The Self Of The Moment

To the question “Who are you?” we necessarily answer from the present. But the same condition holds when the question becomes “Who were you?” or “Who will you be?” In all three cases, it is the self that exists at the moment the question is posed and the answer formulated who speaks. From this observation the present thesis arises: the self’s relation to its own past and to its own future is necessarily determined by the position of the self of the moment. The past that occurred does not change. The future has not yet occurred. What can change is the relation that the present self establishes with the past and with possible futures. The thesis does not claim to establish what a person is metaphysically, nor which criterion guarantees personal identity over time. It takes the factual succession of selves as given and focuses on a narrower question: from which self is the past or the future necessarily referred to oneself? The answer is: from the self of the moment. The paper further develops an empirical application of the thesis: it relates three psychological phenomena studied separately — temporal self-appraisal, self-exculpation in relation to moral development, and moral hindsight — and derives from them a testable empirical prediction, narrowed to a single resource: knowledge of an action’s outcome. The controlled reduction of such information should attenuate the severity of retrospective judgment, other factors being equal. This prediction is put forward as an empirical hypothesis, not as an already demonstrated consequence.