•  733
    Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger abou…Read more
  •  569
    On Preferring that Overall, Things are Worse: Future‐Bias and Unequal Payoffs
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1): 181-194. 2021.
    Philosophers working on time-biases assume that people are hedonically biased toward the future. A hedonically future-biased agent prefers pleasurable experiences to be future instead of past, and painful experiences to be past instead of future. Philosophers further predict that this bias is strong enough to apply to unequal payoffs: people often prefer less pleasurable future experiences to more pleasurable past ones, and more painful past experiences to less painful future ones. In addition, …Read more
  •  238
    The implicit decision theory of non-philosophers
    with Andrew Latham, Kristie Miller, and Michael Nielsen
    Synthese 203 (2): 1-23. 2024.
    This paper empirically investigates whether people’s implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something _as a news item_ and preferring it _as an object of choice_. Finally, we investigate whether differences in people’s im…Read more
  •  34
    Social bias, not time bias
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 23 (1): 100-121. 2024.
    People seem to have pure time preferences about trade-offs concerning their own pleasures and pains, and such preferences contribute to estimates of people's individual time discount rate. Do pure time preferences also matter to interpersonal welfare trade-offs, including those concerning the welfare of future generations? Most importantly, should the intergenerational time discount rate include a pure time preference? Descriptivists claim that the intergenerational discount rate should reflect …Read more
  • Hedonic and non-hedonic bias towards the future
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.