Meghan Sullivan

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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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Elucidations · Episode 97: Meghan Sullivan discusses time biases · 11 Jun 2017 podcast

So the question he raises is, is it now rationally permissible, Parfit raises this question, for the young socialist Russian to set things up so as soon as he inherits the money, even though he's gonna want to keep it, he's gonna be forced to give it away.

So maybe like sets up a contract or something where he's forced to redistribute it.

You might think in those cases you're using the fact that like a character change is enough for you to say like you just don't even care about your future preferences anymore because that guy is so different than you that his preferences deserve to be discounted.

I think that's a bad way to interpret these cases.

And in fact, even if you know your character is going to change a lot, if that's you in your future, you should still care about setting up things so that your preferences are satisfied.

And here's one of the things I think that's going wrong with the Russian nobleman case.

There's a lot of moral noise when you present this thought experiment.

So a lot of us think like being a greedy capitalist oligarch is a really bad way of living.

No matter what, everywhere, always in every circumstance, somebody should give away that money as a moral imperative to redistribute that money.

And it's this moral imperative that's overriding our intuitions about what's rational to do.

And there's a way of testing that.

And one way of testing that is to do a thought experiment

That we might call the reverse Russian nobleman problem.

So let's imagine you've got a youth right now who's really greedy capitalist oligarch.

But he also knows in a few years, maybe when he gets out of college, he's gonna soften up a little bit and become like more generous and more socialist and probably wanna re give away a lot of his money.

Is it rational for him to set things up in such a way right now that he couldn't give away his money when he changes?

Or do you think it would be rational for him to set things up in such a way so he's guaranteed to be frustrated when he tries to become more generous?

I think a lot of us in that case have the intuition that yeah, there might be something like it might be pretty irrational for him to set things up just because he doesn't really identify with that future self.

Well if that's your intuition about the case, then you should think the same thing about the regular Russian nobleman case and just think like in those cases your your moral judgments are overriding or providing noise for your theory about what it's in your self interest to do in these cases.

Yeah, and as a matter of course, like we are pretty bad at guessing about how happy we will be after radical changes.

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