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Brink on Temporal Neutrality

By Lawrence Solum

David O. Brink (University of California, San Diego) has posted Prospects for Temporal Neutrality (The Oxford Handbook of Time, Craig Callender, ed., Clarnedon Press, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This paper focuses on normative questions about intertemporal distribution that might seem parallel to more familiar questions about interpersonal distribution. Temporal neutrality is the claim that the temporal location of benefits and harms within a life should not affect their normative significance and implies that agents should have equal concern for all parts of their lives. I focus on temporal neutrality as a demand of prudence. A traditional rationale for temporal neutrality appeals to the idea of compensation: whereas there is no automatic interpersonal compensation for sacrifice, because benefactor and beneficiary are different people, intrapersonal compensation is automatic, because benefactor and beneficiary are the same person. This is why sacrifice of one's present interests for the sake of one's later greater good is a paradigm of rationality. Despite the hegemony of temporal neutrality, it appears to have some counter-intuitive implications ? it may seem to be undermined by reductionist accounts of personal identity, it may seem to compromise fidelity to one's ideals in cases involving diachronic changes of personal ideals, it may seem committed to problematic assumptions about the symmetry of death and prenatal nonexistence, and it might suggest that our apparent preference for pain being in the past is irrational when the alternative would be a smaller future pain. I consider these objections to temporal neutrality and argue that its normative and metaphysical commitments are surprisingly robust.

Highly recommended!

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on February 26, 2010 (boomark / email).