The trouble with prudence

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The trouble with prudenceAnthony Simon Laden aa Philosophy , University of Illinois at Chicago , Chicago, IL, USAPublished online: 16 Jan 2009.

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The trouble with prudence

Anthony Simon Laden�

Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Standard discussions of prudence treat it as requiring time-slice management. That thisis the standard view of prudence can be seen by its presence in two seemingly opposedpositions on prudence, those of Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit. I argue that this kind ofview fails to properly appreciate the difficulty with being prudent, treating imprudenceas a kind of theoretical mistake. I then offer a characterization of prudence as integrity,the holding together of disparate but temporally extended parts of the self in a mannerthat makes the act of reasoning possible.

Keywords: practical reason; prudence; T. Nagel; D. Parfit; C. Korsgaard

Introduction

In The Possibility of Altruism (1970), Thomas Nagel argues that altruism is rational forreasons similar in structure to those that make prudence rational. According to this argu-ment, the recognition of the normativity and difficulty of being prudent helps pave theway for the recognition of the rationality of morality. In Reasons and Persons (1984),Derek Parfit takes what at first appears to be the opposite tack. He argues that prudencecannot be a stable, self-sufficient principle of rationality. But he uses that conclusion tosuggest that the considerations that speak in favor of prudence turn out to speak in favorof morality. Both Parfit and Nagel, despite appearing to hold opposed views, movedebates about the rationality of morality forward by highlighting that prudence is not anatural, internal motivation, but, possibly like morality, a normative standard that mayrequire effort to meet.

Because of the differences in their conclusions about the rationality of prudence,however, much recent discussion of prudence has taken Parfit and Nagel’s positions asroughly laying out the two main alternatives, so that arguments against one of them aretaken to be arguments in support of the other. Such an approach fails to take heed of theimportant similarity in their conceptual framework suggested above, however. In thispaper, I aim to articulate that similarity and then argue against what turns out to be theircommon position.

Both authors share a basic strategy and a basic conceptual commitment. Parfit, likeNagel, leverages his argument for the rationality of morality by considerations meant tohighlight the difficulty of being prudent. And, more importantly for the arguments of thispaper, he shares with Nagel a basic conception of what prudence entails, a view of prudenceI will call prudence as time-slice management.

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Philosophical ExplorationsVol. 12, No. 1, March 2009, 19–40

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In the first half of the paper, I look at Nagel and Parfit’s discussions of prudence andargue that they conceive of prudence as time-slice management, and that in doing so,they mistakenly identify the difficulty with acting prudently. In the second half of thepaper, I sketch out an alternative conception of prudence, prudence as integrity. I alsosuggest how understanding prudence in this way might lead to a more fruitful defense ofthe rationality of morality than those offered by Parfit and Nagel.

Before I begin either of those arguments, some conceptual and terminological ground-clearing are in order. In what follows, I take prudence and self-interest to be equivalentterms that describe acting (or reasoning) with an eye to one’s whole self rather thaneither with an eye to only a part or, as with morality, an eye beyond one’s self. Notethat this is a more general characterization of prudence than one that describes prudenceas long-range planning or concern with one’s overall welfare. Both of these will countas forms of prudence on this characterization, but so will reasoning that seeks tobalance a set of commitments, projects or plans.1 Given this general characterization,one of the key ingredients of any conception of prudence will be its description of theparts of the self that make up the whole. Though both Parfit and Nagel treat prudencein terms of temporal distance, and so conceive of the parts of the self as time-slices, itis not a necessary feature of prudence that it conceive of the parts/whole relation alonga temporal dimension. A person can be imprudent in the general sense of the term as Iuse it here by being single-minded in her pursuit of one of her aims, in a way that failsto take heed of her other, current, aims. In this broad sense, then, imprudence is, arguably,a form of akrasia.

It will also help to distinguish between the matter and the ground of a reason. Atheory of rationality has to tell us the kind of things that make up a reason, whetherthey be desires, beliefs, plans, projects, intentions or facts about the world. In doingso, the theory tells us what kind of thing can serve as the matter of a reason. So, forinstance, the so-called belief-desire model of practical reason says that the matter of areason includes a current desire and a current belief. A theory of rationality also has totell us what it is that makes these bits of reason-matter into a reason, what gives themtheir normative force. That is, it has to tell us what grounds a reason. A realist theoryof rationality might ground reasons in certain kinds of metaphysical facts about agentsor about the universe, whereas a constructivist theory will ground them in certainkinds of activities. The value of this distinction becomes clear when we turn to Nageland Parfit’s views.

