living. Here I develop an account of what I call the ‘prudential rationality constraint’ (PRC). The PRC implies that rational citizens will be undermotivated from the standpoint of social value to conduct experiments in living. Second, despite the success of various radical political experiments (e.g., democracy after 1648), citizens generally ought to engage in moderate rather than radical political experimentation. The latter will nearly always be prudentially irrational to conduct, hard to learn from, and quite possibly harmful to participants and third parties. Finally, there are important but overlooked ways, including through entrepreneurship, in which institutions can incentivize citizens to engage in socially valuable political experimentation.

Preferences and Prudential Reasons

Preference-based theories of prudential value seem to generate an absurd result when combined with commonplace platitudes about prudential rationality: it would seem that if the satisfaction of our preferences is the source (or even a source) of prudential value, then prudential rationality must be neutral (in, at least, a troubling range of cases) between taking steps to achieve the objects of one's preferences and merely engineering one's preferences to take as their object(s) that which obtains. Either way, one seems to conform to the prudential demand to promote one's well-being. But this is widely held to be counterintuitive. In this article, I argue that this verdict arises only given eminently controvertible interpretations of a preference-based axiology and of the constitution of prudential reasons.

Neutrality, Partiality, and Meaning in Life

Discussion of whether values and norms are neutral or not has mainly appeared in works on the nature of prudential rationality and morality. Little systematic has yet appeared in the up and coming field of the meaning of life. What are the respects in which the value of meaningfulness is neutral or, in contrast, partial, relational, or ‘biased’? In this article, I focus strictly on answering this question. First, I aim to identify the salient, and perhaps exhaustive, respects in which issues of neutrality arise in the contexts of life’s meaning. In addition to providing a taxonomy of the key points of contention, a second aim is to advance reflection about them by considering the most important arguments that have been marshalled in favour of one side or the other, particularly as they appear in recent neutral positions. I conclude that meaning in life is neutral with respect to time but not any other conditions such as agents and patients, with a third aim being to point out that this makes the value of meaning different from the kinds of non/neutrality encountered in some salient conceptions of prudence and morality.