Time bias and prudential rationality: a defense of the rational permissibility of future bias

• Main Author: Low, Kang Sheng
• Other Authors: Andrew T. Forcehimes
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Philosophy
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/174511
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Prudence is often claimed to rationally require temporal neutrality. Time biases like future bias are thus rejected as rationally impermissible as the temporal location of a good is deemed to be rationally insignificant. However, we appear to have a strong tendency to be future-biased in the case of hedonic goods. This has raised a long-standing debate regarding the rational permissibility of future bias. In this paper, I propose that the debate can be framed in terms of whether we have more than one type of prudential self-interest. I argue that we have two robust kinds of temporal identities and perspectives from which we evaluate our self-interests – the future-facing perspective and the whole-life perspective –, and that each perspective is equally valid and deserves equal priority. I then argue that rationality is perspectival and depends on both perspectives, and insofar as we sometimes ought to adopt the future-facing perspective, we have a rationale to rationally permit future bias in those cases.