Nagel and the rationality of prudence as time-slice management

The basic problem

Both Nagel and Parfit argue for moral principles that tell us that it is rational to take theinterests, desires and aims of others into account when we decide what to do. In order tomake their claims plausible, both begin by highlighting the difficulty with acting pru-dently. If prudence is difficult, something that requires virtue, then this is becauseimprudence is a standing temptation. What sort of temptation is it? By definition, itwill be a case where a part of myself draws me towards some action that my wholeself has reason to reject. In order not to beg too many questions at this point, we canfocus on a case where the problem is the temptation of short-term gain that also frus-trates a long-term plan: smoking yet another cigarette after having decided to givethem up, or reading just one more chapter of the mystery novel having decided youneed to get to bed. What is it like to be so tempted and to act for the short-term pleasure?

20 Anthony Simon Laden

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There are a number of common descriptions, many of which apply to other forms ofakrasia: of being pulled by a force beyond one’s rational will, of losing sight of thecompellingness of the prudential consideration, or a temporary shift in one’s preferencesdue to the shape of one’s temporal discounting curves.2 What all of these descriptionshave in common is that they point to something like a lack of firmness in the agent’sgrip on herself as a whole self, one, here, that extends stably into the future. And itis arguably this thought that lies in the background of both Parfit and Nagel’s treatmentof prudence.

Avoiding the temptations of prudence requires that I deliberate with an eye to my wholeself. When the temptations come from my current, short-term desires, then keeping aneye on my whole self will require, among other things, taking into consideration myfuture desires as well as those I have in the present. Prudence thus naturally comes tolook like a matter of managing the claims of temporally distant desires, since the desiresI will have in the future are remote from me now. And it is then this feature of prudencethat makes it useful as a model for thinking about morality, for whatever justifies mytaking heed of my future (and thus distant) desires can help us see what might justifytaking heed of the (distant) desires of others: temporal distance serves as a model forinterpersonal distance.

Of course, it is hardly news that we must sometimes take heed of our future if we are toact rationally. So the question that Nagel focuses on is not whether we should take ourfuture desires seriously, but why (1970, p. 37). In particular, Nagel is concerned to rejectan answer that starts from the thought that all present motivations must be grounded inour present aims, interests, and desires. If that premise is correct, then we only havereasons to be moved by our future desires if some of our present desires are desires forfuture satisfactions. For instance, imagine that I know on Monday that on Wednesday,I will have a desire for a persimmon. According to the view Nagel rejects, that knowledgeshould only motivate me on Monday (say, to plan my Tuesday so that I stop by the fruitstand) if I also have a desire on Monday that my future desire be satisfied (1970, p. 42).If such a view of reasons were correct, then the rationality of taking heed of distantconsiderations would depend on my current psychological state. Such considerationswould not have any independent force of the sort we think moral considerations have,and thus to the extent that temporal distance served as a model for interpersonal difference,the rationality of morality would depend on an individual’s desires and interests. To theextent that I have an interest in an other’s well-being, it will give me reasons to act, butto the extent I don’t have such an interest, it won’t.

The basic insight

Nagel’s first task, then, is to show that such an explanation of the rationality of prudencecannot be right. His basic insight is that this theory gets wrong the importance of myfuture desires to me now. I have reason to promote my future desires’ satisfaction, Nagelpoints out, not because that will satisfy a current desire that I have, but because eventhough these desires lie in the future, they are nonetheless mine (1970, pp. 38–39).

I think of myself as existing not merely at this present moment in time, but as persistinginto the future, and as a result, I regard my future desires as just as much mine as my presentdesires. My desires, after all, give me reasons to act because they are mine, not because theyare now. If I persist into the future, then I can have desires in the future and these desires willthen be just as much mine as my present desires are now. But if these future desires will bemine and they give me reasons to act because of their connection to me, not their temporal

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location, then they should already give me reasons now. Nagel explains this capacity offuture desires to give me reasons now by saying that my future desires give me reasonsthat transmit the force of those desires back across time to the present. They give mereasons not only when they occur, but now, with an eye to their future appearance. Andsince their normative force lies in their being mine, not their connection to my currentdesires, aims or interests, they have that force independently of my current psychologicalstate. That is, it seems as if prudential considerations impose rational constraints on methat do not arise from my current state, and so are, in this way, not so very differentfrom the demands of morality. For Nagel, the force that prudential reasons thus have istied to their ground in our temporally extended nature. If we fail to take seriously theclaims of our future desires, we lose our grip on our selves as temporally extended, wecome to regard the future stages of our life as somehow other, as something to whichour present selves have to reach out (Nagel, 1970, pp. 42–43).3

