Abstract
There has recently been a revived interest in temporal justice among political philosophers. For example, lone mothers have, on average, 30 h less free time per week than people in couples without children. Recent work has focussed on free time as a distinct distributive good, but this paper argues that it would be a mistake for a theory of temporal justice to focus only on shares of free time. First, I argue that the concept of free time does not succeed in tracking discretionary control over time. All of time is a resource, and the particular moral relevance of free time must be established otherwise. Second, hours of time differ in use value, and we cannot fully track our concerns about the allocation of time, whether free or necessary, without taking this into account. We care about free time but also about ‘quality (of) time’. To explain this observation, I develop an account of the value of time as a resource. The value of time periods differs with the prospects for which a time period can be used, that is, what we can do and be with it. What we are allocating when we are allocating time is not just hours; it is hours of time with a certain value. Finally, I argue that a concern for the value of time is compatible with a resourcist theory of temporal justice.
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Notes
These two dimensions cannot be reduced to one, because there is incomplete substitutability between time and money. This will be elaborated in Section 1.
The most obvious way in which time is unequal is, arguably, inequalities in life length, but I will follow Rose (2016a, p. 41, footnote 3) and Goodin et al. in disregarding this source of inequality for our current purposes.
Goodin et al. do this using ‘social benchmarks’; i.e., necessary time is estimated based on how much time other people in a society actually spend meeting the same needs (Goodin et al. 2008, pp. 36–53). Rose argues that necessary time should be determined by an objective standard of what counts as basic needs and how much time it takes to meet them (Rose 2016a, pp. 53–58). Further discussion in Goodin (2017, pp. 40–42) and Rose (2017, pp. 106–108).
Goodin et al. seem to be egalitarians about the distribution of shares of free time (2008, pp. 3–4, 263–265), whereas Rose, without concluding decisively, discusses whether temporal justice should be egalitarian or use some other distributive principle (Rose 2016a, pp. 85–89, 128–129).
Goodin et al. write about the special properties of time as a resource (2008, pp. 3–4) and about time poverty as distinct from money poverty (2008, pp. 16–18). Vickery (1977), in introducing the idea of time poverty, also makes the assumption that there is incomplete substitutability between time and money. For a good discussion of more recent economics work on time poverty, see Williams et al. (2016).
Cp. Brown (1970, p. 176).
Goodin later (in Goodin 2017, p. 44) seems to acknowledge the concern for differences of control over what one does in one’s necessary time as a matter of temporal autonomy as he writes the following: ‘A concern with people’s autonomous control over their time should also lead us to care about how much control they have over what they are doing whether they are engaging in that activity out of choice or necessity’. However, he does not develop this nor its implications any further.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me make this point. To be fair, I think neither Rose nor Goodin et al. would claim that free time inequality is all there is to temporal justice, as they both disregard the obvious temporal inequalities associated with differences in longevity. However, I think the point still stands that we should think more about how the fact that all of time is a resource matters for temporal justice.
This may leave the free time approach to temporal justice open to the objection that not all people want time for leisure activities. The answer, I think, must be to argue that everyone should nevertheless have a share of free time. For one such argument, see Rose (2016a, pp. 43–45).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for help in making this point.
Economists also treat time as a resource that varies in value; see Festjens and Janiszewski (2015, pp. 178–181).
Cp. Goodin et al. (2008, p. 4): ‘Time is a necessary input into anything that one cares to do or to become’.
If taking a risk is involved, we can use expected value, i.e., the values of success and failure multiplied by their respective probabilities.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for terminological advice here.
There are many perishable goods, such as milk and fruits, that cannot be stored very long, but time cannot be stored at all. For more on how time is special as a resource, see Nordström et al. (2019, pp. 215–216).
I owe this comparison to an anonymous reviewer.
See also Brown (1970, p. 177).
A complete theory would, for instance, have to incorporate the fact that people appreciate variation, that a choice of project at one point in time may matter for what options are available at a later point in time, and so on.
If one does not think (temporal) justice should be responsibility sensitive, another way to deal with the availability of multiple projects could be to multiply the value of each available project with the probability of engaging in it, where the sum of these products gives the value of the time period so that the value of a time period equals its expected value.
However, there is of course also such a thing as having too much time, that is, having more time than one has valuable prospects. Williams (1973) gives a vivid philosophical treatment. For an interesting theorization and experimental study of how people’s valuation of time blocks depends on amount of time, see Festjens and Janiszewski (2015). Their study finds near indifference to small time gains, increasing marginal utility for moderate gains, and diminishing marginal utility for large gains. However, perhaps in a situation where people were used to having more time, they would also have more ideas about what to do with it, which would give higher marginal utility also for large gains.
I thank Malte Jauch for helping me make this point.
I here use ‘rule of regulation’ in the sense developed in Cohen (2008, p. 265).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
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Acknowledgements
I give special thanks to Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Göran Duus-Otterström for several rounds of feedback and discussions through which these thoughts matured into this paper. I also thank Søren Midtgaard, Kim Angell, Tom Parr, Malte Jauch, Andreas Bengtson, Douglas Bamford and Maria Nordström for helpful written comments and/or other significant input. Different versions have been presented at The Annual Meeting of the Danish Society for Philosophy in Vejle, March 2019, the Oslo-Aarhus Political Theory Workshop in Aarhus, March 2019, and at the MANCEPT Workshops Panel ‘Realizing Egalitarian Futures’ at Manchester University, September 2019. I thank Lauritz Munch, Andreas Albertsen, Lasse Nielsen, Robert Huseby, Jens Damgaard Thaysen, Asger Sørensen, Viki Møller Lyngby Pedersen, Fabio Wolkenstein, Sigurd Lindestad, Didde Boisen Andersen, Brookes Brown, Josette Daemen, Jason Branford, Cain Shelley, John Wilesmith, Angus Hebenton, Dai Oba and Anne-Sofie Greisen Højlund for their helpful comments on these occasions. Finally, I thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal for very helpful comments, which greatly improved the paper.
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Tyssedal, J.J. The Value of Time Matters for Temporal Justice. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 183–196 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10149-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10149-1