Objectivism and time preference

[Gavagai]

As I understand, a recurring argument in favor of Objectivist ethics is that actions which violate it and seem beneficial in a short run have serious destructive consequences in a long run. For example, lying may provide some initial benefit – you can avoid consequences of your wrongdoing or trick your victim into giving you money. But in the long run you will have to spend an enormous effort to construct and support a false reality for your victim and that will ultimately lead to your destruction. The same is with stealing – you may obtain a large sum of money with little effort, but then you will face retribution from your victim and spoil your reputation (or will need to spend a lot of resources to cover up your crime).

It seems to me that this line of reasoning is based on some assumptions about time preference, i. e. that it is low enough to make long-run considerations important. But, as far as I know, there are no explicit references to this concept in the Objectivist corpus.

I see, then, three ways, in which the concept of time preference may relate to Objectivist ethics.

The first one is to claim that Objectivist ethics doesn’t assume anything about time preference and that it is equally valid for any value of it. As far, as I understand Objectivism, it doesn’t make such a strong claim. As I understand, Objectivism doesn’t deny that in short run immoral actions may be beneficial. I may be wrong here – but then I don’t understand what immediate harm immoral actions necessarily bring.

The second one is to claim that there is some “rational” value of time preference, or set of them, and it is in the scope of ethics to determine it. In my understanding that is exactly what Objectivism assumes. I think, it is implicit in the recurring claim, that a person should have “an integrated view of one’s life” and that “one should evaluate the consequences of his actions in the relation to his life as a whole”.

But if I’m right here, than ethics should answer what time preference is “rational”. I don’t see in the Objectivist corpus an answer to this question. I think it is not zero – at least because a human with zero time preference was not yet born. But if it is not zero and is not infinitely large – than how large is it?

The only hint to an answer which I can see is that “rational” time preference should be somehow commensurable with one’s expected lifespan. At least, this answer seems to be implied in the quotes given. But this kind of answer poses other questions, because expected lifespan varies greatly from person to person. There are infants, old people, people with incurable diseases. Is it possible that there are categories of people for whom “rational” time preference is high enough to make some rules of Objectivist ethics non-applicable? If it isn’t – why?

It looks like that even if we are able to determine some kind of “rational” time preference, it will vary greatly for different people. And this will jeopardize the claim of universality of Objectivist ethics.

The third way to integrate the concept of time preference into Objectivist ethics is to claim that it is applicable only for a limited set of its possible volumes and that it is not the business of ethics to determine which time preference is rational. It is possible to find a hint to this kind of answer in Miss Rand’s essay “Ethics of Emergencies”. (Btw, can we redefine emergency as a specific kind of situations in which extremely high time preference is natural?)

As I understand, to accept this approach will mean not only to drop the claim of universality, but to make the subject of ethics void. Time preference is a key factor influencing our choices and if ethics accepts it as a given and gives us no guidance how to determine it, than for practical purposes it doesn’t give any guidance altogether.

That’s the conundrum for which I can find no satisfactory solution - none of the three options I have listed seem satisfactory to me. I hope, some you will be able to solve it.

[Zip]

It seems to me that this line of reasoning is based on some assumptions about time preference, i. e. that it is low enough to make long-run considerations important. But, as far as I know, there are no explicit references to this concept in the Objectivist corpus.

There is. In Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged. All of the Objectivist virtues touch on exactly this issue in different ways...

“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking-that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action-that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise-that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality-that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind-that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.

“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it-that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life-that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence-that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions-that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him-that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to one’s own consciousness.

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud-that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee-that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling-that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification-that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a totter above a hero-that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions-that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement-that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit-and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live-that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values-that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others- that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human-that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay-that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live-that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road-that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up-that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned-that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character-that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind-that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining-that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul-that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice-that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself-and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.

[Eiuol]

In my understanding that is exactly what Objectivism assumes. I think, it is implicit in the recurring claim, that a person should have “an integrated view of one’s life” and that “one should evaluate the consequences of his actions in the relation to his life as a whole”.

