The author is Samuel Scheffler, and the subtitle is The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment. He is one of America’s leading philosophers, and proves it once again here.
Much of this book is devoted to arguing against Derek Parfit’s view of “time neutrality,” namely that a pleasure or pain is not intrinsically more or less valuable because it arrives earlier or later in time. Scheffler has some compelling examples of intuitions that seem to violate Parfit’s time neutrality. Here are two:
a) If you will have written say 6 good books in your life, you might at a moment of time care how many of them lie in your past, and how many lie in your future.
b) If a loved one dies, you want to be grieving for some particular period of time, and for a period of time of a particular length. You also (probably) prefer that most of the grieving passes after some particular period of time.
Scheffler has other examples too, but those force you to consider what time neutrality really means.
One possible defense of time neutrality is to invoke a ceteris paribus clause, namely when comparing different time periods a time neutrality standard is allowed to hold certain things constant across the two periods. Scheffler should have done more to consider that option. That said, a sufficiently strict ceteris paribus clause obliterates the distinctions between past and future, and threatens to make time neutrality a tautology (i.e., of course you should be time neutral if the past and present differ in no distinguishable regards).
Another possible defense is to suggest that time neutrality does not necessarily apply to individual “personalist” decisions, but it should rule impersonal judgments of social welfare and assessments of “what is best.” That is the stance I take in my Stubborn Attachments.
A third defense, but only a partial one, is to suggest that virtually all individuals, at the margin, should be more time neutral than they are currently.
A further trick might be to ask how Scheffler finds some of the counterexamples to time neutrality compelling, but presumably not all possible counterexamples are compelling. He is weighing the costs and benefits, and other philosophical considerations, of having most of the books in your life ahead of you rather than behind you, to continue with one of his exmaples. And finding those two states of affairs are not equally valuable. What discount rate should he be using to assess which are the effective counterexamples? What if that discount rate were in essence zero? Time neutrality would have re-entered through the back door. You have to choose some discount rate to evaluate all of those counterexamples and their degree of compellingness, and if Scheffler thinks the right rate is, say, three percent, he ought to come out and say so. But I suspect the arguments for that position would look rather weak, weaker than the arguments for time neutrality at the very least. And so there is a silence where he needs to give some answer or another as to how exactly costs and benefits get weighted through time.
Ultimately I think of a multiplicity of not-fully commensurable perspectives on time neutrality are required to give a life meaning, and to make our attachments salient. And some of those perspectives ought to include time neutrality, and indeed will need to include time neutrality, most of all at the level of social choice. At some level or another, the time neutrality position will prove to be indispensable as part of the portfolio.
That is not where Scheffler ends up, but in any case I am happy to recommend this book strongly to anyone with an interest in serious philosophy.
Note that many other issues are considered in the work as well. He gives new arguments for “finding meaning in the whole,” yet without going overboard on dubious metaphysics. There is also an implied theory of obligation in his account, namely that you should act to help create more meaning and more attachment for others. His notion of “archived lives” is fascinating, but I fear it, and much of the associated discussion, gives one very neurologically specific understanding of memory too central a role in understanding human valuation and also human attachment.
It is all worth a ponder.
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