From insight to theoretical machinery

Nagel then takes this rather plausible insight and gives it some fancy philosophical dress,and it is here, I think, that he ends up heading down the wrong track. First, note that asNagel conceives of the problem of the rationality of prudence, it asks how a temporallyrestricted but distant phenomena (my future desire) can exert a kind of influence acrosstime to give me a present motivation to act. His answer is that reasons transmit the motiva-tional force of desires across time because they are tenseless (1970, p. 54f). That is, themotivational force of a reason-giving desire or interest or end does not depend on therelation of its temporal location to the present. This is why my future desires need noextra help from my present desires. For Nagel, the tenselessness of reasons is part oftheir generality, and thus part of the internal logic of something being a reason (1970, p. 47).

Nevertheless, accounting for the ability of reasons to transmit force across temporalgaps in terms of their being tenseless has implications that it is important to keep trackof. To do so, we need some basic terminology. Something is temporally restricted if ithas a very short temporal duration. In contrast, something that persists over a longer dur-ation is temporally extended. The distinction between temporally extended and restrictedphenomena cuts across a different one that Nagel insists on, between things that aretensed and those that are tenseless. Something is tensed if its temporal position (particularlythe relation of that position to the present) matters. Something is tenseless if its nature isindependent of its temporal position. Since temporally restricted phenomena have muchmore precise temporal locations, the effect of their being tenseless is potentially greaterthan for temporally extended entities. At the limit, for an object that persisted forever,the distinction between being tensed and being tenseless would not matter at all.

By insisting on reasons being tenseless, then, Nagel leaves open the possibility that thematter of a reason can be temporally restricted phenomena. In fact, it is arguable that thefocus on tenselessness is not merely neutral in this regard, but serves to push towards a con-ception of the matter of reasons as temporally restricted, since the more restricted the matterof reasons are, the more important is the fact that reasons are tenseless.

Nagel’s tendency to discuss cases where the matter of reasons is temporally restricted is,I think, a result of his arguing against a theory of reasons that takes the temporal position ofreasons to matter, and thus is committed to the claim that the matter of reasons be tem-porally restricted. A theory that says that only my present desires give me reasons to actplaces two limitations on the temporal properties of reasons. It needs to hold that reasonsare both tensed (in the present) and that they are temporally restricted. Nagel’s argument


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that reasons are tenseless only challenges the first of these limitations, and it is in this sensethat he implicitly accepts the second.4

The second piece of Nagel’s theory holds that we are, as a matter of metaphysical fact,temporally extended beings, and that this fact grounds prudential reasons (1970, 58). Notetwo things about this claim. First, it is the temporal extension of the self that provides themedium of the temporal transmission of the reason-giving force of desires.5 Thus, Nagel’stheory of prudential reasons holds that prudential reasons have a temporally restricted buttenseless matter and a temporally extended ground. Second, the temporal extension of theself is taken as a metaphysical fact. That is, it is a given, not something that is produced orachieved through particular activities. As a result, when Nagel talks of us losing our grip onour conception of ourselves as temporally extended if we fail to recognize the rational forceof prudential considerations, the picture he has in mind is of losing one’s grip on a rock-faceone is climbing, not losing one’s sense of the importance or meaningfulness of a particularproject or aim. In other words, according to Nagel, the person who fails to reason pruden-tially is making a kind of mistake in her navigation through the world, a world that, givenNagel’s robust ontology, might include such things as reasons. Someone who does not feelthe force of prudential reasons is, on such a view, like someone who does not consider theforce of physical barriers in her way as she walks down the street or the force of gravity asshe lets go of the rock she is climbing.

The third piece of Nagel’s theory holds that to evaluate correctly the claims that tense-less reasons make on us given our temporal extension, we need to take up a standpoint oftemporal neutrality, a standpoint from which now is just one time among others, equally real(1970, pp. 60–61). Temporal neutrality involves ignoring the temporal position of entitiesunder consideration, and so allows us to take full cognizance of the tenselesness of reasonsthat justify our acting on, pursuing and preparing for our various desires, interests and endsthat occur at different moments in our lives. From this standpoint, we also can see clearlyand thus take heed of the metaphysical fact that grounds the force of prudential consider-ations: our temporally extended self. If no moment of time is privileged, then there is notemptation to distinguish me-now from me-in-the-future. Both become me-at-some-time.

