Departments & Programs

Temporal neutrality affirms that the temporal distribution of goods and harms within a life has no normative significance of its own. The view is the intrapersonal analog of impartial conceptions of distributive justice. Under impartial distributive views, no agent is given a privileged position. That a distribution of goods privileges one particular agent cannot be a reason for favoring it, even when that agent is you. Under temporally neutral conceptions of prudence, no time is given a privileged perspective. That a distribution of goods privileges one moment over another cannot be reason for favoring that distribution, even if that moment is now.

In the first part of the talk, I assess various biases against temporal neutrality, including privileging the present, privileging the proximate future, and privileging the future over the past. I argue that the last of these biases is indefensible. The only reason for privileging the future is the mistaken conviction that we are incapable of influencing the goodness of our past. Assuming the falsity of hedonism, we can shape the goodness of our past without influencing it causally. In the second part of this talk, I assess various reasons for thinking that death is not a misfortune for the one who dies. One familiar set of considerations, due to Lucretius, is found to rest on a conflation of harms de dicto and de re. A second set of considerations requires indefensibly privileging the goodness of our future over the goodness of our past. However, a third set of symmetry considerations, again stemming from Lucretius, is a qualified success. Death’s status as a misfortune is invariant with respect to the direction of time. Even if the direction of time is an illusion, our reasons for being saddened by death remain unaltered. With Lucretius, I claim that we should take symmetric attitudes towards prenatal and postmortem nonexistence. Against Lucretius, I claim that they are both misfortunes. 

• View Current Events
• View Past Events