Deprived Through Time

This is the first chapter of my dissertation (New York University, 2020), reprinted here because I think it’s alright.

1.1. Strange, pessimistic attitudes

We are often rather ambivalent about the passage of time. It is common to observe that as we get older, time feels like it goes by faster. Generally, this is not meant as a good thing. That the promise of living somehow outside time is part of a traditional religious picture of heaven is also telling. Secular counsels to embrace time’s passage, to not view time as the enemy, reveal the prevalence of our time-related angst.

Our anxiety about time’s passage doesn’t seem to be due solely to the fact that we want to do things that there may not be enough time for, although that is part of it. It is also disturbing to many people just that time keeps going, and going, and going! Even if we try to live life to the fullest, there is the sense that everything will inevitably pass us by. Sometimes this sense even leads us to try to fight back by seeking out more long-lasting experiences, practicing mindfulness of the present, or otherwise trying to renegotiate what feels like a problematic and generally disempowering relationship with time’s inexorable march.

But it’s not easy to say why the passage of time is a bad thing, or even how it could be a bad thing. The ‘movement’ of time is a precondition on our doing anything at all. Everything we value takes place in and through time. But still, at least some of us have a vague sense that, in some hard-to-articulate way, it is unfortunate that things have to be this way.

Many of us also have related-seeming feelings about our own deaths that are similarly hard to justify. The most philosophically mainstream view of the badness of death is the deprivation view, according to which death is bad (or a harm, or a misfortune)[1] for someone insofar as and because it deprives him of good things—experiences, achievements, and so on—that would otherwise have been part of his life.[2]  The deprivation view has the interesting consequence that death is not very interesting from an evaluative perspective. It’s bad for us in just the same way that, for instance, not being invited to a party is bad for us: purely by keeping from us good things we’d otherwise enjoy. Of course, it’s worse than not getting invited to a party, but this represents a difference in degree and not in kind.

Against this, many people feel that death is special in some way, that its role in our evaluative lives is very different from other deprivations, even grave deprivations like not being able to have children or failing to have a successful career. Philosophers write books about death; poets, poems about death; and death is how every Greek tragedy must end. Surely death is not just an imposition—one among many—that keeps us from having more of what we want in life.

Given the deprivation view of the badness of death, the intuition that death is special in this way looks like it may just be a mistake: death is bad in the same way that any other kind of deprivation is bad. Its apparent specialness is an illusion, perhaps a leftover fear of damnation or a brute feeling with arational, evolutionary origins.

An even more inexplicable attitude is the sense that eventual death undermines the value of many of life’s activities. It’s a familiar thought that the fact that we will inevitably die somehow makes ordinary things less worthwhile. This is not just the sense that these activities may be wastes of our finite time on earth (though that is also a common feeling), but a different, more mysterious sense that because we are finite everything gets drained of some of its color. But how can this possibly be an intelligible reaction to the fact that we will eventually die? This stereotypically ‘teenage’ attitude is associated with an irrational and undirected angst. It has never appeared to be philosophically explicable;[3] yet it is tenacious.

Call these three rather mysterious sentiments—that the passage of time is bad for us, that death is bad in a special way, and that the fact that we will die in some way makes the activities of life less valuable—the pessimistic attitudes.

1.2. The pessimistic attitudes, comparativism, and the bias toward the future

In this chapter, I show how the pessimistic attitudes can be rationalized—can be made sense of—by the natural extension and combination of two common ideas.

The first is comparativism. This is the idea that something—an event or state of affairs—is good (bad) for you just in case things are better (worse) for you given the event than they would be if some relevant alternative obtained instead.

The second idea comes from the bias toward the future. Someone who is biased toward the future prefers, all else equal, to have good events in her future rather than in her past, and bad events in her past rather than her future. Roughly speaking, she’d rather have good things ahead of her rather than behind her, and bad things over with rather than still to come.

So described, the bias toward the future is a psychological phenomenon, a preference, and not properly described as an ‘idea.’ However, most people have this preference, and do not regard it as irrational. If you have this preference and think it’s perfectly reasonable, you might naturally think—as discussed in the introduction—that it is desirable to have goods in front of you and evils behind you. This might be because what’s valuable for people depends on what they rationally permissibly prefer in some way, or it might be because what people permissibly prefer reflects what has value for them. In either case, the bias toward the future naturally gives rise to the idea that it is more desirable for someone who is future-biased to have something good in the future, and to have something bad over with. This idea (which for the remainder of this chapter I will refer to as the future bias idea), I will argue, helps rationalize the strange pessimistic attitudes we have been discussing toward death and the passage of time.

Now, the rational permissibility of the bias toward the future is contested. A number of philosophers have argued that it is a mistake to have preferences for when things happen relative to the present when all else is equal. [4]  But as a descriptive matter we do feel temporally located in this way, and future bias’s place in our psychology seems secure. It is overwhelmingly common to be future-biased and to regard it as perfectly sensible. The ordinary attitude is that of course it’s better to have something bad—most obviously in the case of painful experiences—over and done with.

Showing how the future bias idea and the pessimistic attitudes relate—showing, that is, that the latter helps make sense of the former—represents the beginning of this investigation into the psychological, emotional, and rational significance for us of the bias toward the future. How future bias impacts us seems to me to be underexplored. And its striking role in making sensible the pessimistic attitudes is, I think, just one example of how the bias toward the future pervades our psychology in ways that are not always appreciated.

I have said I am going to show how the future bias idea and comparativism ‘rationalize,’ or ‘make sense of’ the pessimistic attitudes. I briefly discussed this notion in the introduction; but let me take a moment now to more fully explain what I mean by ‘rationalize’, by contrasting rationalization with two other relations we might seek to establish between ideas and sets of attitudes: justification and explanation.

As I use the term, if we wanted to justify some attitudes, we’d try to show that we should have those attitudes, all things considered. One would typically do this by showing that having them is implied by some ideas that one argues is true. For example, one might try to justify a feeling of protectiveness toward different species of animals, or anger at their extinction, by arguing that species variation is intrinsically valuable.

