Meghan Sullivan
speaker
520 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2017
last heard Jun 2017
Meghan Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Because you think a ten hour surgery, if it already happened.
is preferable to a five hour hour surgery that's scheduled in the future.
It's the same kind of trade off.
Now something that's weird about future bias, about discounting the past, is
If you have near biased preferences, you can act on those.
Like you can make bad decisions or good decisions based on those preferences.
You can decide to spend that money or put it into your retirement account or start smoking or refrain from smoking.
But if you're that patient in the Parfid case, there's nothing that like you can do to change whether or not you already had surgery.
There's no like bad decision seemingly you could make as a result of wishing that your surgery had already happened.
So for this reason I think a lot of philosophers have thought or just assumed you can have whatever preferences you want about the past.
Like rationality is a matter of performing actions that make your life go well.
If there's no action that you could ever take about the past, then you can have whatever wish or desire or preference you want about the past.
The way I think uh Lady Macbeth puts it is uh
that which is past redress is now for me past care.
If you can't do anything about something, don't care about it.
You know, care in whatever way you want about it.
So, for this reason, a lot of philosophers have said, like, we have that intuition in the perfect case.
You can want all the bad things in your life to already be in your past if you don't have any present memories of it, or if it can't affect your life at all going forward.
A big part of my project is like, let's look in some detail at the arguments for why it's irrational to be near-biased.
And we actually find that there are parallel arguments that say you shouldn't.
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