The only reason "an integrated vioew of one's life" is viewed as proper here is that it has to do with the nature of all humans being creatures that choose and entities of a limited life-span. That gives rise to the concept value (it sounds like you've read up on this, so I won't go into detail), which any time preference would depend on. Really the whole point of it is to maximize value to be had through life. I'm not sure if you can call long-range thinking a time preference exactly, because values vary greatly from person to person. I don't know if you can give any person an exact time preference, so I don't think it's even possible to determine a "one" time preference. You seem to suspect that ethics may be such a way to determine a "one" time preference, but the scope of that is large and non-contextual.

It looks like that even if we are able to determine some kind of “rational” time preference, it will vary greatly for different people. And this will jeopardize the claim of universality of Objectivist ethics.

I don't see how so. The only sort of claim of universality of Objectivist ethics is that all people need to use reason since any choice is based upon the furtherance of one's whole life. Nothing more than that really. That expands into capitalism being good as well as some other concepts, but there isn't any kind of venture into the "right" music, or the "right" books to read, or the "right" sexual preference, or the "right" personality. Personal context makes those sort of things non-universal. Context varies further if you're old or have an incurable disease because those things alter how your life works considerably different. There are no "rules" to follow. Virtues honesty or independence may seem to be rules, but there isn't a list of things to do in order to be honest or independent. All you can really do is figure out what good those concepts are, and what makes for honesty.

Using reason helps to determine what sort of time preference to have for a particular value unique to an individual, so if time preference is a useful concept for discussing ethics, it is because it emphasizes that personal context matters.

Edited June 3, 2011 by Eiuol

[Gavagai]

I've read Galt's speach many times. I wouldn't start this topic if I saw there answers to my question.

My question is, specifically, what assumptions does Objectivism make about time-preference? Is there such thing as objective, "rational" time-preference or is it a matter of personal whim? If objective time-preference exists, is it the same for all individuals or it varies from person to person?

In my opinion objective time-preference does exist (though it would be a hard venture to validate it), but it varies from person to person. And as I now see it, for some persons it may be too high to make the rules of Objectivist ethics applicable. For example, if I know for sure that I will die soon - why should I care about long-term consequences of my actions?

[Gavagai]

=The only sort of claim of universality of Objectivist ethics is that all people need to use reason since any choice is based upon the furtherance of one's whole life=

Hm, it leads me to an interesting twist I hadn't thought about before. Can we say that if we somehow know for sure how long it remains for us to live and have no way to change it, we don't need ethics at all? And if we have some upper limit on our lifespan, ethics rules which would otherwise enable us to prolong our life beyond this limit is unapplicable in our context?

[Dante]

The second one is to claim that there is some “rational” value of time preference, or set of them, and it is in the scope of ethics to determine it. In my understanding that is exactly what Objectivism assumes. I think, it is implicit in the recurring claim, that a person should have “an integrated view of one’s life” and that “one should evaluate the consequences of his actions in the relation to his life as a whole”.

But if I’m right here, than ethics should answer what time preference is “rational”. ... The only hint to an answer which I can see is that “rational” time preference should be somehow commensurable with one’s expected lifespan. At least, this answer seems to be implied in the quotes given. But this kind of answer poses other questions, because expected lifespan varies greatly from person to person. There are infants, old people, people with incurable diseases. Is it possible that there are categories of people for whom “rational” time preference is high enough to make some rules of Objectivist ethics non-applicable? If it isn’t – why?

It looks like that even if we are able to determine some kind of “rational” time preference, it will vary greatly for different people. And this will jeopardize the claim of universality of Objectivist ethics.

There certainly are categories of people out there for whom the Objectivist ethics (in fact, any ethics conceived as a code for living) is inapplicable, and you've touched on it: the dying. Objectivist ethical principles are derived from the needs of man to live long-term; they come from identifying the long-term consequences to types of actions and evaluating those consequences in relation to the goal of continued and sustainable living. This is why those principles do not apply to certain contexts, such as genuine emergencies and those on their deathbed. Objectivism as an ethical system does not try for ethical principles which are contextless, categorical-imperative-type principles. That kind of 'universality' is neither necessary nor desirable in an ethical system, given the nature of knowledge as contextual and all.

