Temporal Asymmetry and the Self/Person Split

Abstract

Derek Parfit’s discussion of our bias towards the future has sparked considerable discussion of our pervasively asymmetrical attitudes towards past and future goods. Much of this discussion has centred on whether we can rationally justify such attitudes or whether they are intrinsically irrational. This paper seeks neither to justify nor to reject temporally asymmetrical attitudes, but to explicate the way perspective, and particularly temporal perspective, operates in such biases, in order to show how our temporal biases point to something important about the structure of selfhood. By employing an emerging distinction in the personal identity literature between the ‘self’ as an intrinsically first personal and temporally indexical locus of consciousness, and the ‘person’ as a diachronic bearer of various forms of physical and psychological predicates, we can see that the clash between temporally asymmetrical attitudes and symmetrical welfare judgments is in fact a result of the ways in which selves and persons interact.