I find much to like in Craig Callender's [2022] arguments for the rational permissibility of non-exponential time discounting when these arguments are viewed in a conditional form: viz., if one thinks that time discounting is rationally permissible, as the social scientist does, then one should think that non-exponential time discounting is too. However, time neutralists believe that time discounting is rationally impermissible, and thus they take zero time discounting to be the normative standard. The (...) time neutralist rejects time discounting because they think it is rationally impermissible to prefer to live a worse life in expectation because of arbitrariness. Callender’s attack on the time-neutralist position is the following: the time-neutralist’s non-arbitrariness intuition assumes the existence of nonexistent ‘pure’ time preferences. In response, I aim to clarify the time-neutralist position and show that the non-arbitrariness argument does not rely on the existence of pure time preferences. Instead, the debate between time neutralism and permissivism about time discounting boils down to a methodological question: can we ever criticize the content of preferences? If so, we should embrace time neutralism. (shrink)

Several areas of welfare economics seek to evaluate states of affairs as a function of interpersonally comparable individual utilities. The aim is to map each state of affairs onto a vector of individual utilities, and then to produce an ordering of these vectors that can be represented by a mathematical function assigning a real number to each. When this approach is used in intertemporal contexts, a central theoretical question concerns the evaluative weight to be applied to utility coming at different (...) times. This question concerns the rate of pure time preference, which is one key determinant of the social discount rate. This article argues that the standard philosophical account of pure time preference is mistaken, because it ascribes to economists a methodological commitment they need not, and often do not, accept. This in turn undercuts the most common philosophical objection to pure time preference, which traces at least to Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The article then evaluates three further objections to pure time preference, concluding that it might still be defensible under certain circumstances. The article closes by articulating a final argument that is suggested by the “Social, Economic and Ethical Concepts and Methods” chapter of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. If this further argument is sound, it would constitute a decisive objection to pure time preference as it currently figures in much intertemporal welfare economics. (shrink)

This paper investigates two assumptions of the exponential discounted utility theory (EDU) to which Callender draws our attention: namely that we can cleanly distinguish pure from impure temporal preferences, and that past discounting can be ignored. Drawing on recent empirical work in this area, we argue that in so far as one might have thought that past-directed preferences are more pure than future ones, then there is evidence that people’s pure preferences (in so far as we can make sense of (...) that notion) show more interpersonal variation than has previously been thought. (shrink)

The empirically documented fact is that people’s preferences are time -biased. The main aim of this paper is to analyse in which sense do time -biases violate the requirements of rationality, as many authors assume. I will demonstrate that contrary to many influential views in psychology, economy and philosophy it is very difficult to find why the bias toward the near violates the requirements rationality. I will also show why the bias toward the future violates the requirements of (...) rationality in a very basic sense. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that our moral concern for future well-being should reduce over time due to important practical considerations about how humans interact with spacetime. After surveying several of these considerations (around equality, special duties, existential contingency, and overlapping moral concern) we develop a set of core principles that can both explain their moral significance and highlight why this is inherently bound up with our relationship with spacetime. These relate to the equitable distribution of (1) moral concern (...) in a universe that we can only causally affect in one temporal direction; (2) access to the benefits from using spacetime as a resource; and (3) the burdens of care given (1) and (2). We conclude by considering the practical implications of our argument and find that, while it is often assumed that a preference for present over future well-being weakens the case for existential risk mitigation, this likely is not the case. (shrink)

Philosophers working on time-biases assume that people are hedonically biased toward the future. A hedonically future-biased agent prefers pleasurable experiences to be future instead of past, and painful experiences to be past instead of future. Philosophers further predict that this bias is strong enough to apply to unequal payoffs: people often prefer less pleasurable future experiences to more pleasurable past ones, and more painful past experiences to less painful future ones. In addition, philosophers have predicted that future-bias is restricted (...) to first-person preferences, and that people’s third-person preferences are time-neutral. Philosophers disagree vigorously about the normative status of these preferences—i.e., they disagree about whether first-person future-bias is rationally permissible. Time-neutralists, for example, have appealed to the predicted asymmetry between first- and third-person preferences to argue for the rational impermissibility of future-bias. We empirically tested these predictions, and found that while people do prefer more past pain to less future pain, they do not prefer less future pleasure to more past pleasure. This was so in both first and third-person conditions. This suggests that future-bias is typically non-absolute, and is more easily outweighed in the case of positive events. We connect this result to the normative debate over future-bias. (shrink)

