Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Near-term bias (NTB), a preference for nearer over later goods of equal value, is widely thought to be prudentially irrational. Dale Dorsey has recently argued that it is, but by an argument that avoids the question-begging character of the traditional appeal to anticipated regret. On his view, it is unsavory to regret a past act performed from NTB while being presently disposed to perform the same act, and this shows NTB to be irrational. I argue that Dorsey's argument does not improve on the traditional one: the unsavoriness he identifies…

Our natural attitude is to care about the fate of a future person in a special manner once we know that this person is none other than ourselves. In the present paper, we defend the rationality of that attitude against Parfit’s famous contrary claim that ‘identity does not matter’. We argue that it is intrinsically bad for a conscious subject to have negative experiences, and that one therefore has reasons of a special kind (de se subject-relative reasons) to avoid having such experiences in the future. Our argument makes crucial…