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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 343 case, our judgment would be made, irrespective of our temporal location, about the significance of a certain kind of temporally characterized state of affairs, irrespective of its temporal location; call this a temporally indeterminate judgment. A temporally indeterminate judgment cannot provide evidence of any sort of time preference at all. Slote neither addresses these questions nor furnishes the sustained conceptual analysis that might dispel them. Instead, he appeals to our intuitive responses to two cases: the individual who achieves great success only late in life and dies "while still ‘in harness' and fully possessed of his powers" (23) versus the individual who achieves the same degree of success in her youth and then loses it permanently. His implicit question to us, then, is whether we would prefer to be what I shall call a late bloomer or an early achiever. Now suppose for the sake of argument that we would prefer to be a late bloomer, as Slote maintains. As before, there are at least two possible explanations for why we would, neither of which would controvert the irrationality of pure time preference. The first possibility is that we might be evaluating these two alternatives from the temporal perspective of already mature individuals who themselves enjoy or can anticipate great success only later in life, if at all, and so may be expressing a pure-time-preferential bias in our judgment of them. In this case, Slote's appeal to our intuitive response to these alternatives would beg the question. A second possibility is that our intuitive response might depend on contingency reasons. For instance, we may consider the late bloomer more fortunate because we envision his early failures as consoled by faith in his abilities, whereas we envision the early achiever's repeated failure to sustain her early success as exacerbated by her own deepening self-doubt and the pressure of others' disappointed expectations. But it might just as easily happen that the early achiever is an athlete, hence instead is both permitted and expected to rest on her laurels and to content herself thereafter by sportscasting or running a restaurant. Similarly, it might happen that the late bloomer is a mathematician, whose early failure to achieve success undermines his self-confidence and so poisons his life that his late, unexpected, and anomalous success provides insufficient psychological compensation for it. So the criteria by which we judge a person's life to be fortunate are not intrinsically related to the temporal location of its successes and failures. Slote seems to reject the first possibility, i.e., that we ourselves are exhibiting a pure-time-preferential bias in preferring being a late bloomer to being an early achiever, when he says that he has "been concentrating on the sorts of judgments concerning individual good that are sometimes made when we consider the lives of others or stand back from our own lives and attempt to view them in a detached way" (28; italics added). Slote does not give a fuller characterization of this detached perspective. But we can infer, minimally, that he does not mean to maintain that we prefer a later period of © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