What I am calling rationalizing a set of attitudes, on the other hand, involves showing that the attitudes would be justified given some plausible ideas that may or may not be true. For instance, we might rationalize the desire to vote for a law, which may or may not in fact hurt the economy, by showing that it is a rational response to some (possibly misleading) information, or a reasonably believed (but possibly false) economic theory. We might express this by saying that the information or the theory makes sense of the support for the law, or more formally, renders it conditionally rational. As I discussed in the introduction, I think this project of conditional rationalization is helpful for investigating the significance of the bias toward the future in our lives.

Finally, explaining a set of attitudes would require giving a causal, psychological story of how they actually came about. Often the attitudes will be rational responses to some ideas—and thus the explanation of the attitudes and their rationalization might look quite a lot alike—but this will not always be the case.

My project in this chapter is to rationalize the attitudes according to which time’s passage is in some sense bad, death is special, and the fact that we will eventually die means that the activities of life are less valuable than they would be otherwise. I claim that they would be justified by a combination of comparativism and the future bias idea (along with some other plausible stipulations). If it turns out that comparativism is true and the idea of future bias is too, then I will have shown that the pessimistic attitudes are justified as well. But I take no stance here on that matter.

If it turns out that most people who have the pessimistic attitudes in fact also believe (at least to some extent) comparativism and the future bias idea, and they are appropriately sensitive to the implications of their ideas, then I will have given a plausible psychological explanation of the pessimistic attitudes. Although I think many people do at least implicitly believe comparativism and do regard it as bad for them in some sense for good things to be over with, and although I do think that we are at least somewhat responsive to the implications of our beliefs, I do not take a stand on this  empirical matter either. My aim here is to rationalize, not necessarily to justify or explain.

In what follows, I begin by giving more introduction to comparativism and future bias and showing how they can be productively combined (Section 1.2). I then argue that the combination of these views implies that intrinsically good things, and in particular experiences, have a downside: they involve a kind of deprivation (Section 1.3). In Section 1.4 I clarify an ambiguity in my result, and in Section 1.5 I consider objections to my argument and the picture of value that emerges from it. In Section 1.6 I explain how this picture rationalizes the three pessimistic attitudes we began with.

1.3. The marriage of comparativism and future bias

1.3.1. Comparativism

To simplify the argument in this chapter, I will assume a hedonistic axiology, so that talk about ‘good things’ always refers to good experiences, and ‘bad things’ to bad experiences.[5] Comparativism is not an axiology, but a view, as John Broome (2012) puts it, about the ‘structure’ of goodness. According to comparativism, an event is overall bad (good) for someone just in case, and to the degree that, it is worse (better) for her than a relevant alternative.

According to a mainstream form of comparativism, the relevant alternative is what would have happened or obtained had the event in question not happened. We can rephrase this in the language of possible worlds in order to make it more precise:

Comparativism: the overall value for someone of an event is the net value (the value of the goods minus the value of the evils) for him of everything in the possible world in which that event occurs, minus the net value of everything in the closest possible world in which it doesn’t.[6]

For example, getting a flu shot is overall good for me if and to the extent that the world in which I get the flu shot is net better for me than the closest world in which I don’t. This might be because while that world includes the added pain of the shot, in the world in which I don’t have the shot I get the flu, which is worse. The difference in value between these worlds will therefore be positive, and the event will be good for me in proportion to this difference.

1.3.2. Future bias

Both the term and the philosophical treatment of future bias originated with Parfit, who noticed that most of us prefer to have pain in our pasts rather than in our futures, even if this means greater pain overall, and pleasures in our futures rather than our pasts, even if this means less pleasure overall (1984, 165-166). It’s worth restating Parfit’s famous thought experiment here: if you were to wake up in a hospital with amnesia, not knowing whether you’d just had a 10-hour painful operation yesterday or you will have a 5-hour painful operation tomorrow (which you will subsequently forget), which would you hope to be the case? Most people prefer to have the operation behind them, even though in that case it was twice as long.

We can summarize this by saying that we place less importance on past experiences—good or bad—than we do future ones. Sometimes I will talk about valuing them less. Parfit claimed not to value past experiences at all.[7] But even if for most of us our future bias is not quite so strong[8], we tend to value past experiences much less than we do present and future ones.

As I said above, future bias is, properly speaking, a psychological phenomenon—a way of valuing. But given that most of us are future-biased, and for most people future bias strikes them as eminently reasonable, it gives rise to the future bias idea[9]—the sense that it is better or more desirable, at least for oneself, and at least given that you are future-biased, to have good things still ahead of you and bad things in the past.

1.3.3. Future-biased comparativism

We can marry comparativism and future bias by replacing ‘net value’ in the previously given formulation of comparativism with a concept that integrates future bias: net current[10] value. I borrow this concept from Natalja Deng (2015), who uses it to defend an application of comparativism from an objection, one which we will examine briefly in a moment. The net current value of a possible world for someone is given by the net value of the goods minus the evils for her in that world, counting future goods and evils more heavily than past ones to some degree (2015, 425-426). Replacing net value with net current value, we get

Future-biased comparativism: The overall value for someone of an event is the net current value for him of everything in the possible world in which it happens minus the net current value for him of everything in the closest possible world in which it doesn’t.

Let’s use the objection that Deng discusses—to the deprivation view of the badness of death—to see how future-biased comparativism works in practice. Recall that the deprivation view claims that death is bad for a person just in virtue of what it deprives her of. This is, essentially, an application of comparativism, with one death-specific stipulation: that death is not in any way intrinsically bad. Most philosophers who work on death embrace this idea, and I will not question it here.[11]

The deprivation view faces a traditional objection: the symmetry problem. The symmetry problem originates with Lucretius’s ancient argument that death is not bad at all,[12] but it can be reformulated to directly challenge the deprivation view. The challenge goes like this: if the deprivation view is right, then (comparatively late) birth is often just as bad as (comparatively early) death, since by being comparatively late it deprives us of intrinsic goods we would have enjoyed, had we been born earlier. Thus, in the absence of reasons to think that life before your actual birth would have been less good than life after your actual death, you should feel just as much sorrow (regret, etc.) looking back at your birth as you do looking forward to your death. But you don’t. We just aren’t as bothered by having been born later than we could have been as we are by dying earlier than we might, and it doesn’t seem like rationality requires us to be.