These three elements – the tenselessness of the matter of reasons, the temporal exten-sion of the self as metaphysical fact and ground of prudential reasons, and the necessity ofreasoning from the temporally neutral standpoint – together generate a conception of pru-dence as time-slice management. In addition to conceiving of the reason-bearing parts ofthe self as time-slices, prudence as time-slice management conceives of prudence as akind of management, something to be done from a point of view external to the conflictingparts. We need principles of prudence or the virtue of prudence because sometimes our parts(here our current and future desires) conflict, or our parts (desires of a particular moment)cannot be satisfied consistent with the well-being of the temporally extended whole (desiresof all the parts). In answer to such conflicts, prudence as time-slice management tells us tostep back from the various parts to see the whole more clearly, and to settle the conflictsaccording to a kind of fixed standard: the fact of our temporal extension. It is thus just ascentral to this view that it conceives of prudence as a kind of management as that whatis managed are the conflicting claims of time-slices.

Parfit and the irrationality of prudence as time-slice management

Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (1984) also makes an argument for the rationality oftaking other people’s interests into account in our deliberations that turns on a detailed con-sideration of the rationality of prudence. But he famously comes to the opposite conclusion


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about prudence in the process. Contra Nagel, he argues that a theory of rationality that toldus to act to maximize our self-interest would lack sufficient grounds. However, though hereaches different conclusions, Parfit turns out to share something fundamental with Nagel’sposition: a conception of prudence as time-slice management.

This underlying agreement comes out most clearly in one of Parfit’s arguments ques-tioning the rationality of taking up the position of temporal neutrality. Nagel’s argumentis meant to explain how future desires transmit their reason-giving force back acrosstime to the present. Thus, when Nagel thinks about temporally distant desires, his eyesare fixed firmly on the future. Parfit, however, points out that if we really take up the stand-point of temporal neutrality, we must consider past moments as well (1984, pp. 149–153).If all moments are equally real, then past moments are as good as future ones. And there, heclaims, lies a problem for the plausibility of temporal neutrality as a rationally requiredstandpoint. To see why, consider the following example: imagine, says Parfit, that for 50years, I have devoted a large portion of my time, resources and energy to saving Venice.But now I am no longer devoted to this project. Parfit asks whether I now have reason tonevertheless devote time and resources to saving Venice. It seems that I don’t, if I nolonger care about it. But notice that from the standpoint of temporal neutrality, savingVenice is the single largest and most important project of my life taken as a whole. Itoccupies more time-slices than any other. I thus seem to have reason, from the standpointof temporal neutrality, to do what I can to help it succeed. To fail to do so is to exhibit thesame bias towards my present desires that Nagel argues is irrational when the competingclaims come from my future. So it looks like temporal neutrality yields irrational resultsbecause it requires me to give too much weight to the past (Parfit, 1984, p. 152).

Nagel’s claim, however, is not that I am required to take up this standpoint, but that if Ifail to do so when I reason, then I will lose my grip on myself as a temporally extendedbeing. What is important about Parfit’s arugment here is that he, at least implicitly,accepts this conditional. He just denies that there is a problem with the consequence(1984, pp. 219–241). Losing my grip on myself as a temporally extended being, heclaims, is not a big deal, because, as he argues elsewhere in the book, it is a metaphysicalfiction to begin with (e.g. p. 281). That is, unlike Nagel, Parfit holds that there is no meta-physical fact that supports the temporal extension and unity of the self. Temporal distancematters, Parfit says, just as much (or just as little) as the distance between persons. So, heconcludes, I have just as much (or as little) reason to take the desires and aims of othersseriously as I do my own temporally distant desires and aims. My future desires have nospecial claim on me. Because there is no metaphysically unified self, there is no virtue inprudence.

But notice here that in denying the rationality of prudence, Parfit is, in particular,denying the rationality of time-slice management. His argument is directed primarilyagainst two of its features: the existence of a temporally extended self that groundsreasons and the rationality of taking up the standpoint of temporal neutrality. At thesame time, he seems to accept a third feature (the temporal restrictedness of the matterof reasons) as part of the set-up of the field. That he takes these to be arguments againstthe rationality of prudence (or what he calls the self-interest theory) shows that he alsoconceives of prudence as time-slice management.

