Future Bias and Regret

Although the rationality of future bias figures crucially in various metaphysical and ethical arguments (Prior 1959; Parfit 1984; Fischer 2020), many philosophers have challenged future bias as being either arbitrarily motivated or irrational (Dougherty 2011; Suhler and Callender 2012; Greene and Sullivan 2015). In particular, Greene and Sullivan (2015) have claimed that future bias is irrational because it implicates two kinds of irrational planning behaviors in agents who seek to avoid regret. In this paper, I join others (Dorsey 2016; Tarsney 2017) in arguing against their claims, but for different reasons that highlight the relationship between the alleged irrational planning behaviors and certain features of regret that it shares with future bias. First, regret is dynamic, involving preferences that change over time and in inconsistent ways. Second, regret comes in degrees, meaning that we can rank our potential regrets. Because regret has these features, I explain why the future-biased agents in Greene and Sullivan’s cases do not need to act in irrational ways to avoid regret.