Future-biased comparativism yields an intuitive way of responding to the symmetry problem. The deprivation view becomes the future-biased deprivation view, according to which a person’s death is bad for her just to the extent that the current value of the world in which she dies then is lower than the current value of the closest world in which she doesn’t. This view doesn’t overgeneralize in the way the traditional, time-neutral deprivation view does. Although late birth deprives me of goods I would have had, had I been born earlier, those goods don’t get counted (or don’t get counted fully) in the net current value of that world for me, because they are, or would have been, past. So when I subtract the current value for me of the nearest world in which I was born earlier from the current value of the world in which I was born when I actually was, the negative value of the total is moderated by my discounting the past. This is because the value of the extra time I would have lived in the past is not as currently valuable. It is not as bad as the result of subtracting the current value of the world in which I live longer than I actually do from the current value of the world in which I die when I do. This is because the goods that death deprives me of are future goods, and thus counted fully in the net current value for me of the alternative world.

In more natural terms, late birth is not as bad as early death because it deprives us of goods most of us wouldn’t have cared as much about anyway because they would have been past.[13] Future bias means future goods are weighted more heavily; thus, their deprivation is worse for us. Future-biased comparativism therefore yields an asymmetrical treatment of late birth and early death for the deprivation view, resolving the symmetry problem. [14]

Now, keeping in mind the foregoing demonstration of how comparativism and future bias can be fruitfully combined, let us now turn to implications of this union.

1.4. A proliferation of deprivation disvalue

Events can have value for people in different ways. Pleasure and pain are, we are assuming, intrinsically valuable and disvaluable. Events can also have causal instrumental (dis)value in virtue of causing something (or causing something that causes something, etc.) intrinsically (dis)valuable. Finally, events can have what I call deprivation (dis)value, the (dis)value of depriving someone of something good or bad they would have had if things were different[15]—this is the kind of value that the comparativist way of looking at things most distinctively reflects.

Events can be good and bad in different ways at once—for instance, exercising could have causal instrumental value (causing an ‘afterglow’), causal instrumental disvalue (causing pain), deprivation value (preventing disease), and deprivation disvalue (precluding time with friends). On the deprivation view, death has only deprivation (dis)value, because it precludes various events with intrinsic value or disvalue but doesn’t itself have any intrinsic (dis)value or cause anything that does. Other events like this include not winning some award and passing up your would-be-true-love on a dating site. On the deprivation view, death can be likened to these other kinds of deprivation. As deprivationist Ben Bradley observes, death on this view is different in degree perhaps, but not in kind, from unknowingly not being invited to a baseball game (2009, 178).

As deprivation value and disvalue is a primary focus of this chapter (and a central concept in this dissertation), we should lay out a more formal definition:

Deprivation (dis)value: the (dis)value of not having (some or all of) the value or disvalue of something good or bad.

I will be introducing a distinction in deprivation disvalue. Usually philosophers discuss only what we can call deprivation through lack—deprivation (dis)value due to not having some bad (good) thing in your life at all. This is one kind of deprivation disvalue, which the ‘possible worlds’ interpretation of comparativism picks up on. It is the deprivation disvalue of not being invited to a baseball game and therefore not having the pleasure of attending in your life at all.

But there is also what we might call deprivation through time: deprivation (dis)value due to not having some bad (good) thing in your future, but having it in your past.  This depends on our being future-biased. For example, if someone were instead ‘past-biased’ (and life were mostly good for them), they would not experience deprivation through time when goods went from future to past, but rather what we might call gains through time: the (dis)value due to not having some good (bad) thing in your future, but having it in your past. They’d then see their lives ‘fill up’ with goods they grew older and goods went from future to past. But as things are for most of us, we have deprivation through time. It is in this sense that deprivation through time is only possible on the future-biased version of comparativism, where what matters for something’s value is the (future-weighted) current value it contributes to your life.

If we adopt future-biased comparativism, then even more things—not just intuitive deprivations like not winning an award or dying an early death—might be deprivationally bad. This is because future-biased comparativism makes available a distinct form of deprivation (dis)value—deprivation through time—which might attach to additional events and states of affairs that do not have deprivation (dis)value through lack.

In particular, I will argue, good things are, in this distinctive sense, deprivationally bad. They give rise to deprivation through time. And the better they are intrinsically, the worse they are deprivationally.

Here is the argument.

Say I am about to have a good experience: drinking a delicious cup of coffee. Assume that whether I do or not does not affect my opportunities for drinking more good coffee in the future. Future-biased comparativism is designed for comparing the current value for someone of different possible worlds with futures of different values. So we might start by looking at the coffee drinking episode like this:

Before I drink the coffee, at time t1, I have some amount of good in my future x + y, where x is the value of drinking the coffee (assume it’s positive), and y is the net value of all the other things in my present and future (which may be positive or negative). If I am as future-biased as Parfit, such that I completely devalue past experiences, the overall current value the world for me would then be x + y, because I only count present and future value. Assuming for simplicity that in the closest possible world in which I don’t drink the coffee I do nothing else good or bad instead, and that drinking the coffee doesn’t affect the value of any other aspect of my future,[16] the current value for me of the closest world in which I do not drink the coffee is y.

At time t2, I have had the coffee. As before, the current value of the world in which I did not drink the coffee is y. The current value of the world in which I did drink the coffee, however, is now also y! Because at time t2 the coffee-drinking is in my past, and I am as future-biased as Parfit, at t2 the episode contributes nothing to the current value of the world for me.

