Search

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the ages, time has been considered a gilt from God - though it has always bad to be used in an economical way. In the modern era, time came to be seen increasingly as the resource par excellence, and the equation `time is money' was established. During the industrial revolution, this approach led to an enormous leap in growth and acceleration, brought about by the large-scale exploitation of carbon deposits accumulated over millions of years. Thus the conditions were created which enabled humans both to ignore the rhythms of nature and to attain the `perpetual motion' and `rest-lessness' of the nonstop society. Still, this `theft of time' cannot be carried on endlessly since, in spite of technological progress, it undermines the conditions of possibility for future economic activity and is therefore not `rational' in the long term, even from an economic point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]