In ‘from times to worlds and back again: a transcendentist theory of persistence’ (henceforth TTP) Alessandro Giordani outlines five competitor views regarding the manner in which objects occupy regions along a dimension. These are: (1) classical uni-location (2) bare uni-location (3) multi-location (4) counterpart presence and (5) transcendent presence. Each view comes in both a temporal and modal version and Giordani argues that one ought to prefer transcendentism (i.e. 5) along both dimensions. According to temporal transcendentism, necessarily, no object is (...) exactly located at any region along the temporal dimension. Instead, any object, O, is derivatively present at some region, R, along the temporal dimension in virtue of bearing certain relations to something (according to TTP an event) that occupies R along that dimension. According to modal transcendentism, no object is exactly located at any region along the modal dimension. Instead, any object, O, is derivatively present at some region, R, along the modal dimension in virtue of bearing certain relations to something (according to TTP an event) that occupies R along that dimension. I argue that such a view is under motivated, and, at any rate, may not in fact offer a distinct view. (shrink)

Most of us are “time-biased” in preferring pains to be past rather than future and pleasures to be future rather than past. However, it turns out that if you are risk averse and time-biased, then you can be turned into a “pain pump”—in order to insure yourself against misfortune, you will take a series of pills which leaves you with more pain and better off in no respect. Since this vulnerability seems rationally impermissible, while time-bias and risk (...) aversion seem rationally permissible, we are left with a puzzle. (shrink)

Future-biased individuals systematically prefer positively valenced events to be in the future (positive future-bias) and negatively valenced events to be in the past (negative future-bias). The most extreme form of future-bias is absolute future-bias, whereby we completely discount the value of past events when forming our preferences. Various authors have thought that we are absolutely future-biased (Sullivan (2018:58); Parfit (1984:173) and that future-bias (absolute or otherwise) is at least rationally permissible (Prior (1959), Hare (2007; 2008), Kauppinen (2018), Heathwood (2008)). The (...) permissibility of future-bias is often held to be grounded in the structure of the temporal dimension. In this paper I consider several proposals for grounding the permissibility of such preferences and evaluate these in the light of the preferences we would have, and judge that we should have, in various time-travel scenarios. I argue that what we learn by considering these scenarios is that these preferences really have nothing to do with temporal structure. So if something grounds their permissibility, it is not temporal structure. (shrink)

More philosophical effort is spent articulating evolutionary rationales for the development of belief-like capacities than for precursors of desires or preferences. Nobody, though, seriously expects naturally evolved minds to be disinterested epistemologists. We agree that world-representing states won’t pay their way without supporting capacities that prioritise from an organism’s available repertoire of activities in light of stored (and occurrent) information. Some concede that desire-like states would be one way of solving this problem. Taking preferences as my starting point instead of (...) belief-like states, I defend two conclusions. First, psychologically real preference states, which approximately token expected utilities, have a quite general evolutionary rationale. They are a solution to the problem of efficiently allocating capacities with incompatible uses. This argument is a version of the Environmental Complexity Thesis. Second, preferences can plausibly function and naturally evolve without belief-like states, even though the converse claim is incredible. Preferences, that is, can mediate between discriminations of occurrent states (‘internal’ or ‘external’) and the processes selecting activity without mediation by stored indicative representations. By tokening expected utilities of actions conditional on discriminated state, they can increase the rate at which the ‘right thing’ is done at appropriate times, and they can do this without the support of belief-like, world-representing states. Preferences, even incomplete and noisy sets of them, are a fuel for success that will tend to be favoured when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when the organisms have complex behavioural repertoires with heterogenous returns and costs. (shrink)

We propose a theoretical model to explain the usage of time-inconsistent behavior as a strategy to exploit others when reputation and trust have secondary effects on the economic outcome. We consider two agents with time-consistent preferences exploiting common resources. Supposing that an agent is believed to have time-inconsistent preferences with probability p, we analyze whether she uses this misinformation when she has the opportunity to use it. Using the model originally provided by Levhari and Mirman (Bell J (...) Econ 11(1):322–334, 1980), we determine the optimal degree of present bias that the agent would like to have while pretending to have time-inconsistent preferences and we provide the range of present-bias parameter under which deceiving is optimal. Moreover, by allowing the constant relative risk aversion class of utility form, we characterize the distinction between pretending to be naive and sophisticated. (shrink)

Chrisoula Andreou says procrastination qua imprudent delay is modeled by Warren Quinn’s self-torturer, who supposedly has intransitive preferences that rank each indulgence in something that delays his global goals over working toward those goals and who finds it vague where best to stop indulging. His pair-wise choices to indulge result in his failing the goals, which he then regrets. This chapter argues, contra the money-pump argument, that it is not irrational to have or choose from intransitive preferences; so the agent’s (...) delays are not imprudent, not instances of procrastination. Moreover, the self-torturer case is intelligible only if there is no vagueness and if the agent’s preferences are transitive. But then he would delay only from ordinary weakness of will. And when it is vague where best to stop indulging, rational agents would use symmetry-breaking techniques; so, again, any procrastination would be explained by standard weakness of will, not vagueness. (shrink)

This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (...) (a) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation. (shrink)

