To explain, I think that the common sense justification for not wandering blindly into the road simply is that I currently have a preference against being hit by a car.
I don’t think this defence works, because some of your current preferences are manifestly about future events. Insisting that all these preferences are ultimately about the most immediate causal antecedent (1) misdescribes our preferences and (2) lacks a sound theoretical justification. You may think that Parfit’s arguments against S provide such a justification, but this isn’t so. One can accept Parfit’s criticism and reject the view that what is rational for an agent is to maximize their lifetime wellbeing, accepting instead a view on which it is rational for the agent to satisfy their present desires (which, incidentally, is not Parfit’s view). This in no way rules out the possibility that some of these present desires are aimed at future events. So the possibility that you may be clueless about which course of action satisfies those future oriented desires remains.
Thank you for raising this, I think I was too quick here in at least implicitly suggesting that this defence would work in all cases. I definitely agree with you that we have some desires that are about the future, and that it would misdescribe our desires to conceive all of them to be about present causal antecedents.
I think a more modest claim I might be able to defend would be something like:
The justification of everyday actions does not require an appeal to preferences with the property that, epistemically, we ought to be clueless about their content.
For example, consider the action of not wandering blindly into the road. I concede that some ways of justifying this action may involve preferences about whose contents we ought to be clueless—perhaps the preference to still be alive in 40 years is such a preference (though I don’t think this is obvious, cf. “dodge the bullet” above). However, I claim there would also be preferences, sufficient for justification, that don’t suffer from this cluelessness problem, even though they may be about the future—perhaps the preference to still be alive tomorrow, or to meet my friend tonight, or to give a lecture next week.
Very interesting comment!
I don’t think this defence works, because some of your current preferences are manifestly about future events. Insisting that all these preferences are ultimately about the most immediate causal antecedent (1) misdescribes our preferences and (2) lacks a sound theoretical justification. You may think that Parfit’s arguments against S provide such a justification, but this isn’t so. One can accept Parfit’s criticism and reject the view that what is rational for an agent is to maximize their lifetime wellbeing, accepting instead a view on which it is rational for the agent to satisfy their present desires (which, incidentally, is not Parfit’s view). This in no way rules out the possibility that some of these present desires are aimed at future events. So the possibility that you may be clueless about which course of action satisfies those future oriented desires remains.
Thank you for raising this, I think I was too quick here in at least implicitly suggesting that this defence would work in all cases. I definitely agree with you that we have some desires that are about the future, and that it would misdescribe our desires to conceive all of them to be about present causal antecedents.
I think a more modest claim I might be able to defend would be something like:
The justification of everyday actions does not require an appeal to preferences with the property that, epistemically, we ought to be clueless about their content.
For example, consider the action of not wandering blindly into the road. I concede that some ways of justifying this action may involve preferences about whose contents we ought to be clueless—perhaps the preference to still be alive in 40 years is such a preference (though I don’t think this is obvious, cf. “dodge the bullet” above). However, I claim there would also be preferences, sufficient for justification, that don’t suffer from this cluelessness problem, even though they may be about the future—perhaps the preference to still be alive tomorrow, or to meet my friend tonight, or to give a lecture next week.