Sullivan Meghan - A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence

You are timebiased if you have systematic preferences about when events happen. For instance, you might prefer to spend your tax return now rather than save it for a rainy day, believing full well that if you put it in savings, it would increase in value. This is a near biascaring less about the experiences money can buy when they are scheduled further in the future. You might prefer that a painful root canal scheduled for tomorrow was already over and done with. This is a future bias caring less about an unpleasant experience when its past. You might prefer that the best part of a vacation come at the end rather than the beginning. This is a structural biascaring about the temporal sequence of your experiences. You might even have preferences about when events outside of the confines of your life happen. Perhaps you now prefer that environmental crises happen a long time after your death rather than in the next few generations, because imminent catastrophes would diminish the meaning of your projects. This is a kind of meaning biascaring about when your life occurs in relation to other events.

Philosophers, economists, and social psychologists have tended to treat these time biases in a piecemeal fashion, offering different theories of the origin of such attitudes, different theories of how to measure their extent, and different verdicts on whether these various time biases are rational or irrational. But in this book, I will argue that our time biases are far more similar than we have acknowledged. And there is good reason to think that all time biases are irrational. Learning to recognize and overcome our irrational time preferences can help us become better planners. Indeed, if Plato is right, overcoming our time biases might even save our lives.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part () will focus on whether it is rational to care less about events that would happen in your distant future. Many social psychologists and philosophers simply assume that near bias is a pervasive but irrational attitude. But why is it wrong to care less about the distant future? I will isolate two philosophical arguments for why near bias is irrational and defend the arguments against objections. In the process, I will also offer a theory of rational egoistic concern.

The second part () will consider whether it is rational to care less about some events just because theyve already happened. This attitude, while common, has been largely ignored by social psychologists and philosophers. I will offer a theory of what it is to discount your past, and then argue that such a time bias is irrational for the same reasons it is irrational to be nearbiased.

The final part () will develop a theory of why we are timebiased even though we shouldnt be. I will explain what is (and, more importantly, isnt) entailed by temporal neutrality. And I will show how this theory can help us in determining when to stick to our past plans, in planning for the future in the face of radical change, and in understanding the meanings of our lives even if none of our plans make a permanent difference to the world.

If your curiosity is piqued and youd like to get straight into the debates about time biases, you can skip ahead to the first chapter. But some readers might be interested in a preview of the kind of rationality at play in these debates. The rest of this Introduction will describe the type of rationality that I am interested in, contrast it with some other common approaches, and then introduce the three main principles of rational planning that will reappear throughout the book.

This is a book about what you have most prudential reason to prefer and the extent to which temporal considerations should affect these preferences. Some philosophersand many economiststhink we ought to take our preferences as the fundamental inputs to a theory of rationality. On this view, there is no particularly deep question of why you have the preferences that you do. We just take it for granted that you have some preferences and then ask whether your set of preferences, taken as a whole, is logically consistent at a particular time. For instance, suppose Sparky the pyromaniac reports that right now he prefers blowing up cars to slowly burning them. ButSparky immediately continuesright now he also prefers slowly burning the cars to blowing them up. The minimalists will deem Sparky irrational for having contradictory preferences. But they remain silent on whether there is anything irrational about wanting to torch vehicles in the first place.

We often have good reason to make sure our preferences conform to logical constraints. But we omit an important dimension of rationality if we take individual preferences to be immune from criticism. Rational beings can and should deliberate about what preferences they ought to have. And in deliberating about the reasons that back our particular preferences, we often come to realize that some of our preferences are irrational. For instance, I might start off the electoral year preferring that Bernie Sanders win the 2016 primary rather than Hillary Clinton, with little reflection on my reasons for this preference and not having formed any other electoral preferences. I find that I just like Bernie. This preference is logically consistent. But I might nevertheless find myself learning more about the various candidates platforms and on the basis of new reasons come to prefer that Clinton win. There is an important sense in which my preferences are more rationally justified after this research and deliberation. And this improvement need not be explained as my preferences better cohering within some formal framework or with any of my other preferences. It has to do with my uncovering the reasons for what I should want. Philosophical reflection can help us uncover reasons for and against our preferences in just this way, and your preferences are more rational to the extent that they are better supported by reasons and less susceptible to bias.