Prioritarianism, Timeslices, and Prudential Value

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that versions of prioritarianism that focus at least partially on well-being levels at certain times conflict with conventional views of prudential value and prudential rationality. So-called timeslice prioritarianism, and pluralist views that ascribe importance to timeslices, hold that a benefit matters more, the worse off the beneficiary is at the time of receiving it. We show that views that evaluate outcomes in accordance with this idea entail that an agent who delays gratification makes an outcome worse, even if it is better for the agent and worse for no one else. We take this to show that timeslice prioritarianism and some pluralist views violate Weak Pareto, and we argue that these versions of prioritarianism are implausible.

KEYWORDS:

• prioritarianism
• axiology
• prudential value
• delay of gratification
• Weak Pareto

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Besides the kind of prioritarianism that we will discuss, there is, for instance, deontic prioritarianism (see, e.g., Williams [2012] and Nebel [2017]), Fred Feldman’s [2016] baseline-dependent prioritarianism (see also Herlitz [2020]), and Lara Buchak’s [2017] ‘relative prioritarianism’.

2 Dennis McKerlie [1997] and Shlomi Segall [2016] have put forward such ideas.

3 There is another prioritarian view that we do not discuss in this paper. This view focuses on psychological connectedness: see Holtug [2010]. The problems examined in this paper might or might not pertain to this view, but, if they do, showing this would require longer elaboration.

4 For a discussion of locations of good, see Broome [1991: 22–31].

5 There is a different kind of objection that might occur to readers. Nils Holtug [2010] has argued for a theory of prudence according to which a person A’s present self-interest in a future benefit to person B depends, not on A’s being identical with B, but rather on A’s standing in a relation of ‘continuous physical realization of (appropriate) psychology’ to B: roughly, A needs to be psychologically connected to B. Moreover, according to Holtug, the strength of the self-interest depends both on the size of the benefit and on the strength of this relation. This theory of prudence, arguably, delivers the results sought by timeslice prioritarians in Delay of Gratification: If the relation of ‘continuous physical realization of (appropriate) psychology’ is sufficiently weak between the agent in the first period of A1 and the agent in the second period of A1 (i.e. if the agent’s psychology changes to a sufficient degree), then A2 rather than A1 is the better option, from a prudential point of view. There is no need to assess Holutg’s theory of prudence here. If this theory is convincing, axiological prioritarians might be able to avoid the kind of criticism developed in this paper. However, if one develops a version of axiological prioritarianism based on Holtug’s theory of prudence, one ends up with a particular version of axiological prioritarianism—Holtug’s version—that takes into account the relation of ‘continuous physical realization of (appropriate) psychology’ when assigning weights to individual benefits. Holtug’s axiological prioritarianism is an alternative to the versions of axiological prioritarianism that we criticize in this paper (timeslice and pluralist prioritarianism). Hence, advocates of the theories that we criticize cannot accept Holtug’s theory.

6 An alternative way of illustrating this point would be to assume that the agent in Delay of Gratification faces a a large sequence of the choice under consideration.

7 Cf. the ‘mistake in moral mathematics’ explained at the end of section 28 of Parfit [1986: ch. 3].

8 The result could also be seen as unsurprising in light of previous research on prioritarianism and uncertainty. Previous research on prioritarianism, prudential rationality, and uncertainty has shown that there are conflicts between prudential rationality and prioritarianism in cases of uncertainty where one norm evaluates prospects from a person-based perspective and another norm evaluates them from the perspective of states of nature [Otsuka and Voorhoeve 2009]. At a high level of abstraction, the research on prioritarianism and uncertainty shows that there is a tension between prioritarianism and prudential rationality when judgments are based on aggregation across certain two-dimensional ‘locations of good’—i.e. possible states of nature and people. Switching focus from uncertainty to time is, in some sense, just a switch from focusing on one of the dimensions of the location of goods to focusing on another. While prioritarianism and prudential rationality differ from each other with respect to whether they apply person-based, or instead state of nature-based, perspectives when uncertainty is introduced, timeslice prioritarianism and prudential rationality differ from each other with respect to whether they apply person-based or instead time-period-based perspectives when one looks at distributions across time. The general lesson seems to be that norms that are seemingly aligned with each other might come into conflict when one studies goods in multiple dimensions and when the norms express structurally different ways of accounting for differences in some dimensions.

9 Previous versions of this article were presented at a workshop on prioritarianism held as a satellite workshop of the 15^th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2018 and at the PPE seminar of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm in 2020. We would like to thank all participants, in particular Gustaf Arrhenius, Paul Bowman, Tim Campbell, Annette Dufner, Nils Holtug, Karim Jebari, Weyma Lübbe, Björn Lundgren, Christoph Lumer, Julia Mosquera, Ingmar Persson, Rudolf Schüßler, and Andrew Williams. Finally, we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for their extremely helpful reports.