This is as far as the letter of future-biased comparativism takes us, because it only tells us to find deprivation (dis)value by comparing the current values of different possible worlds. But it also seems legitimate to compare the current values at t1 and t2 of a single world, e.g., the world in which I drink the coffee. (I will defend the legitimacy of this comparison in Section 1.5.) At time t1 this world has current value x + y. At t2 it has current value y. So, between t1 and t2, there is a loss of current value equal to the value of drinking the coffee, x.

What precipitates this loss? Apparently, drinking the coffee—though I will come to a complication to this answer in the next section.

When I drink the coffee, this experience goes from being in my future, to being in my present, to being in my past, reducing or eliminating its contribution to the current value of the actual world for me. Living through the experience, then, has a bad aspect to it: it results in a loss of current value for me. This fits with the sense that in living I am ‘using up my life’ like a scarce resource. And since this bad aspect is not intrinsic badness (nothing intrinsically bad happened, like pain or suffering), and it is not causal instrumental badness (it caused nothing intrinsically bad), it seems it is a matter of deprivation.

What is bad about drinking the cup of coffee is that it means my future does not contain—no longer contains—this simple pleasure. On future-biased comparativism, then, good experiences seem to have both intrinsic value and this form of deprivation disvalue.[17] They have a downside, and indeed a downside that scales in proportion to how good they are. The better something is, the worse it is to lose its contribution to the value of your future. Although good things are still intrinsically good, they also have an evaluative component in common with not being invited to a baseball game, and indeed with dying an early death—they are deprivationally bad. The difference is just that they have deprivation disvalue through time, and not through lack.

1.5. What is bad—the good event, or living though it?

One might wonder why I say that drinking the coffee is itself deprivationally bad. Someone might think that it is not the experience itself, but just the transition of the experience from being in the future or present to being in the past—the living through it, we might say—that has negative deprivation value. Which of these is right depends on what we think the relationship is between events and the time in which they take place. There are two broad popular options here, corresponding to the ‘A’ and ‘B’ theories of tense, and I will go through them briefly here.[18]

I have been speaking in terms of the event itself having deprivation disvalue because I have been implicitly assuming the B-theory of tense. According to B-theory, the only temporal properties events have at bottom are non-tensed and unchanging, such as happening in the year 2018, or happening before WWII. In particular, there is not fundamentally such thing as an event’s going from future to present to past—it just happens at the date and time it happens, and that exhausts its temporal properties. So what we might call an event’s ‘passage’ from future to present to past is really just no more or less than its occurrence.[19]

If this is how we think about time, then it seems there is nothing but the occurrence of the experience itself—no distinct temporal dimension or property change—for the deprivation disvalue of an intrinsically good thing to attach to. If this is right, the negative deprivation value of living through a good experience will be a downside of the occurrence of the experience itself.

Things are a bit different on the A-theory. A-theory holds that there are tensed temporal properties of events—being future, being present, and being past—which are metaphysically real and irreducible to non-tense properties. For an A-theorist, when an experience changes from being in the present to being in the past, it undergoes a genuine temporal property change: it goes from being present to being past. Thus, an A-theorist could maintain that what is deprivationally bad in the vicinity of drinking the coffee is not drinking the coffee itself but instead is the change in the episode’s temporal properties.

Some philosophers think that only if the A-theory is true can future bias be rationally permissible.[20] It is certainly easier to make sense of a bias toward the future on a picture that includes a metaphysically weighty property of futurity. Likewise, it may seem easier to make sense of temporal property change being deprivationally bad than just a good event itself being deprivationally bad. That said, it’s not obvious that our attitudes have to be about metaphysically real properties to be rationally permissible, and there isn’t any obvious contradiction in thinking that an intrinsically good event could itself be deprivationally bad for us in the way we are discussing—that is, could involve deprivation through time. After all, it’s perfectly sensible for an intrinsically good thing to be instrumentally bad in the sense of preventing something better from happening.

For present purposes, this doesn’t particularly matter, as the interpretation of these results on the A-theory—according to which what is deprivationally bad about a good event is its change from future to past—is no less interesting than the B-theory interpretation. Both imply that the occurrence of a good event is always in some way bad. After all, assuming the A-theory, it cannot be that I have an experience in my life, but it never undergoes this temporal property change. If it never goes from my future to my past, it is not an experience of mine. So although the A-theory implies that it is not intrinsically good events themselves that are deprivationally bad, it does imply that there are deprivationally bad events—temporal property changes—which necessarily accompany all the good experiences in our lives. We might say, on this view, that while intrinsically good events are not themselves deprivationally bad in any way, living through them is.

There are therefore two subtly different conclusions we might draw here, depending on which theory of tense we embrace: that future-biased comparativism implies that intrinsically good experiences are deprivationally bad, as I suggested in the previous section, or that the change of a good experience from future or present to past—itself a necessary co-occurrence with the event—is deprivationally bad. Both are interesting and troubling, and my language from now on should be interpreted as being agnostic between them.

1.6. Objections and replies

1.6.1. An alternative symmetry problem

I said in Section 1.4 that we should be able to compare the current values of the same world for someone at different times, and that therefore we should be able to compute the current value lost due to (living through) good experiences. I called that a kind of deprivation value attaching to the event (or living through it). This was a crucial step in the argument, and its legitimacy might be questioned. Perhaps we can compare the current values of different possible worlds at the same time, as Deng does in her answer to the symmetry problem for the deprivation view, but we cannot compare the current values of the same possible world for someone at different times. That is, maybe deprivation through lack is a genuine kind of (dis)value that something can have, but deprivation through time is not. Comparativism was not originally about cross-time comparisons, and one may worry that using it in this way might amount to sort of sleight of hand. If so, this would block the implication of future-biased comparativism that I have sought to draw out.