I would be comfortable in saying that there are ranges of extremely high time preference which could be labeled 'irrational,' given that the nature of life is a process which must be sustained, not just a series of moments where we could be feeling pleasure or pain. Given that fact, people willing to sacrifice their entire future for some measly gain today are disregarding the nature of life and thus acting irrationally. However, I would not move from there to claim that we can discover some precise range of time-preferences which are 'rational.' The most specific that I would go would be your suggestion of commensurability with the nature of life as a process which must be maintained in the long term. As long as one isn't in a situation where their expected lifespan is nil (as long as one isn't dying), they need ethical principles to guide their actions; the extreme variability of those lifespans is irrelevant.

In short, I would agree with your second option, but I would disagree that we should therefore expect ethics to precisely answer questions about time preference, in the same way that ethics cannot give us precise answers about any other weighing of values in our lives. Most questions about our everyday preferences and actions require the reference of our particular hierarchy of values and preferences, and not just universal ethical principles. The universality of the ethical principle of productiveness is not jeopardized by the fact that some people enjoy being doctors and some people enjoy being engineers. The particulars can vary widely, so long as the fundamentals of productiveness are met, and the same goes for time preference.

[Dante]

=The only sort of claim of universality of Objectivist ethics is that all people need to use reason since any choice is based upon the furtherance of one's whole life=

Hm, it leads me to an interesting twist I hadn't thought about before. Can we say that if we somehow know for sure how long it remains for us to live and have no way to change it, we don't need ethics at all? And if we have some upper limit on our lifespan, ethics rules which would otherwise enable us to prolong our life beyond this limit is unapplicable in our context?

FYI, you can get the quote tags automatically by simply clicking the "Reply" button below the post you want to reply to.

[Gavagai]

I would be comfortable in saying that there are ranges of extremely high time preference which could be labeled 'irrational,' given that the nature of life is a process which must be sustained, not just a series of moments where we could be feeling pleasure or pain. Given that fact, people willing to sacrifice their entire future for some measly gain today are disregarding the nature of life and thus acting irrationally.

Interesting notion. Will it be correct to restate what you are saying here in the followimg way:

Most valuable experiences which make our life enjoyable are stretched along time and can't be possibly felt in few short moments. Therefore, if we have a very high time preference, we will not be able to have this experiences and we will diminish the value of our life so much that for practical purposes it will be equal to denying it. So at some point choosing high time preference is equal to choosing not to live.

[chuff]

=The only sort of claim of universality of Objectivist ethics is that all people need to use reason since any choice is based upon the furtherance of one's whole life=

Hm, it leads me to an interesting twist I hadn't thought about before. Can we say that if we somehow know for sure how long it remains for us to live and have no way to change it, we don't need ethics at all? And if we have some upper limit on our lifespan, ethics rules which would otherwise enable us to prolong our life beyond this limit is unapplicable in our context?

The way that I respond to this is, no matter how long you are told you have remaining to live, that still is time alive, i.e., there will still be some amount of time left to live. Since man, to live, needs values, and must act rationally to pursue them, ethics is still just as applicable then (assuming freedom of choice etc) as it is when you are alive and don't suspect imminent death. I hope my thoughts here came across clearly, I'm writing them very quickly.

[Amaroq]

I don't think that Objectivist ethics can recommend a time preference. Sure, it recommends thinking in the long term. But that isn't for the purpose of putting off a value today for an equal value tomorrow. It's about taking your life as a whole and maximizing the value you gain in total throughout that whole.

The reason it's bad to be a hedonist isn't necessarily just because you're having a more in-the-moment time preference. It's because in the grand scheme of your whole life, you'll be getting less value for your life that way. A little pleasure in the moment might prove destructive for you in the long run. And in total, you have a net loss of value for your life as a whole as a result of that hedonistic action. Working harder today for greater values tomorrow is recommended because you can sustain your life and create/gain much greater value by being productive. If you think of your life as a sheet of paper and the values as spikes going up and down, as on a heart monitor, Objectivist ethics isn't recommending lowering one spike now to raise a different spike farther down the road. It's doing whatever will cause the whole to go up the most. Not putting off a value today for an equal value tomorrow. Investing a value today for a greater net return.