Where time-slice management goes wrong

The attraction of the time-slice management view of prudence for both Nagel and Parfit isthat it makes prudential action less automatic, more difficult, and so makes it easier to see


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that acting self-interestedly and acting on moral considerations might not be so far apartafter all. In this section, I argue that the time-slice management view turns out to mischar-acterize the difficulty with being prudent, because it mischaracterizes both the activity ofpractical reasoning and the place of the self in practical reasoning. This will point theway in the following section to a different conception of prudence.

To understand where time-slice management goes wrong, it helps to attend more closelyto the phenomenology of imprudence. Recall my earlier discussion of the temptations toimprudence. We feel such temptations when we are losing our grip on ourselves asunified agents. In other words, to now use Nagel’s language, one way I can be temptedby imprudence is that I begin to lose my grip on myself as a temporally extended being.I may say things like, I don’t really believe in my future (at all, like that). In otherwords, the very fact that is supposed to make it rational for me to act prudently is one Iam losing confidence in. In other cases, it may feel as if my self is literally breakingdown, separating out into component parts that each pull their own way without anymeans of integrating these demands into a coherent order. It is that feeling of disintegrationthat I think opens the possibility of acting imprudently. Faced with a choice betweenimmediate gratification and the arduous fulfilling of a long-term plan, the thought thatthese are just different paths to take, satisfying different, unrelated parts of me, can makeit easier to just go with the short-term pleasure. If all choice is just plumping for anoption, why not take the easier, nearer one?6

And we can now begin to see where the time-slice management view is going to run intoproblems. First, if the self can threaten to come undone or we can actually lose our grip onourselves as temporally extended, then just how given, and how firm, is the self’s structure,and how secure a ground for practical reason does it provide? And second, how could theremedy to such a problem be a principle of practical reason whose normative standing restson the ground of a now disintegrating or hard to grasp hold of self ?7

The importance of change of values cases

To develop these thoughts more fully, I look closely at discussions of two examples, onefrom Nagel and one from Parfit. What I want to tease out of these discussions is a pairof objections to the time-slice management view, one to the division of the self intotime-slices and one to its view of rationality as management. First, however, we needsome background. According to the time-slice management view, reasons grounded inthe various temporal segments of the self are to be evaluated from the standpoint oftemporal neutrality. Even if this is right, it is incomplete as a theory of practical reasoning,for it fails to tell us how we are to do that evaluation. What counts as a good reason? Whichdesires should be acted on, which interests pursued? Time-slice management gives us theform of evaluation, but not its content. Well, let’s call whatever standard you use yourvalues. Now we get to the problem that these examples discuss: imagine that over thecourse of your life, not only your desires, but also your values, your standards for evaluatingyour desires, change. Which values do you use from the standpoint of temporal neutralitywhen evaluating your desires? If values, like desires, can be temporally restricted, then theycan conflict in precisely the same way as desires, and the mere shift to temporal neutralitywon’t give us a way to decide rationally what to do: there will be multiple and conflictingpossible standards for evaluation from that standpoint. Change of values examples like theones to which I now turn are pretty common in the literature on prudence (another sign, bythe way, that time-slice management is the standard view of prudence) (e.g. Brink, 2003;Parfit, 1984, p. 327).


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Nagel’s example: preparing for middle age

What interests me in Nagel’s particular example is not what he concludes about it, but howhe presents it:

Suppose for example that [a person] now believes that in twenty years he will value security,status, wealth, and tranquility, whereas now he values sex, spontaneity, frequent risks, andstrong emotions. A decisive response to this situation could take either of two forms. The indi-vidual may be strongly enough convinced of the worthlessness of his inevitable future valuessimply to refuse them any claim on his present concern. He would then regard his presentvalues as valid for the future also, and no prudential reasons would then derive from hisexpected future views. On the other hand he may treat both his present and future valueslike preferences, regarding them each as sources of reasons under a higher principle: ‘Livein the life-style of your choice.’ That would demand of him a certain prudence aboutkeeping open the paths to eventual respectability. (1970, p. 74 n1)

The first thing to notice about Nagel’s presentation of this example is that it is radicallyunderdescribed, even by the rather anemic standards of philosophical examples. In particu-lar, there is no explanation of how the agent has developed these beliefs about the future.We are told that ‘It may happen that a person believes . . .’ And later on, that he has a certainset of beliefs about his future, and one of two possible attitudes towards them. What is leftout here is any sense of connection, for the agent, between the agent’s present and his future.From the standpoint of temporal neutrality, this doesn’t appear to be a problem. But that, Iwant to suggest, tells us that there is something wrong with the standpoint of temporalneutrality.

