A Puzzle about Other-directed Time-bias 1

¹I owe thanks to Alex Byrne, Sally Haslanger, Chris Heathwood, Cody Gilmore, Barry Lam, Steve Yablo and two anonymous reviewers for most helpful comments.

Abstract

Should we be time-biased on behalf of other people? ‘Sometimes yes, sometimes no’—it is tempting to answer. But this is not right. On pain of irrationality, we cannot be too selective about when we are time-biased on behalf of other people.

Notes

¹I owe thanks to Alex Byrne, Sally Haslanger, Chris Heathwood, Cody Gilmore, Barry Lam, Steve Yablo and two anonymous reviewers for most helpful comments.

²Derek Parfit drew attention to what he called ‘a surprising asymmetry in our concern about our own, and other people's pasts’. We tend to care about our own past suffering only insofar as it impacts upon our future, but we care about the past suffering of a beloved for its own sake—if Parfit were to discover that he suffered terribly last year it would trouble him little, but if he were to discover that his dead mother suffered terribly in the year before she died, it would trouble him greatly [Parfit 1984: 181 – 4]. Fair enough, but, as the nearby and far-away daughter cases illustrate, there are curious asymmetries within the way in which we care about other people's pasts. (Incidentally, I take it that Parfit is aware of this because, in an effort to elicit the better-life intuition, he stipulates that he is distant from his mother: ‘I am an exile from some country, where I have left my widowed mother. Though I am deeply concerned about her, I very seldom get news’1983: 181].)

³We can say this while leaving it open whether facts about the past may have some bearing on the value of a predicament.

⁴Things get complicated when all other things are not equal. Suppose, for example, that the later extraction brings with it two extra days of stomach-clenching dread. Then perhaps your daughter will have a better life if she suffers the earlier, painful operation and cuts short all that dreading. But, in the case we are looking at, there is one day of dreading either way. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for showing that the case needs to have this feature.

⁵This much is not controversial, although of course, as papers by Slote 1982 and Velleman 1991 illustrate, the precise way in which the distribution of good and bad things across lives determines their relative value is controversial.

⁶I don't know of any research on the psychology of time-bias on behalf of other people. But there has been research on the psychology of time-bias on one's own behalf, summarized by George Ainslie 2001. And Yaacov Trope [Trope, Fujita, Henderson, and Liberman 2006 has conducted some very suggestive research on the way in which empathizing is sensitive to spatial and temporal distance.

⁷I should emphasize that this argument has never been made in print. The cases have never been discussed in print. But it is has popped up several times in my undergraduate lecture class, so it may be worth addressing here.

⁸There is logical space for an advocate of the majority view to deny this, to say that once you have discovered that your daughter is here before you, it is mandatory that you prefer (a) to (c), but prior to that discovery it is not mandatory to prefer (a) to (c). But this would take a lot of motivating. Why have a preference for ϕ over ¬ϕ, upon discovering that φ, if you did not have a prior preference for (φ∧ϕ) over (φ∧¬ϕ)?

⁹Some may disagree. Larry Temkin 1996, for example, believes that the relations better for me, better for my daughter, better for Joe Bloggs, etc. are intransitive. So I assume he already thinks that appropriate concern for a daughter mandates intransitive preferences. Someone who holds such a view may be untroubled by a new example of mandated intransitivity. I won't weigh into the (considerable) debate on this topic here (see Norcross 1997; Rachels 1998; Binmore and Voorhoeve 2003; Broome 2004: 50 – 64]), beyond observing that even those who are sympathetic to Temkin's view concede that the intransitivity is prima facie puzzling, that it deserves an explanation. But this ‘Where's My Daughter?’ case is very different from the familiar cases in which, supposedly, better for is intransitive (typically such cases involve trade-offs between two factors that bear upon the well-being of a person—factors like the intensity and duration of a bout of suffering, or the intensity of a bout of suffering and the financial rewards that come from enduring it). So the stock explanations are unlikely to be satisfactory.

¹⁰To elicit this preference you would, of course, need to wake her up, and take advantage of the period of amnesia that (it is useful to pretend) follows waking.

¹¹We had some evidence that this was true all along. After all, in the far-away case, the preference that she have the later operation becomes less and less stable as you learn more and more about her condition (as you see the video-feed … etc.). And the grain of truth upon which full-information theories of rationality are precariously balanced is that you should be antecedently suspicious of a preference that will, you know, disappear as you learn more and more about its object.