The trouble with prudence

Abstract

Standard discussions of prudence treat it as requiring time-slice management. That this is the standard view of prudence can be seen by its presence in two seemingly opposed positions on prudence, those of Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit. I argue that this kind of view fails to properly appreciate the difficulty with being prudent, treating imprudence as a kind of theoretical mistake. I then offer a characterization of prudence as integrity, the holding together of disparate but temporally extended parts of the self in a manner that makes the act of reasoning possible.

Keywords:

• practical reason
• prudence
• T. Nagel
• D. Parfit
• C. Korsgaard

Acknowledgements

This paper has been incubating for a long time, and so there are many people whose comments have been helpful in its reaching its current form and whom I would like to thank: Marya Schechtman, Abe Roth, Tamar Schapiro, Tamar Szabo Gendler, Daniel Sutherland and audiences who heard a version called ‘Prudence Reconceived’ at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, both in Milwaukee and Madison, Northwestern University, Children's Hospital of Chicago's lecture series on the virtues, and The 2006 Summer Institute of the Center for the Study of the History of Economic thought at George Mason. I have been able to make the most significant progress on this paper during a number of research leaves, supported by the Philosophy Department and the Humanities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for the journal for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

For a discussion of what I am calling prudence that distinguishes these different types of prudence, see Korsgaard (2004, esp. pp. 78–85).

This last description is from Ainslie (2001). Ainslie argues that all sorts of imprudent and akratic behavior is best understood as a result of the effect of hyperbolic rather than exponential discounting of the future.

Though Nagel takes the fact that the present-desire theory commits an agent to this attitude towards his future self to be a serious flaw in the view, some who defend such theories seem less troubled by it (MacIntosh, 2001, p. 355).

One might wonder why the present desire theory of reasons is committed to the temporal restrictedness of the matter of reasons. It is a necessary feature of the theory because without it the theory loses all distinctive content. If reasons’ matter is not temporally restricted, then their temporal location (now or distant) doesn't matter, and so there is no content to a view that insists that only present desires can serve as the matter of reasons.

Since Nagel goes on to argue that reasons must be objective (impersonal) as well as tenseless, and thus must be able to transmit motivational force from person to person, he does not strictly speaking need the temporal extension of a unified self to support the claim that future desires could ground present reasons. However, in the absence of the claim about the temporal extension of the self, there would be no specifically prudential reasons, and his position would more closely resemble Parfit's, at least in its structure: what we think of as prudential reasons would just be a peculiar sort of moral reasons. I am grateful to a referee for the journal for pushing me to see this point about Nagel's view.

Ainslie (2001) argues that issues of prudence boil down to intertemporal bargaining between different interests within a person, and that both short- and long-term interests often succeed by using strategies that block the other's prominence at given moments. Some of these strategies involve forms of identification discussed above.

A time-slice management theorist might reply that the ground of her principle of prudence is not the unified self as such but something like the overwhelming cost of disintegration. But notice that unless such a theory comes with a claim that rationality requires each of us to minimize costs impersonally (to the universe?), then she will need to be able to answer the question, with regard to the disintegrated agent, ‘costs to whom?’ I am grateful to an anonymous referee for the journal for both pointing out this line of argument and its potential problems.

One might try to rescue Nagel from the recourse to brute attitudes in the cited passage by bringing to bear the more robust realist picture of reasons that lies in the background of his overall argument. Thus, the time-slice manager could appeal to the fact of the reasons that do, timelessly, exist, in choosing one course of action over another. Whether this move would count as shoring up Nagel's view or digging it into a deeper hole may depend on one's philosophical temperament. But for the purposes of this paper, note that it would saddle Nagel's view of prudence with extraneous baggage that isn't essential to it, thus wouldn't count as a defense of the view of prudence itself. Thanks to a referee for the journal for pointing out the bearing that Nagel's realism has on these cases.

When criticizing the present-desire account of prudence, Nagel seems to be quite aware of this point. There he raises a somewhat different change of values case, ‘Suppose that for no reason having to do with the future, I conceive now a desire to become a policeman on my 35th birthday. If I do not believe that the desire will persist, or that any circumstances then obtaining will provide me with reason for being or becoming a policeman, is it possible to maintain nevertheless that the desire itself gives me reasons to do what will promote its realization? It would be extremely peculiar if anyone allowed himself to be moved to action by such a desire, or regarded it as anything but a nervous symptom to be looked on with suspicion and got rid of as soon as possible’ (1970, pp. 43–44). My point is that it would be just as peculiar if someone allowed herself to be motivated by the sort of belief about future values posited in the change of values cases, where it is completely detached from an account of how the change occurs. Moreover, once such an account is added to the case, then it either ceases to be coherent or it ceases to be a problem. See Schechtman (2002) for a similar analysis, though focused on a discussion of Parfit.

