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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Appearances
Then how much do you think you will want in thirty-five years?
It might be that you're more motivated to take your reasons for saving seriously if I describe it in the uh in the second way rather than in the stagey way.
And you know, these differences matter.
So I think we should at the very least be cautious about how we describe these planning problems and not think it's like fine to switch between stage talk and switch between endurantist talk, 'cause we might then when we're giving people evidence for our different theories of rationality, we might uh be turning off some of their ways of reacting to that evidence, if that makes sense.
So one big puzzle with this debate about time biases, you might say like, look, you're being really arbitrary when you care less about your distant future self or your past self and rational agents shouldn't be arbitrary in these ways.
A common next move in the argument, this is when you see Thomas Nagel make and Derek Parfitt make in this debate, is they say like, Okay, well if arbitrariness is bad, there seems to be only arbitrary differences between experiences as that happen to you and experiences that happen to other people.
Does being prudentially rational, does prudence require extreme altruism too?
If you if being prudential
Means not being arbitrary.
Then doesn't the whole concept of like being self interested just collapse?
And Parfit thinks it does, famously.
I don't think it does.
It's somewhat complicated to explain why.
I think one of the most convincing arguments for thinking that there's a real distinction between prudential rationality and altruism is a point that David Brink makes, which he calls the the compensation defense of prudence.
But basically the defense relies on a substantive claim about the metaphysics of personal identity.
When you make a far sighted trade off for your future self
You are going to get compensated for making that trade off.
You're going to get that extra money in your retirement account.
You're going to get that second marshmallow.
When you make a sacrifice, an altruistic sacrifice for somebody else, you never get compensated for that sacrifice.
Showing 381–400 of 520 · page 20 of 26
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