However, I don’t see a principled reason to think that we shouldn’t be able to compare the current values at different times of the same possible world, and to call a difference in such current value a loss. Future bias implies that the value of events for people is dynamic: that it matters when something happens relative to the present. For a time-neutral version of comparativism, only comparison across possible worlds makes sense, because the value of worlds is static—there will never be a difference in value for me between different times in a single world. But future-biased comparativism is distinctive exactly in that it implies changes over time in the current value of a single world.

Indeed, I think we have case-based reasons to think that future-biased comparativism should be able to work this way. Take a case I’ll call the alternative symmetry problem. Future-biased comparatism, which allows cross-time comparisons in single worlds to yield deprivation (dis)value, can account for our intuitions in the case, while a time-neutral version of comparativism can’t.

Compare two situations:

(A)  You have been diagnosed with brain cancer. You have been told that you could begin to decline sharply any time, and that death would shortly follow. You begin to lose your cognitive capacities, and it seems clear that you will soon die.

One night you say to your wife:

I’m only 65! It’s not fair. My father lived to 87!

You’re right, she replies. “t’s not fair. But…sweetie, you’re 67, not 65.

You haven’t forgotten the year of your birth. You have forgotten what year it is now. You’ve effectively forgotten two years of your life and everything that happened in them. Your wife helps you remember by showing you photographs, and eventually it sinks in. It’s 2020. You are 67.

And

(B)  It’s 2018, and you are 65. You have been diagnosed with brain cancer and expect to die imminently. You get a phone call from your doctor.

We made a mistake reading your CAT scan, he says. We now believe

you will live to 67.

If you are like me, you would not feel the same way in these two situations. And like in the original symmetry problem, it doesn’t seem like you should be rationally required to. The traditional, non-future-biased version of the deprivation view implies that you should feel the same way about (A) and (B), since in both cases you find out that you will die at 67 instead of 65. You find out in (A) that you did actually have two of the years that you thought you were being deprived of by death, and in (B) that you will have two years you thought you were being deprived of by death. In both cases you find out that death deprives you of two fewer years than you thought it did, and so the traditional deprivation view treats these the same way.

So, I suggest, we should be able to use a future-biased version of comparativism to make sense of our intuitions here, just as we did with the original symmetry problem. But consider now the fact that (A) and (B) are actually consistent. They can happen in the same possible world: (B) happens, and then, two years later, (A) happens. Are you, in this case, rationally required to feel the same way about these events, given that they happen in the same possible world? It seems like you still are not. In the same way that comparatively early death is disturbing in a way in which comparatively late birth is not, (B) provides a kind of comfort that (A) does not.

If we did not countenance value comparisons between times at a single possible world, and instead limited our value comparisons to differences between different possible worlds, we would be no more able with future-biased comparativism than we are with the standard, time-neutral versions of comparativism and the deprivation view to explain the difference in our reactions to (A) and (B). There is only one possible world here, and so no cross-world comparisons are available to make sense of the difference in our reactions.

But if we allow comparison between the current values for someone at different times of the same world, then we can handle this case. The relevant difference between (A) and (B) is when the present is. Though (if you are not completely future-biased) in both cases you find out that death is less bad than you thought it was, in (B) you also find out that the actual world holds somewhat more current value for you than you thought it did, i.e., the value corresponding to two extra years of life. This is true to a much lesser extent in (A) (depending on how future-biased you are) and this seems to be why the cases strike us differently. Future-biased comparativism, understood the way I have suggested, accommodates and explains this difference, because it allows us to compare the current values of a single world between different times. This suggests that such comparisons should be legitimate.

1.6.2. Is deprivation through time really deprivation?

It may seem unnatural or even misleading to describe the kind of loss that future-biased comparativism yields in experiencing good things as a kind of ‘deprivation.’ After all, it happens when one gets the relevant good, not when one doesn’t get it. Being deprived through time, as I have described it, is more like what we can call ‘temporal loss’—the ordinary sense of loss, which we go through when a loved one dies, or when our knees give out—than it is like being deprived of something you would have been able to have or do under different circumstances.[21] Like temporal loss, being deprived through time is affected by the passage of time, and it does not imply that your life does not contain the good lost. It does contain it; it is just in the past. Why, then, have I put it in the language of deprivation?

It is exactly my point that the union of future bias and comparativism gives rise to this irony: to get something you want is to lose its contribution (or some of its contribution) to the current value of your life. We might say that when we combine future bias and comparativism, we blur the distinction between temporal loss and deprivation through lack, by giving rise to something in between: deprivation through time. That is because this combination makes something being in my past look more like it not being in my life at all, or being ‘less’ a part of my life, in virtue of its status as past. This is why I think it is appropriate to call the kind of loss to my future of some good a kind of deprivation on this view—I am deprived of it where it counts.

It is not my intent to argue for future-biased comparativism or its implications. I aim only to show that combining these two intuitive ideas—the future bias idea and comparativism—implies these interesting evaluative conclusions.

The primary result has been that future-biased comparativism renders intrinsically good events and experiences deprivationally bad; or, if you like, transforms temporal loss into a form of deprivation. The promise was to show that this result provides a rationalization of the rather puzzling pessimistic attitudes we began with. I turn to these attitudes now.

1.7. Rationalizing our pessimistic attitudes

1.7.1. The tyranny of time

If, as I have argued, future-biased comparativism reveals a downside to experiencing good things, this yields an obvious explanation for time’s passing seeming regrettable: the passage of time furnishes a constant stream of deprivations.[22] When good things happen to us, or we live through them, we lose their contribution to the current value of our lives. It is a cruel reality that life delivers loss; a heaven in which we could experience good things without banishing them into the past looks like a truly divine prospect. Though such a heaven may be a vain (and perhaps ultimately nonsensical) hope, it is an understandable one. If future-biased comparativism is correct, the passage of time really does have a downside in the deprivation it brings about.