From the standpoint of temporal neutrality Nagel adopts as he spells out this example,it makes sense to posit an agent with a set of values at t, and a different contradictory setat t0, and beliefs at t about their relative merit. But if I am trying to figure out how to actin a similar situation, these facts alone will not hold together. I (like any agent) need toknow more about what grounds those beliefs, about what will lead my values to changein this way.

For my current views about my future values to have any reasonable hold on me now, Imust have some way of understanding those future values as mine, and this must involvesome account of how I could come to develop such values, a story about how I will getfrom now to then. The importance of such a link between my present and future dropsout of the picture when I take up the standpoint of the time-slice manager. From that stand-point, all temporal segments are equivalent, and more importantly, they are already positedas obtaining. The time-slice manager knows (or at least believes) that certain values obtainat certain times. Her problem is what to do about this. My problem, as an agent, however, issomewhat different. It is to figure out what to do now, where that may involve figuring outwho I am, or whom to avoid becoming. Thus, I cannot make use of this belief about myfuture values without some understanding of how this predicted future will come to bemine. It is not so much that Nagel’s account is incoherent as that it is incomplete. Anynumber of details could be coherently added so that an agent could begin to figure outwhat to do. And in spelling out the possible routes to a ‘decisive response’ Nagel is,inter alia, forced to provide the beginnings of such details. Nevertheless, because Nagelfills in the details that the time-slice manager rather than the agent needs, these come inthe form of brute attitudes towards the worth of the future values rather than the kind ofdevelopmental account one would actually look for in such a situation.8

Nagel fails to appreciate the problematic incompleteness of the example because heassumes as given a piece of information that the case turns out to put up for grabs: the


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unity of the agent’s self. Confronted with a prediction that in 20 years time I will have aradically different set of values than I have now, I may very well ask in what sense thatfuture person will be me. (This is roughly the question that Parfit suggests change-of-values cases like that of his Russian nobleman push us to ask; 1984, pp. 326–328). Inthe absence of the developmental story I am suggesting Nagel fails to see the need for, itwill look as if my temporally extended self is actually rather discontinuous and thus notunified at all.9 I think Nagel fails to see this because he thinks of the temporal extensionof the self as a metaphysically given fact, one that the mere activity of figuring out whatto do and doing it could in no way fundamentally alter. So Nagel’s blindness to thisproblem suggests that there is an important difference between the standpoint of aprudent agent (where such facts are relevant) and the standpoint of temporal neutrality(where they are not).

Why management principles won’t help

And now we can start to see that time-slice management views of prudence go wrong in justthe way I suggested above. Nagel’s theory of prudence grounds prudential reasons on ametaphysical account of the self as unified across time-slices. In so doing, it treats aprinciple of prudential reasoning as a kind of external standard for rationality. But at themoment when I am tempted to be imprudent, to act on the promptings of a mere part ofmy self, it is precisely the authority of that standard that I am no longer seeing the legiti-macy of. In such a condition, being told by my friendly neighborhood metaphysician thatI am, after all, a unified and temporally persisting self is unlikely to help, for it is that veryfact I am no longer so sure of. At the very least, I am no longer sure that it provides thegrounds for acting one way rather than another. Nor will it help to be told, as Nagel tellsus, that if I fail to evaluate my reasons from the standpoint of temporal neutrality, then Irisk losing my grip on myself as a temporally persisting being. For that, after all, is whatis already happening to me.

