On being more strongly connected to your continuers than your ancestors: apparent future-bias and degree-theoretic conativism

There is a widespread intuition that we have prudential reason to discount the value of an event when it is past compared to equidistant in the future, even holding fixed various factors that might be thought to ground our having such reasons, such as the probability, (dis)utility, and so on, of that event conditional on it being past compared to future. It is also usually assumed that if, holding fixed such factors, we retain such a preference, then that preference is genuinely time-biased: it is sensitive to the temporal location, per se, of the event, rather than to factors (like probability or utility) that are contingently associated with temporal location. However, there is significant dispute about whether temporal location per se is normatively relevant, and hence whether it can ground there being prudential reason to have such preferences. Since empirical research suggests that we retain these preferences under these circumstances, there is a question about whether our actual preferences are prudentially reasonable. In this paper I argue that we can understand our actual preferences not as genuinely time-biased, but as apparently time-biased preferences that are sensitive to the degree to which the personal-identity relation obtains between person-stages. Since degree of personal-identity is normatively relevant, a stage has prudential reason to be apparently time-biased when the personal-identity relation holds more strongly towards the future than the past. I argue that this is, quite plausibly, sometimes the case. To show this I employ a degree-theoretic conativist view of personal-identity on which, (a) which relation realises the personal-identity relation relative to a stage is determined by certain conative attitudes of that stage, and hence can vary from stage to stage, and (b) what realises the personal-identity relation, relative to a stage, holds as a matter of degree and (c) the degree to which the personal-identity relation holds between stages is non-symmetric and (d) some affective relations that plausibly are among those that jointly realise personal-identity for some stages are temporally asymmetric: they hold more strongly towards the future than the past.