What would it be for a process to happen backwards in time? Would such a process involve different causal relations? It is common to understand the time-reversal invariance of a physical theory in causal terms, such that whatever can happen forwards in time can also happen backwards in time. This has led many to hold that time-reversal symmetry is incompatible with the asymmetry of cause and effect. This article critiques the causal reading of time (...) reversal. First, I argue that the causal reading requires time-reversal-related models to be understood as representing distinct possible worlds and, on such a reading, causal relations are compatible with time-reversal symmetry. Second, I argue that the former approach does, however, raise serious sceptical problems regarding the causal relations of paradigm causal processes and as a consequence there are overwhelming reasons to prefer a non-causal reading of time reversal, whereby time reversal leaves causal relations invariant. On the non-causal reading, time-reversal symmetry poses no significant conceptual nor epistemological problems for causation. _1_ Introduction _1.1_ The directionality argument _1.2_ Time reversal _2_ What Does Time Reversal Reverse? _2.1_ The B- and C-theory of time _2.2_ Time reversal on the C-theory _2.3_ Answers _3_ Does Time Reversal Reverse Causal Relations? _3.1_ Causation, billiards, and snooker _3.2_ The epistemology of causal direction _3.3_ Answers _4_ Is Time-Reversal Symmetry Compatible with Causation? _4.1_ Incompatibilism _4.2_ Compatibilism _4.3_ Answers _5_ Outlook. (shrink)

The article presents the results of a survey of Odessa residents as part of a study of the motivational and value preferences of townsfolk in the field of fitness. It has been established that the determining motives for choosing a place for fitness are the individual trainer's approach to the client, personal comfort and convenient location of the fitness club. It was revealed that respondents have an interest in innovative training, but it has not yet acquired the character of a (...) trend. We also obtained data about the significance of playing sports under the supervision of a personal trainer and sports physician. The collected empirical material served as the basis for revealing the behavioral patterns of townspeople and allowed to identify three groups of city residents who are characterized by different motivational and value preferences in the field of fitness. The first ones are focused on personal achievements, the second – on health, good physical form, good time among like-minded people, the third – on the development of special skills, achievements and opportunities to escape from problems. Based on the survey, it was also revealed that the overall physical development of the child is the leading physical motivation for children to do sports, and despite the fact that children may have certain achievements in sports, parents do not attach much importance to them. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing; given access to some information about (...) the preference target, third-person preferences mirror first-person preferences. As a result, the simulation hypothesis has been proposed, according to which third-person preferences will mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. Second, there is evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past (we are first-person negatively hedonically future-biased) only when we view future events as fixed and in no way under our control. By contrast, when we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis, and which aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the heuristic version of the hypothesis, but no support for the squirrelling version. (shrink)

My objective is to offer at least a rough sketch of a new model for understanding time. Since many people are quite content with the model they have, I will try to show why a new model might be desirable or necessary. The exposition will be broken down into three parts. In the first part, I’ll try to show that no one has ever experienced time as such. In the second part, I shall argue that one good reason (...) for this is that there is no such thing as time as such. Finally, in the third part, I’ll try to reassemble what’s left of the conception of time after all this demolition, and I’ll offer a positive model (albeit rather vague) of what I prefer to call “temporality”. The exposition will follow lines familiar to contemporary students of time, but will, I hope, lead to conclusions that are at least modestly novel. (shrink)

There are two kinds of time-bias: near-bias and future-bias. While philosophers typically hold that near-bias is rationally impermissible, many hold that future-bias is rationally permissible. Call this normative hybridism. According to arbitrariness objections, certain patterns of preference are rationally impermissible because they are arbitrary. While arbitrariness objections have been levelled against both near-bias and future-bias, the kind of arbitrariness in question has been different. In this paper we investigate whether there are forms of arbitrariness that are common to (...) both kinds of preferences, and hence whether there are versions of the arbitrariness objection that are objections both to near-bias and future-bias. If there are, then this might go some way towards undermining normative hybridism and to defending a thorough-going time-neutralism. (shrink)

We care not only about what experiences we have, but when we have them too. However, on the B-theory of time, something’s timing isn’t an intrinsic way for that thing to be or become. Given B-theory, should we be rationally indifferent about the timing per se of an experience? In this paper, I argue that B-theorists can justify time-biased preferences for pains to be past rather than present and for pleasures to be present rather than past. In support (...) of this argument, I appeal to the doctrine of temporal parts or “four-dimensionalism” for short. When held in conjunction with a certain evaluative principle about whose experiences matter, four-dimensionalism reconciles B-theory with some time-biased preferences. (shrink)

The phenomenon of weakness of will – not doing what we perceive as the best action – is not recognized by neoclassical economics due to the axiomatic assumptions of the revealed preference theory (RPT) that people do what is best for them. However, present bias shows that people have different preferences over time. As they cannot be compared by the utility measurements, economists need to normatively decide between selves (short- versus long-term preferences). A problem is that neoclassical economists (...) perceive RPT as value-free and incorporate present bias within the economic framework. The axiomatic assumption that people do what is best for them leads to theoretical and practical dilemmas. This work examines weakness of will to resolve some shortcomings of RPT. The concept of intention is used to provide multiple self conception with the framework to decide between selves, which had not been done before. The paper concludes that individuals should not always follow their revealed preferences (desires) but the intentions (reason) because the latter indicates what people really want. (shrink)

