Smoking rationality to our future selves : an application of a discount rate onto the smoking addiction

• Main Author: Abdul Rahim Siti Zulaiqah
• Other Authors: Andrew T. Forcehimes
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/73549
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper explores the rationality to smoke cigarettes across different temporal parts of a person’s life as grounded on the harms and benefits of smoking. Smokers typically smoke cigarettes for the temporary pleasures at the expense of its future pain. However, this act of smoking can only be just if the harms accrued to the future self are discounted. I propose that smokers should apply a discount rate in reducing the irrationality of future harms accrued to the future self. This gives rise to a version of my own discount rate which I call as the smoker’s discount rate, a formulation influenced by Parfit’s discount rate to degrees of psychological connectedness. As smoking cigarettes is intrinsically both addictive and habitual, the degree of connectedness is always stronger for addicted smokers. The stronger the addiction, the stronger the Relation R, psychological continuity and/or connectedness, holds. The discount rate, however, becomes conversely weak. I argue that because smoking is addictive, even if we accept a discount rate to reduce the future harms of smoking, the discount will be negligible. Therefore, for smokers, applying a discount rate to their future selves, is ineffectual.