Exploring People’s Normative Judgements About Future Bias and the Temporal Value Asymmetry

This paper empirically probes people’s judgements about whether future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry (TVA for short) are rationally permissible, obligatory, or impermissible. While philosophers are divided about the normative status of these attitudes/preferences, they have typically agreed that non-philosophers will judge that future-bias is at least permissible, and probably obligatory, and will judge that TVA is not permissible. If this is right, it is important for two reasons. First, many researchers have argued that future-bias is a manifestation of TVA. If, however, people make different normative judgements about the two phenomena this tends to undermine this idea. Second, if it is true, it impacts theorising about the normative status of these phenomena: the assumption that future-bias is rational currently guides theorising, in that defenders of the rationality of future-bias tend to argue that its rationality is obvious, and hence must be accommodated, while opponents tend to try to show why, despite not being rational, future-bias appears to us to be rational. Yet no empirical work has been undertaken to test these assumptions about people’s judgements. In the first work of this kind, we confirmed that most people judge future-bias to be rationally obligatory, and TVA to be rationally impermissible.