(Pdf updated to final, slightly revised version of November 2010) -/- Almost everyone would prefer to lead a meaningful life. But what is meaning in life and what makes a life meaningful? I argue, first, for a new analysis of the concept of meaningfulness in terms of the appropriateness of feelings of fulfilment and admiration. Second, I argue that while the best current conceptions of meaningfulness, such as Susan Wolf’s view that in a meaningful life ‘subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness’, (...) do a fairly good job capturing meaningfulness at a time, we need an account that makes sense of the intimate connection between meaningfulness and having a direction in one’s life. According to the Teleological View I propose, what makes a single chapter of a life most meaningful is success in reaching central, objectively valuable goals as a result of exercising essential human capacities. Life as a whole is most meaningful when past efforts increase the success of future goal-setting, goal-seeking, and goal-reaching, so that the life forms a coherent whole without being dedicated to a single aim. Since coherence in this sense is a holistic property of a life, global prudential value is not a function of local prudential values. I suggest that just as pleasure is the final good of human beings as subjects of experience, meaningfulness is the final good of human beings as active agents. (shrink)

This essay examines Qoheleth’s Catalogue of the Times poem in Eccl 3:2–8. I argue that the two most common scholarly interpretations of the poem’s overall meaning fail to sufficiently account for its literary context and that an underdeveloped alternative reading is to be preferred. When we read the poem in light of two other closely related passages, 1:4–11 and 3:9–15, it becomes clear that a poem ostensibly about “time” is much less concerned with “timing” than is typically thought, but (...) instead signifies Qoheleth’s frustration with the inevitable equilibrating tendency embedded into every human task. (shrink)

Background: Current practice frequently fails to provide care consistent with the preferences of decisionally-incapacitated patients. It also imposes significant emotional burden on their surrogates. Algorithmic-based patient preference predictors (PPPs) have been proposed as a possible way to address these two concerns. While previous research found that patients strongly support the use of PPPs, the views of surrogates are unknown. The present study thus assessed the views of experienced surrogates regarding the possible use of PPPs as a means to help (...) make treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. -/- Methods: This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to determine the views of experienced surrogates [n=26] who were identified from two academic medical centers and two community hospitals. The primary outcomes were respondents’ overall level of support for the idea of using PPPs and the themes related to their views on how a PPP should be used, if at all, in practice. -/- Results: Overall, 21 participants supported the idea of using PPPs. The remaining five indicated that they would not use a PPP because they made decisions based on the patient’s best interests, not based on substituted judgment. Major themes which emerged were that surrogates, not the patient’s preferences, should determine how treatment decisions are made, and concern that PPPs might be used to deny expensive care or be biased against minority groups. -/- Conclusions: Surrogates, like patients, strongly support the idea of using PPPs to help make treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. These findings provide support for developing a PPP and assessing it in practice. At the same time, patients and surrogates disagree over whose preferences should determine how treatment decisions are made, including whether to use a PPP. These findings reveal a fundamental disagreement regarding the guiding principles for surrogate decision-making. Future research is needed to assess this disagreement and consider ways to address it. (shrink)

It is often said that the world is explained by laws of nature together with initial conditions. But does that mean initial conditions don’t require further explanation? And does the explanatory role played by initial conditions entail or require that time has a preferred direction? This chapter looks at the use of the ‘initialness defence’ in physics, the idea that initial conditions are intrinsically special in that they don’t require further explanation, unlike the state of the world at other (...) times. Such defences commonly assume a primitive directionality of time to distinguish between initial and final conditions. Using the case study of the time-asymmetry of thermodynamics and the so-called ‘past hypothesis’ — the hypothesis that the early universe was in a state of very low entropy —, I outline and support a deflationary account of the initialness defence that does not pre- suppose a basic directionality of time, and argue that there is a relevant explanatory asymmetry between initial conditions and the state of systems at other times only if certain causal conditions are satisfied. Hence, the initialness defence is available to those who reject a fundamental direction of time. (shrink)

A layered approach to the evaluation of action alternatives with continuous time for decision making under the moral doctrine of Negative Utilitarianism is presented and briefly discussed from a philosophical perspective.

I briefly discuss the philosophical reasons for preferring the future over the present.