Surveying ways of answering the normative question is the aim of Korsgaard (1996a). She discusses the question (pp. 9–10), and discusses why Nagel's realist approach can't give a satisfactory answer (pp. 40–47). The point I am trying to raise here is not that such reasons can't motivate me, so is not about whether such reasons are internal and external in the sense made famous by Williams (1981), but whether they can speak to me.

The thought that the standards of morality are internal or constitutive standards of agency or rationality can be found in Korsgaard (2002) and in a somewhat different register, in Velleman (2006), both of whom take their views to be Kantian in this regard.

Note as further evidence that something is going wrong in Parfit's analysis of his case that the self-interest theory as he represents it gives an absurd answer to the question of why he should support saving Venice even when he does care about it. The self-interest view is going to have to say that he should do so because caring for Venice will turn out to be one of the longest lasting concerns of his life rather than that it is something that he presently cares deeply about.

I mean this term to gesture towards so-called ‘narrative’ theories of the self and personal identity without making particular claims about their details (for one such theory, see Schechtman, 1996). That is, I don't think we need here a complete theory of how the role of an event in one's overall life gives it significance and place and a connection to one's identity over time to note that we are attending to a different feature of an event when we attend to its significance to the person than when we attend to its temporal location. And this basic distinction is all I need here.

Korsgaard (1989/1996b, pp. 371–372) makes something like this point with regard to Parfit. What I am suggesting here is that a similar complaint can be made against Nagel.

It is important to stress here that the connection of values to identity aspects does not make all values values of self-expression. The connection explains why I take a given value to give me reasons to act one way rather than another, but not why I take that value to be worth identifying with.

There is temptation here to talk of practical identity aspects as if they were like mini-me's, fully functional, rational sub-parts of the self. While there is some value to be had from the metaphor of the multiple self as a kind of miniature city of deliberating parts, taking the picture too seriously obscures certain features of the internal logic of the self. Working out precisely where the dangers here lie and how to avoid them is well beyond the scope of the paper, but would certainly be necessary in any attempt to decide among the various alternatives to the time-slice management approach that would fit the general confines of the prudence as integrity view. For two very different discussions of intrapersonal conflict that attend to these issues while seeing prudence as integrity, see Lear (1998) and Ainslie (2001).

See Nozick (1993, chaps. 1–2) for a somewhat different account of the forward-looking nature of reasons, which relies in part on Ainslie's work. Of course, my vegetarianism might be shallow – adopted on a whim and ready to be abandoned at the first sign of difficulty. A large part of what determines which of my identities are deep and which shallow is, I think, ultimately my future actions. This is one of the ways in which our futures affect our pasts.

I discuss how to answer this question at greater length in Laden (2005).

Lear (1998) draws a contrast between defensive and non-defensive uses of reason that might be helpful in further thinking through this issue. Defensive uses of reason provide us with consistent stories about and explanations of our behaviors that save us from having to confront their underlying motivations. They are thus a bar to self-integration. Clearly, the kind of reasoning I have in mind here is the non-defensive kind.

See chapter 9 of Korsgaard (2009) for an illuminating discussion of Parfit's example, and why he both fails to integrate himself and thereby fails to be someone others can relate to.

As such, prudential reasoning on the integrity model will look a lot like the strategies found in Millgram (1997) and Taylor (1997) for approaching incommensurable values. Both argue that the commensurability of values is an achievement of practical reasoning, rather than a metaphysical or other fact that allows for practical reasoning in the first place.

For the beginnings of a view of practical reason as the process of forming such common ground, see Laden (2000).

This is clearer for Parfit, who is a Utilitarian, than for Nagel, who defends a kind of Kantianism, but it is no less true for Nagel.

For two recent attempts to do this that take their inspiration from Kant, see O'Neill (1989) and Korsgaard (2009). Both argue that the categorical imperative is a constitutive principle of reasoning. Another approach is to see the demands of morality in terms of the demands of reasonableness (Laden, 2000).