Imagine, in contrast, what things would be like if we were time-neutral: deprivation through time would simply not be a kind of (dis)value, as having something good in front of you vs. behind you would carry with it no value difference—no difference in the current value for you of the world. Without future bias, the current value of a world would be constant through time. In that case, we would not experience deprivation through time, and the passage of time would be harmless. But because we are future-biased, it makes sense for us to experience the passage of good things from future to present to past as a kind of loss.

We should expect this basic phenomenon to have far-reaching effects on our psychology. It might even help explain why we are inclined sometimes to save the best for last, to ‘delay gratification’: we may try to forestall the loss of something especially good to have in our futures by putting it off. This might seem like a natural response: if getting something has this downside, it seems like there should be reason to keep it in your future, where it is maximally valuable to you. The problem with this solution, of course, is that you must live through it eventually; else, it is not anywhere (anywhence) in your life. And if it isn’t in your life, it can hardly contribute to the current value for you of your life, no matter how future-biased you are.[23]

There is another reason we might expect some ambivalence here. Maybe it’s better to get the loss itself over with—a thought that pulls in the opposite direction from putting good things off. It’s hard to say—does future bias apply to loss itself, as well as intrinsic goods and evils? For most of us, future bias looks at least much less pronounced for non-intrinsic goods. But it’s not yet clear how we ought to think about this question. I will discuss these questions more in Chapters 3 and 4.

The idea that the passage of time is a bad thing because it involves deprivation is the most fundamental of the three pessimistic attitudes I discuss here. As we will see in a moment, it forms the basis for the rationalization of the other two.

1.7.2. A special place for mortality

Recall the thought that death is not just a misfortune like any other, but has something distinctive about it. Compared to the misfortune of time’s passage, it is much less obvious how future-biased comparativism rationalizes this idea. Indeed, future-biased comparativism may seem to render death even less evaluatively special than it was on the traditional deprivation view. After all, it implies that deprivation disvalue is exceedingly common, attaching not only to death and not being invited to baseball games, but to every intrinsic good in life besides. How does future-biased comparativism help make the idea that death is in some way special more reasonable, rather than less?

Future-biased comparativism does not make death particularly special qua discrete event. My death on so-and-so a day from so-and-so a cause remains bad for me in the same way many other things are: by depriving me of goods. However, future-biased comparativism does give a very special place to mortality, one that we cannot recognize on the non-future-biased version of comparativism in its application to death.

If we were not mortal, the current value for us of all worlds in which we exist would at every time be a function of an infinite combination of goods and evils. And this would block the implication that all good experiences also have some deprivation disvalue attached to them. This is because, if you were immortal, when some good experience moved from your future to your past, that wouldn’t reduce the overall current value of the world for you. Its passing would affect just a small subtraction from the value of an infinitely large collection of future goods and evils.[24][25] Living through life, then, would not carry with it much deprivation value. This is intuitive: if you had infinite pleasures in your future, one being over with wouldn’t merit much distress.[26] Therefore, the fact that we will die is actually responsible for the generalized deprivation effect we have observed. We can see, then, why eventual, inevitable death seems distinct in our evaluative lives: it is the condition on which much other deprivation disvalue depends.

In his discussion of the bias toward the future, Parfit emphasized that being future-biased can make death seem worse in an important way: if you are at the end of your life, you regard this as a grave misfortune, while if you were not future-biased you would regard this as no worse than being at the beginning, or the middle (1984, 175-177). As this discussion shows, the bias toward the future also helps explain not just why we regard death as so bad when it is imminent, but also why we regard it as bad in a special way—as the condition upon which the passage of time itself is bad for us.

The tie with mortality also explains why it is possible for it to seem somehow regrettable that time passes for us the way it does; one might think that this cannot be regretted because it is impossible for things to be otherwise. And it is extremely difficult to imagine the passage of time being any different from how it actually is. But it is not so difficult to imagine death being different than it actually is; indeed, it does not seem that difficult to imagine living forever. It is only because of death that living is ‘using up’ life. And this may be where the contingency comes in that allows us to regret that things have to be this way: not exactly that we live in time, but that we live in time while mortal.

This is not to say that immortality would be perfect; many have argued that it would have downsides of its own.[27] But it would protect the value of life’s activities from the thievery of time’s passage.

1.7.3. The teenage attitude

Of the pessimistic attitudes we began with, the one that seems the least defensible may what I called the teenage attitude: the feeling that the fact that we will inevitably die undermines the value of many of life’s activities, making things overall less valuable for us than they would otherwise be.

We are now in a position to see how this attitude looks more reasonable given a combination of future bias and comparativism. Indeed, the teenage attitude is not distinct from the two pessimistic attitudes we have just discussed. It is a result of appreciating the first two points from a particular perspective: the perspective of someone looking forward toward the rest of her life.

When I seek out good things, on this framework, I inevitably banish them into my past, where they lose current value for me. Attempts to make life better therefore simultaneously result in loss. Indeed, the current value of our lives will drop especially fast when things are going especially well for us in the moment.

We can see how, looking ahead to these losses, this might make things feel less worth doing and experiencing. It may appear to us like an income tax: the better the good is, the more going for it results in deprivation disvalue. The more you get, the more deprivation you suffer. Of course, also like income tax, throwing up one’s hands in response still represents a grave overreaction: you always do better by seeking the good, or the extra income, even though you lose, or are taxed, more too. But we can see how the deprivation disvalue might make the good things in life overall seem less good, and create an apparent smoothing effect between the values of different activities.

The effect will be most extreme for the steepest past-discounters—people whose future bias is very strong. For someone who discounts the value of past goods completely, it may seem almost like nothing is worth doing because the deprivation disvalue of living through anything good is equivalent to the event’s entire value. One imagines oneself after the event and thinks “what was the point?” Whether this really means we have less reason to pursue goods is a question I will address in Section 4 of Chapter 4.

Looking forward to all this loss, we see that the phenomenon is fundamentally due to the fact that there is a cap on our lives, as we saw above: if we were immortal, we could enjoy the intrinsic value of activities without their coming laced with substantial deprivation disvalue. This then, may be a large part of how death can make life feel somewhat depressing: mortality does, on this view, mean that life is shot through with deprivation disvalue.