We investigate the causal manipulability hypothesis, according to which what partly explains (a) why people tend to prefer negative events to be in their further future rather than their nearer future and positive events to be in their nearer future rather than their further future and (b) why people tend to prefer that negative events be located in their past not their future and that positive events be located in their future not their past, is that people tend to discount (...) the value of events they are less able causally to manipulate. If people discount the value of events they are less able to causally manipulate, then since often temporally nearer future events are more causally manipulable than further ones, and since future events are manipulable whereas past ones aren’t, this could explain both (a) and (b). In turn, if the causal manipulability hypothesis is correct, this might suggest that insofar as people’s preferences are explained in this manner, those preferences are rationally permissible, since relative causal manipulability is normatively relevant. Thus, ascertaining whether the causal manipulability hypothesis is true may shed light on the normative status of such preferences. We investigate the cognitively mediated version of the causal manipulability hypothesis, according to which people’s consciously held beliefs about the relative causal manipulability of events explains (a) and (b). Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence in favour of this view. We suggest that either relative causal manipulability plays an explanatory role, but one that is not cognitively mediated, or that it does not play any role, even if it is sometimes associated with other factors, such as probability, that may play a role in explaining some time biased preferences. (shrink)

Through reference to Karl Löwith's reading of time in Hegel as fundamentally inspired by the temporality of Aristotle, the paper shows how the absolute "now" is thoroughly informed by historical time. Hegel's preferred tense is that of the Perfekt, the present perfect, where the present "now" is always also what it has been. Hegel thus reconciles Greek and Christian forms of temporality, the distinction that Löwith reads as unreconciled and tragic in Hegel's "young" followers: Feuerbach, Stirner, Bauer, Marx (...) and Nietzsche. Nonetheless, the Left Hegelian heritage is right in comprehending Hegelian time as fundamentally past-oriented. Their own stunted philosophical endeavors are aimed at the future. (shrink)

In the present study it was shown that both decision heuristics and social value orientation play important roles in the building of preferences. This was revealed in decision tasks in which participants were deciding about candidates for a job position. An eye-tracking equipment was applied in order to register participants´ information acquisition. It was revealed that participants performing well on a series of heuristics tasks (availability, representativeness, anchoríng & adjustment,and attribution) including a confidence judgment also behaved more accurately than low (...) performers in the fulfillment of the preference tasks. It was also established that the high performers were not as influenced by whether uncertainty was presented in terms of probabilities or in terms of frequencies as was the low performers. With regard to social value orientation the results revealed that decision processing differences were more systematic between cooperators and competitors than between cooperators and individualists. Also, the cooperators did not seem to attend more to proenvironmental goals than to profit goals in the evaluation of the candidates. Finally, it was shown that accountable cooperators invested more time in their decisions than those that were not accountable, and that no such difference was observed between accountable and not accountable competitors or individualists. (shrink)

We often show a greater inclination to assist and avoid harming people identified as those at high risk of great harm than to assist and avoid harming people who will suffer similar harm but are not identified (as yet). Call this the identified person bias. Some ethicists think such bias is justified; others disagree and claim that the bias is discriminatory against statistical people. While the issue is present in public policy and politics, perhaps the most notable examples can be (...) found in medical ethics such as in ICU triage decisions made during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The Rule of Rescue, as the application of the identified person bias is sometimes called, states that spending large amounts of resources rescuing identifiable individuals who are in imminent danger is justified. In this paper, I show that our distorted attitudes toward time play a role in identified person bias. I claim that ICU triage decisions are better explained by a preference to treat people sooner rather than later, which is at least partially due to near bias (positive events are to be preferred to be near rather than distant), than by a preference to treat identified lives over statistical lives. Thus, another bias, near bias, is involved in the reasoning behind the identified person bias and the Rule of Rescue. (shrink)

In this introduction to contemporary conceptions of time and change, I investigate what our experience of time, that is, our experience of change, seems to be and ask whether or not we can say that how it seems could match the reality. My conclusion is that more recent contemporary conceptions of time can do this but that more intuitive or traditional conceptions cannot. Thus, the more contemporary conceptions are preferable for research into time consciousness.

This paper reviews debates related to the social cost of carbon (SCC) and the challenge of pricing uncertain damages that will occur only in the future. They often revolve around the pure time preference rate, which reflects how much one favors present over future well-being. The SCC measures the marginal cost of the impact on economic growth caused by the emission of a quantity of greenhouse gases equivalent to an additional ton of carbon dioxide (tCO2eq). There is significant (...) variance among estimates of the SCC; one of the reasons for it is a disagreement on how to bring future damages to present values, especially over the so-called "delta parameter" – the pure time preference rate – of the corresponding discount function. On the one hand, the descriptive approach, associated with William Nordhaus, proposes to use the time preference empirically observed among individuals, which would result in a significant limitation of the present value attributed to the distant future. On the other hand, the normative approach, associated with Nicholas Stern, proposes to treat everyone impartially, in every generation, and so implies transferring more resources to future generations. In the limit, assuming exponential population growth, it would lead to a philosophical stance akin to the so-called "longtermism" (as defended by William MacAskill in What we owe the future). In addition, the analysis points out obstacles to using the SCC to price carbon for climate policies. These include aspects related to economic methodology (such as ecological economics critiques of welfarist accounts of intergenerational allocations) as well as political philosophy. Thus, challenges related to uncertainty about socioeconomic development trajectories, intergenerational justice, and public reason become key. Finally, we present the target-consistent pricing approach, where one calculates a carbon price compatible with specific mitigation targets – an alternative to SCC methodologies. This approach is advocated as a way to avoid the uncertainty and the disagreements associated with the SCC, emphasizing the importance of meeting goals set by binding political decisions – such as the Paris Agreement. (shrink)

