Let me be clear that I am not driven by the mistaken thought that we face a fully general requirement for our preferences to be diachronically consistent. No doubt, such a requirement would be far too strong, given the myriad ways in which we might blamelessly change our preferences. Rather, I am driven by a thought about how we should go about exchanging goods for hedonic experiences. When we make these exchanges, we should not ask, “How much is this experience worth to me, at this moment in time, given my future-biased preferences?” Instead, we should ask, “How much is it worth to me, period?” The reason why is that we need to be able to integrate these exchanges into an overall life-plan that we endorse as reflecting a settled stance on the right way to make these exchanges. When we spend a dollar now, we know that this means we won’t have that dollar later. Yet our future selves are just as much us as our current selves and past selves. So rational prudence requires us to decide now how to spend this dollar in a way that we continue to approve of. This means that we are under rational pressure to come up with a common point of view, shared by our past, present, and future selves, about how to trade off hedonic experiences for goods. This rational pressure might be resisted if we think that there are breaks in personal identity between past and future selves. But otherwise rational prudence means transcending our temporal perspective, and forming a stable plan for how to trade off hedonic pleasures and other goods. When we design this overall plan, the appropriate approach is to compare the intrinsic value of the hedonic experience and the intrinsic value of whatever we exchange for it. It is on this basis that we should make these exchanges, and it is on this basis that we actually do make these exchanges. And of course this is to adopt a temporally neutral perspective.0
