Rationality and Time Bias (Elements in Decision Theory and Philosophy)

By: null Abelard Podgorski

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: We often care not only about what happens to us, but when it happens to us. We prefer that good experiences happen sooner, rather than later, and that our suffering lies in our past, rather than our future. Common sense suggests that some ways of caring about time are rational, and others are not, but it is surprisingly challenging to provide justifying explanations for these tendencies. This Element is an opinionated, non-technical guided tour through the main philosophical issues about the relevance of the temporal location of our experiences to our desires and our choices, and the major arguments for and against different kinds of so-called time bias.