The central question in meta-ethics, and arguably all of ethics, is the question of what moral statements refer to. Several candidates have been proposed, including Platonic objects, natural objects, commands, and personal preferences. The answer, I suggest, is that it is none of these. Rather, morality is a framework. We see this by looking at common moral terms: ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘justice’, ‘guilt’, ‘responsibility’, ‘blame’, and ‘rights’. These terms all have something in common: they are legal terms. Since morality dates (...) to prehistoric times, it’s easy to see where this could have come from: prehistoric societies observed nature acting in a ‘court-like’ way – for example punishing them for overhunting – and inferred that this was a larger version of their own tribunal processes. Thus, we can define morality as an anthropomorphic framework based on the analogy of a human court, applied to human behaviour and its relation to nature. The framework persisted through human religious history, with various gods being the lawmaker and judge. This presents a problem: human society has worked hard to eliminate non-natural objects from our model of the world, replacing them with natural descriptions. Assuming we don’t really believe nature is a giant court, the question is how we replace morality with a natural description. (shrink)

It has widely been assumed, by philosophers, that our first-person preferences regarding pleasurable and painful experiences exhibit a bias toward the future (positive and negative hedonic future-bias), and that our preferences regarding non-hedonic events (both positive and negative) exhibit no such bias (non-hedonic time-neutrality). Further, it has been assumed that our third-person preferences are always time-neutral. Some have attempted to use these (presumed) differential patterns of future-bias—different across kinds of events and perspectives—to argue for the irrationality of hedonic (...) future-bias. This paper experimentally tests these descriptive hypotheses. While as predicted we found first-person hedonic future-bias, we did not find that participants were time-neutral in all other conditions. Hence, the presumed asymmetry of hedonic/non-hedonic and first/third-person preferences cannot be used to argue for the irrationality of future-bias, since no such asymmetries exist. Instead, we develop a more fine-grained approach, according to which three factors—positive/negative valence, first/third-person, and hedonic/non-hedonic—each independently influence, but do not determine, whether an event is treated in a future-biased or time-neutral way. We discuss the upshots of these results for the debate over the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this present paper is twofold: (1) to study the role of gender in food preferences and (2) to study the change in food choice due to climate change in Chandigarh, India. Thus, the hypothesis developed are that (1) there is a significant effect of environmental change on the dietary habits of the women and (2) gender norms are significant in the selection of foods in Chandigarh. -/- Design/methodology/approach The literature review was done with the help of (...) NVivo 11, and for quantitative data analysis, SPSS version 22 is used. -/- Findings The study concluded that societal gender norms were not significant for women in the choice of food. Also, climate change and women are an essential factor in food preferences at the household level. -/- Originality/value While framing the adaptation policy and programs at the institutional level, the cultural and traditional knowledge gets little attention. Hence, the present paper will contribute in the policy-making from a gender perspective. (shrink)

Craig Callender [2022] provides a novel challenge to the non-arbitrariness principle. His challenge plays an important role in his argument for the rational permissibility of a non-exponential temporal discounting rate. But the challenge is also of wider interest: it raises significant questions about whether we ought to accept the non-arbitrariness principle as a constraint on rational preferences. In this paper, I present two reasons to resist Callender’s challenge. First, I present a reason to reject his claim that the non-arbitrariness principle (...) only targets pure time preferences. Second, I criticize the inference Callender draws from a modest claim to a much stronger claim. The modest claim is that it can be hard to reveal the contents of an agent’s preferences. The stronger claim is that this provides us with a reason to reject a certain kind of normative constraint on rational preferences. I argue that the modest claim doesn’t motivate the stronger claim. The upshot of my two arguments is good news for those sympathetic to the non-arbitrariness principle: Callender’s challenge can be overcome, at least as it currently stands. (shrink)

Many philosophers have assumed that our preferences regarding hedonic events exhibit a bias toward the future: we prefer positive experiences to be in our future and negative experiences to be in our past. Recent experimental work by Greene et al. (ms) confirmed this assumption. However, they noted a potential for some participants to respond in a deviant manner, and hence for their methodology to underestimate the percentage of people who are time neutral, and overestimate the percentage who are future (...) biased. We aimed to replicate their study using an alternative methodology that ensures there are no such deviant responses, and hence more accurately tracks future bias and time neutrality. Instead of finding more time neutrality than Greene et al., however, we found vastly more past bias. Our explanation for this surprising finding helps to reveal the rationale behind both future and past biased preferences, and undermines the generalisability of one of the most influential motivations for the rationality of hedonic future bias: Parfit’s My Past or Future Operations. (shrink)

