Past Achievements and Future Bias

Abstract

Abstract According to the Permissive View, it is rationally permissible for a person’s preferences to be both future-biased about pleasant experiences and temporally neutral about achievements. Some philosophers argue that, intuitive though it may be, the Permissive View can’t be right because it runs afoul of a plausible requirement for rationality: namely, that it is rationally impermissible to form one’s preferences by moving back and forth between different evaluative perspectives. Samuel Scheffler has recently attempted to show that this requirement is in fact compatible with the Permissive View. This paper casts doubt on Scheffler’s attempt. I argue that Scheffler either fails to reconcile the Permissive View with the requirement for evaluative consistency or commits himself to unacceptably counterintuitive claims.