A Humean account of temporal preferences

Two central questions regarding future bias are (a) why we are future-biased, and (b) whether future bias is justified. With respect to (a), I propose a Humean explanation of future bias in terms of the workings of the imagination, which makes our imaginings of future events more vivid than our imaginings of past events. However, in order to defend this explanation, a potential tension within Humean psychology needs to be resolved: since, per Hume, memory is more vivid than imagination, we ought to be past-biased. My proposed resolution makes use of Hume’s mechanism of sympathy (when applied to one’s own future self). With respect to (b), I argue that, rather than focusing on the question of rationality, we should focus on whether future bias is a virtue, by considering, in a Humean spirit, how agents’ temporal preferences affect others, when assessed from ‘the general point of view’.