This article is a critical survey of the debate over the value of the social discount rate, with a particular focus on climate change. The ma- jority of the material surveyed is from the economics rather than from the philosophy literature, but the emphasis of the survey itself is on founda- tions in ethical and other normative theory rather than highly technical details. I begin by locating the standard approach to discounting within the overall landscape of ethical theory, and explaining (...) the assumptions and simplifications that are needed in order to arrive at the model that is standard in the discounting literature. The article then covers the general theory of the Ramsey equation and its relationship to observed interest rates, arguments for and against a positive rate of pure time preference, the consumption elasticity of utility, and the effect of various sorts of uncertainty on the discount rate. Finally, it turns specifically to the ap- plication of this debate to the case of climate change, focussing on the recent controversy over the low discount rate used in the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change. (shrink)

All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time-neutralists (...) contend, rationally impermissible? And what is it that grounds their having the normative status that they do have? We consider two sorts of arguments regarding the normative status of future-biased preferences. The first appeals to the supposed arbitrariness of these preferences, and the second appeals to their upshot. We evaluate these arguments in light of the recent empirical research on future-bias. (shrink)

This chapter starts from the claim that the state is plagued with problems of political short-termism: excessive priority given to near-term benefits at the expense of benefits further in thefuture. One possible mechanism to reduce short-termism involves apportioning greater relative political influence to the young, since younger citizens generally have greater additional life expectancy than older citizens and thus it looks reasonable to expect that they have preferences that are extended further into the future. But the chapter shows that this (...) is unlikely to make states significantly less short-termist: no empirical relationship has been found between age and willingness to support long-termist policies. Instead, the chapter proposes a more promising age-based mechanism. States should develop youth citizens’ assemblies that ensure accountability to future generations through a scheme of retrospective accountability. (shrink)

Many times, what we say proves to be wrong. It might turn out that what we took to be a comforting remark was, in fact, making things worse. Or that a joke was inappropriate. Or that yelling out loud was rude. More importantly for this paper, there are plenty of cases in which what we said turns out to be false: we spoke without paying attention, we were misinformed or tricked, or we made a reasoning mistake. -/- A particular instance (...) of this latter phenomenon is when someone changes their perspective and doesn't find their previous assertions true anymore. For example, imagine that you used to like licorice as a child, and that you went around saying things like "Licorice is tasty." But, growing up, you find licorice too strong and quite boring; your tastes have changed. While the taste of licorice itself has not changed, you are not going around anymore uttering "Licorice is tasty." In fact, in certain cases, you might even think that what you said in your childhood was wrong - at least in light of your present preferences. -/- Sometimes we "take back" the assertions we made when we realize they are no longer true. Such speech acts of taking back can be performed in various ways: more formally, as effected in a court of law or when an official speaks to the press, or more informally in our day-by-day interactions. These acts of taking back are known as retraction. Retraction is usually achieved by employing certain linguistic markers ('I was wrong', 'I was mistaken', 'I retract', "Scratch that' etc.) that signal that the retractor takes their previous speech act to be faulty in a certain way. -/- This phenomenon has formed the basis for a popular argument used by relativists about a variety of natural language expressions (predicates of taste, epistemic modals, moral and aesthetic claims etc.) in support of their view. Recently, several considerations (mostly from contextualists about the same expressions), both from the armchair and based on empirical studies, have been offered to undercut the support retraction was thought to provide for relativism. In this paper, I consider and re-evaluate that support in light of both types of considerations, showing that neither of them decisively undermines it. However, to survive the contextualist counterattack, the relativist needs to pay a price: that is, she will be forced to make some concessions or rethink certain claims. I show what I think those concessions should be and what needs to be rethought (and how). The upshot is that, while the support retraction offers relativism is not as strong as initially believed, appeal to retraction remains a legitimate move in the debate. In section 1, I introduce the views in the debate and clarify the phenomenon of retraction and its dialectical role. Armchair data are investigated in section 2, proper experimental studies in section 3, while section 4 summarizes and concludes. (shrink)

In carrying out cost-benefit or cost-effective analysis, a discount rate should be applied to some kinds of future benefits and costs. It is controversial, though, whether future health is in this class. I argue that one of the standard arguments for discounting (from diminishing marginal returns) is inapplicable to the case of health, while another (favouring a pure rate of time preference) is unsound in any case. However, there are two other reasons that might support a positive discount (...) rate for future health: one relating to uncertainty, and the other relating to the instrumental benefits of improved health. While the latter considerations could be modelled via a discount rate, they could alternatively be modelled more explicitly, in other ways; I briefly discuss which modelling method is preferable. Finally, I argue against the common claims that failing to discount future health would lead to paradox, and/or to inconsistency with the way future cash flows are treated. (shrink)