The teenage attitude is one instance of a general type of attitude: the sense, looking forward to something good, that the fact that it will end makes it more of a mixed blessing. We see this phenomenon in other domains—one might experience ‘anticipatory loss’ during a lovely dinner out, or in a romantic relationship one knows must end. There is just something about the fact that a good thing will come to an end that seems to complicate its value for us.

Now we see what that something is: a thing’s being finite triggers deprivation through time. This means that we can’t enjoy the good aspects of the thing without at the same time suffering some loss from its transition to the past. Both the fact that the good is finite and the fact that we are future-biased are required to explain this: if we were time-neutral, the passage of time couldn’t affect deprivation loss, because we would regard it as no less valuable to have some good event behind us as ahead of us. If the good were infinite, we’d always have an infinitely valuable future.

Again, there are complexities here: if we are very future-biased, the great losses involved in living through good things might be devalued in retrospect; can we take this fact about our future nonchalance into account? It is, after all, our future nonchalance, so it may seem that we should if we care primarily about our futures. But again, I have not yet discussed whether we are future-biased with regard to non-intrinsic goods and evils, and if we are, how this interacts with our future bias toward the intrinsic goods and evils themselves. The teenage attitude is rationalized by the proliferation of deprivation disvalue due to the inevitability of death; at the same time, the response by the adult in the room, “this will pass”—applied in this case to the sense of a good’s value being undermined—may yet be relevant.

1.8. Conclusion

There is much more to say on these topics. For example, as I have presented it, future-biased comparativism might yield an argument for pursuing goods that pay dividends farther into the future. And we have barely touched the topic of delayed gratification or the ambivalence that comes from being future-biased with respect to loss itself, and not only the things lost. We will discuss these topics in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4. However, a full examination of the relevant questions could fill many books, and we will only have time for some of them.

For now, I have tried to show how the pessimistic attitudes we began with can be rationalized by a combination of two common and intuitive ideas: a comparativist view of what makes things good and bad for us, and the future-bias idea—that it is better, all else equal, for me to have good things in my future and bad things behind me. The combination of these ideas, I have argued, yields a downside to intrinsically good things in life, either in themselves or in their passing. This explains why many people feel the passage of time is a bad thing, how death plays a singular role in our evaluative lives by providing the conditions under which this deprivation through time occurs, and why the fact that we will eventually die makes us more ambivalent about the goods of life.

Again, this is not to say that these attitudes are ultimately justified. Then again, they might be. If comparativism is the right way of thinking about value, and future bias is the reflection of a deep truth about value’s relation to time—justifying the future bias idea—then these pessimistic attitudes might be a reflection of an unfortunate truth. Hopefully they are not.

The rationalization I have provided for these intuitions also doesn’t amount to a bona fide causal explanation of the fact that many people have these attitudes. For that I’d have to show, at the very least, that the people who have the attitudes reliably think and value in ways shaped by comparativism and the future bias idea and are sensitive to the implications of their beliefs.

I suspect that matters in this domain are a bit murky. There might be other, competing explanations for some of these attitudes. Moreover, people often aren’t sure what to believe or how to feel, and we certainly aren’t always attuned to the full import of our views of the world. However, we aren’t arational creatures either, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rationalization I have demonstrated has a part to play in a psychological explanation of the attitudes it applies to.

In his discussion of the topic, Parfit suggested that we would be better off if we were not future-biased, because we would be less afraid of death. He may have in some ways understated the case. Future bias may also contribute to the pessimistic attitudes. Most centrally, it may create the sense that living though good experiences (while our futures grow ever shorter) is a kind of loss.

Notes

[1] Death may also be good for a person on the deprivation view, if it deprives him of more bad things than good things. For simplicity, I will talk here only about the cases in which death is bad.

[2] Proponents include Nagel (1970), McMahan (1988, 2002), Feldman (1991, 2013), Bradley (2009), Broome (2012), and Johansson (2013).

[3] Attempts have been made to illuminate related phenomena. Thomas Nagel’s “The Absurd” (1971) asks about a distinct but parallel sense that our smallness in the universe (including the temporal smallness of our lives) renders life absurd.

[4] Brink (2011), Dougherty (2011, 2015), Sullivan (2015, 2018), and Greene (2015) argue that the bias toward the future is irrational. Hare (2007) and Heathwood (2008) defend it.

[5] The reason assuming hedonism simplifies this chapter is that hedonic goods and evils are most easily located in time; relatedly, many people think that we are only future-biased with respect to pleasure and pain, and not non-hedonic goods and evils. I think this is a mistake, as I argue in Chapter 3. However, this belief is widespread, and it is easier for my purposes here to sidestep this quarrel by assuming hedonism.

[6] This phrasing represents a nontechnical translation of Fred Feldman’s formulation of comparativism (1991, 216).

[7] Parfit writes, as part of a thought experiment: “I have been reminded, to my surprise, that ten years ago I had a month of agony. All that I have now is a faint memory of this fact, and an ability to imagine how bad my agony must have been. When I am reminded of this past ordeal, would I be upset? Would I have what corresponds to painful anticipation? I would not. I would react to this reminder with complete indifference.” (1984, 172)

[8] I will use the terms ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ in reference to future bias as measures of how much we prefer goods to be in the future and evils to be in the past—cashed out, perhaps, in terms of how much we’d be willing to pay in terms of an evil’s intrinsic badness to have it over with or a good’s intrinsic goodness to have it still to come. Someone whose future bias was maximally strong would want trade an arbitrarily small future evil for an arbitrarily large past one.

[9] Indeed, if future bias were rationally permissible, the future bias idea might be true. This is because on many views, our rationally permissible preferences either determine or reflect what is good for us, as discussed in the introduction. But for the purposes of my discussion here, we just need to note that future bias—along with the sense that it is rational—gives rise to the future bias idea, which can help provide reasons for people to have certain attitudes.

