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Show Chapter VIII. The Problem of Rational Final Ends 342 Moreover, it is not obvious that we do exhibit time preference in such cases as those Slote describes, even if he is right about the judgments we typically make. For (and this is the second possibility) there may be contingency reasons that explain why we take the achievements and failures of a particular period of life more seriously than others; for example, that they are the outcome of the full flowering of one's physical or mental capacities. If this occurred in human beings between the ages of two and five (say) as it does in dogs, we might favor a person's achievements and failures at that age instead. Thus these authors' answer to Slote might be that the reason we take a person's mature successes and failures more seriously than those of adolescence is because the former are her mature successes and failures, not because of the temporal location at which maturity occurs. Slote appears to acknowledge this, when he says, "[W]hat we have so far defended is not ‘pure' time preference, if by that one means the favouring, say, of earlier or nearer times of life as such. Rather, it is a preference for the goals and interests characteristic of certain states or periods of life rather than others, and these goals and interests are from a logical standpoint perhaps only contingently related to what comes earlier or later in time" (23). But the "logical standpoint" cannot be so casually dismissed, if Slote intends his readers to consider seriously the logical force of his thesis. If "the goals and interests characteristic of certain states or periods of life" may occur at any time of life (psychological lore has it, for instance, that intellectual maturity comes between eighteen and thirty for the mathematician, but between fifty and sixty for the historian), then Slote's empirical observations about our preference for those goals and interests are simply a non sequitur in relation to the philosophically compelling issue of pure time preference that Nagel et al. address. When Slote then purports to turn his attention to this issue directly, he defends what he takes to be an even more radical thesis about the rationality of pure time preference. He claims that "even such pure time preference can be found (ironically) not in any favoring of the temporally nearer or earlier, but rather in a precisely opposite preference for what comes later in life" (23). But again the same difficulties arise: Does Slote mean to claim that, from the perspective of youth, we favor the experiences of old age? In our society this seems clearly false, but what would it show it if were true? For Nagel et al. it would show only the irrationality of youth. Or does Slote mean that from no particular temporal perspective at all, i.e., irrespective of our temporal location, we favor "what comes later in life?" This seems prima facie incoherent, since, when we make a judgment irrespective of our temporal location, we discount the temporal location relative to which the temporal location of any other event can be identified as "earlier" or "later" than it. Or, lastly, does Slote mean that, irrespective of our temporal location, we favor what comes later in our life as such, whenever that is, more highly than what comes earlier? In this © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