In recent years, a disagreement has erupted between two camps of philosophers about the rationality of bias toward the near and bias toward the future. According to the traditional hybrid view, near bias is rationally impermissible, while future bias is either rationally permissible or obligatory. Time neutralists, meanwhile, argue that the hybrid view is untenable. They claim that those who reject near bias should reject both biases and embrace time neutrality. To date, experimental work has focused on future-directed (...) near bias. The primary aim of this paper is to shed light on the debate by investigating past-directed near bias. If people treat the past and future differently with respect to near bias, by being future-directed but not past-directed near biased, then this supports a particular version of the hybrid view: temporal metaphysic hybridism. If people treat the past and future the same with respect to near bias, then this supports a simple version of time neutralism, which explains both future bias and near bias in terms of the functioning of a single mechanism: the anticipatory/retrospectory mechanism. Our results undermine the claim that people are future-directed, but not past-directed, near biased, and hence do not support temporal metaphysic hybridism. They also fail to support simple time-neutralism; instead, they suggest that there are multiple mechanisms that differently shape future- and past-directed preferences. (shrink)

Present-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive events to be located in the present rather than the non-present, and for negative events to be located in the non-present rather than the present. Very little attention has been given to present-bias in the contemporary literature on time biases. This may be because it is often assumed that present-bias is not a distinctive psychological kind; that what explains people’s being present-biased is just what explains them displaying various (...) other time-biases. According to this view, there is no need to investigate present-bias independently of investigating these other biases, since present-bias is really just a manifestation of these other biases. We call this the manifestation thesis. We take up the question of whether the manifestation thesis is true, and argue that it is not. Thus, by failing to investigate present-bias in its own right we are failing fully to understand the spectrum of ways in which people display time biases. In turn, we suggest, this may have implications for the ways we evaluate whether present-bias is rationally permissible. (shrink)

We direct different attitudes towards states of affairs depending on where in time those states of affairs are located. Call this the type asymmetry. The type asymmetry appears fitting. For instance, it seems fitting to feel guilt or regret only about states of affairs that are past, and anticipation only of states of affairs that are future. It has been argued that the type asymmetry could only be fitting if there are tensed facts, and hence that since it is (...) fitting, there are tensed facts. In this paper I argue that tensed facts are not necessary to ground the fittingness of the type asymmetry, and thus we have no reason, arising from the fittingness of the asymmetry, to posit such facts. I also argue for a stronger conclusion: even if these facts obtain they are no part of what grounds the fittingness of the type asymmetry. These facts are explanatorily redundant. (shrink)

Philosophers have long noted, and empirical psychology has lately confirmed, that most people are “biased toward the future”: we prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. At least two explanations have been offered for this bias: belief in temporal passage and the practical irrelevance of the past resulting from our inability to influence past events. We set out to test the latter explanation. In a large survey, we find that participants exhibit significantly less (...) future bias when asked to consider scenarios where they can affect their own past experiences. This supports the “practical irrelevance” explanation of future bias. It also suggests that future bias is not an inflexible preference hardwired by evolution, but results from a more general disposition to “accept the things we cannot change”. However, participants still exhibited substantial future bias in scenarios in which they could affect the past, leaving room for complementary explanations. Beyond the main finding, our results also indicate that future bias is stake-sensitive and that participants endorse the normative correctness of their future-biased preferences and choices. In combination, these results shed light on philosophical debates over the rationality of future bias, suggesting that it may be a rational response to empirical realities rather than a brute, arational disposition. (shrink)

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Current debate in the metaphysics of time ordinarily assumes that we should be realists about time. Recently, however, a number of physicists and philosophers of physics have proposed that time will play no role in a completed theory of quantum gravity. This paper defends fictionalism about temporal thought, on the supposition that our world is timeless. We argue that, in the face of timeless physical theories, realism about temporal thought is unsustainable: some kind of anti-realism must be (...) adopted. We go on to provide an argument against eliminativism about temporal thought. While it doesn't follow from this argument that fictionalism about temporal thought is true, we suggest that this nonetheless shows that fictionalism should be regarded as the preferred view. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe ability of providing an adequate supervenience base for tensed truths may seem to be one of the main theoretical advantages of both the growing-block and the moving-spotlight theory of time over presentism. However, in this paper I will argue that some propositions appear to be as problematic for growing-block theorists as past-directed propositions are for presentists, namely propositions stating that nothing will be the case in the future. Furthermore, I will show that the moving-spotlight theory can adequately address (...) all the main supervenience challenges that can be levelled against A-theories of time. I will, thus, conclude that, at least as far as the supervenience principle is concerned, the moving-spotlight theory should be preferred over both presentism and the growing-block theory. (shrink)

Future-bias is preferring some lesser future good to a greater past good because it is in the future, or preferring some greater past pain to some lesser future pain because it is in the past. Most of us think that this bias is rational. I argue that no agents have future-biased preferences that are rationally evaluable—that is, evaluable as rational or irrational. Given certain plausible assumptions about rational evaluability, either we must find a new conception of future-bias that avoids the (...) difficulties I raise, or we must conclude that future-biased preferences are not subject to rational evaluation. (shrink)