[10] The term ‘current’ here should not be taken to carry with it any metaphysical baggage—and in particular should not be taken to signal an assumption that there is such thing as a ‘privileged present.’ ‘Current’ can refer to such a privileged present, but if there is no such thing, it can be taken as an ordinary indexical (like ‘here’), roughly referring to the time of the value assessment. I will discuss the relationship of this material to theories of time more in Section 1.5.

[11] The idea that death is not intrinsically bad for the person who dies is due to the observation that being dead is not good or bad, and death is just the onset of being dead. It is ‘pure absence,’ and thus, this reasoning goes, has no intrinsic value or disvalue.

[12] Lucretius writes: “Look back again—how the endless ages of time comes to pass/Before our birth are nothing to us. This is a looking glass/Nature holds up for us in which we see the time to come/After we finally die. What is there that looks so fearsome?” (Lucretius, trans. W.H. Stahl 1952)

[13] This view only explains indifference toward past deprivations due to late birth. Plausibly late birth also deprives us of future goods, such as (for some of us) the ability to enjoy ‘80’s nostalgia in the future. If we are also indifferent to these (which seems unclear) the view doesn’t explain why.

[14] Note that just like traditional comparativism, future-biased comparativism doesn’t require that we be omniscient with regard to what will happen in the future. Both are views about what actually is overall good or bad for us. If I am trying to determine the current value for me of some action or event, I will have to make my best guess at what will happen in the future if the event happens vs. something else, and thus make my best guess at the actual current value of the event at the time. When deciding what to do, I should ‘discount’ my guess at the current value of the event in order to account for my uncertainty. For example, if I think something has a chance of making my life highly currently valuable, and a chance of making it somewhat less currently valuable, the value I place on it for the purposes of decision-making will be somewhere in between. That will generally be different from my best guess at its actual current value. In this dissertation, I will be talking primarily about events’ actual current values, though I will return to the topic of uncertainty in another context in Section 2.6.2.1 of Chapter 2. It’s also worth noting here that talking about the actual current value of some future event does not presuppose determinism. What it does presuppose is that there be a ‘fact of the matter’ about what the future will hold before the future happens, which we can talk about. There can be a fact of the matter about how things actually will go even if things could go one way or another, and even if you don’t know how they will go. (For discussion of this point, see Velleman 2006.)

[15] Someone might want to call deprivation (dis)value a kind of instrumental (dis)value, since ‘instrumentally valuable’ is often used as a catch-all term for everything that’s not intrinsically valuable. That’s fine, but there is a difference we should note between the most commonly discussed form of instrumental (dis)value–where an event causes an intrinsically (dis)valuable event or state to obtain–and deprivation (dis)value, where an event (sometimes non-causally) makes it the case that an intrinsically (dis)valuable state does not obtain.

[16] This is implausible, of course, as moderately pleasant memories and a caffeine buzz would linger at the very least; but grant the assumption for the sake of the thought experiment.

[17] Bad experiences will have positive deprivation value, on this view: the value of ‘getting it over with.’ Again, for simplicity I focus only on the case of positive intrinsic value and deprivation disvalue in this chapter, but I will discuss the utility of ‘getting things over with’ from a future-biased perspective in Chapter 2.

[18] The A- and B-theories of tense get their names from McTaggart’s (1908) distinction between the A-, B-, and C-time series, where the C-series is an order of events, the B-series is an order of events with directionality, and only the A-series involves tense as we usually understand it (as a matter of something’s being past, present, or  future). For discussion of the A- and B-theories, see Le Poidevin 1998, Zimmerman 2007, and Smart 2008.

[19] One might think that although events do not ‘pass through time’ on the B-theory, nonetheless we may ‘pass through’ events. In other words, perhaps it is me who is changing temporal properties—first I am before the event, and then I am after. Giving this idea a full hearing would take us too far into the muddy waters of personal identity. But at a first approximation it is hard to make sense of. If I am a temporally extended object—equally me throughout life—then it seems I am both before and after the event, and there is no change in my temporal properties. If I am a series of temporally bounded selves—if there is me at moment t1, me at moment t2, etc. and these are different people—then no person undergoes a change, as different people are on either side of each event.

[20] Indeed, this is the primary thrust of Deng’s 2015 paper, from which I borrowed the concept of net current value.

[21] This distinction parallels Seana Shiffrin’s distinction between historical and counterfactual models of harm (1999, 121). Even more so than in the case of harm, it seems plausible that loss can come in a variety of forms—counterfactual, temporal, and the form I am discussing—which is something in between.

[22] This is not to say that there are no other reasons we might dislike the passage of time. For instance, some might find the mere foreclosing of previously seemingly ‘open’ possibilities to be a bad thing. There may be multiple explanatory factors at work here; again, my point is just that there are reasons stemming from future-biased comparativism for feeling that time’s passage is a bad thing.

[23] That said, it is of course possible for the belief that something good is ahead of you to contribute to the current value of your life, even if the good thing isn’t actually in the cards. If I think I’ll eventually have some good, that makes my life, including my future life, better—by adding feelings of positive anticipation. But in that case it would be the belief that is contributing to the current value of my life, not what it is a belief about.

[24] Except in the very special case in which your life is infinitely long but gets less and less valuable, summing to a finite amount of value.

[25] Even if there was value specifically in doing something for the first time (if there were special value in a first kiss, for instance), the point stands. Though the value of the particular first would be subtracted once it was over from the value of the immortal’s future, this loss would be much smaller than it is in the mortal case, as there would always be an infinite number of compensatory future values to be enjoyed.

[26] This intuition of course requires a kind of ‘proportional’ thinking, where the importance to us of goods and evils in our lives depends in various ways on other things of value. This kind of thinking is intuitive, but challengeable. See Lovett and Riedener 2019 for an intriguing defense of proportional thinking.

[27] Most famously, Bernard Williams (1973) argued that immortality would be tedious and, eventually, pointless, as we exhausted reasons for living.