Here I think the problem is more clearly with the management rather than the time-sliceaspect of the view. For in conceiving of prudence in terms of time-slice management, Nagelregards practical reasoning as evaluable according to a set of external standards, one ofwhich is prudence. The good time-slice manager applies such a standard to conflictsbetween the interest and desires of time-slices, and we can judge the proficiency andskill of the manager (i.e. the prudence of the agent) by asking to what degree he matchesthe standards in question. But once we conceive of prudence as an external standard ofthis sort, we open up room to challenge its legitimacy. Why, we can ask, should I careone way or the other, whether I meet that standard? And the problem I have been raisingabove is that the urgency of precisely this challenge will tend to track the urgency of thetemptation to imprudence, so that the principle of prudence as time-slice managementwill fail to help us when we most need it. To put the point another way, thinking of practicalreasoning as the application of an external standard leaves us hard-pressed to answer whatChristine Korsgaard has called ‘the normative question’: what justifies the claim beingmade on us.10

I suspect that we can trace these problems to two features of Nagel’s project. First,because he wants his analysis of prudence to serve as a stepping stone to an analysis ofthe rationality of altruism, he is pushed towards making prudence into a standard of reasonin the same way that morality is supposed to be. If, as Nagel does, you think of moral normsas setting out an external standard of behavior, then it will make sense to bring prudentialprinciples toward moral ones by also making prudential principles external standards.


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If, however, you understand moral norms as being authoritative without providing externalstandards, then Nagel’s advance in seeing the difficulty of prudence will be the kind ofwrong-footed advance I alluded to in the introduction.11

Second, because Nagel analyzes reasons in terms of their ability to transmit force acrossa variety of types of distance, he is drawn to questions of prudence that turn on issues oftemporal distance. But conceiving of prudence as a matter of overcoming temporal conflictsmakes it easier to think that it is a problem that requires a metaphysically grounded solution,one that turns on issues of independence from temporal position, rather than on the connec-tion between various moments and the overarching shape of the agent’s life.

Parfit’s example: saving Venice

The temptation to think of temporal issues metaphysically rather than practically comes outclearly if we turn to Parfit’s discussion of the Venice example I introduced in the last section.First, note that it is also a change of values case, though one looked at from the other end,reflecting back on a past change of values. Second, Parfit, like Nagel, fatally underdescribeshis case, and in so doing fails to appreciate the way that agents change over time and howthis affects what reasons they have. What is significant about agential change is not merelythat we have the power to determine the future through our actions, but that we also have thepower to reinterpret the meaning of our past actions, and thus the place of those actions andevents in our overall lives and with that the force of prudential considerations on us. Again,what matters here is the account we give ourselves of how the temporal segments of ourlives develop from one to the next in a way that supports rather than threatens our gripon ourselves as unified across time. Thus, to take Parfit’s case, if he wants to knowwhether he has reason to continue to devote resources to saving Venice, he needs toknow what place his 50-year devotion to saving Venice plays in his life as he now under-stands it. (Note that this is not the same question as what he thinks now about savingVenice.) Does he think of it as a great waste of time, the product of naı̈ve tastes and concernsthat he has finally outgrown? If so, then even a theory that told him to think of his life as awhole might very well not advise him to continue his foolishness. The case would then belike that of the de-programmed former cult member deciding whether or not to send adonation to her former cult. In contrast, he might think of it as an integral part of hislife, though one he has now outgrown. Although the attractions of Venice no longerattract him, he understands personally and deeply that they can attract others, and soalthough he no longer passionately devotes his time and resources to save the city, whenthe Save Venice Fund calls him up for an annual gift, he has reason to send them a contri-bution. Understood that way, his decision to continue to act in support of his past valueslooks more like the decision of the alumnus who sends his alma mater a check everyyear because of his fond memories of his college years, years he has absolutely no wishto repeat or relive. In either case, newer commitments might lead us to devote our resourceselsewhere, but the pull of our former commitments is neither absurd nor irrational, infusedwith nostalgia though it might be.12 In other words, the rationality of his continuing tosupport the Save Venice Fund seems to turn not on the external standard that says to maxi-mize one’s interests independently of their temporal location, but rather on the very openquestion of whether he still identifies with his earlier self, whether he does see himselfas relevantly continuous and temporally extended.

The contrast I am pointing to here is between the temporal location of events and theirautobiographical significance.13 And my point is that if we think of the whole self asdivided into temporal slices which are primarily identified by their temporal location


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rather than their autobiographical significance, then it will be natural to think that what weneed to string them together into a unified whole is a metaphysical principle or underlyingfact about the temporal extension and unity of the self. If, however, we think that therational importance of these different moments of our lives lies not in their temporallocation, and thus perhaps distance from the present, but in their autobiographical signifi-cance, then the metaphysical solution and the management approach it leads us to will beless obviously what is wanted.

Prudence as integrity: a different model of the whole self

The foregoing arguments suggest that time-slice management conceptions of prudence gowrong along three interrelated axes: their division of the self into temporal slices, theirreliance on purportedly solid metaphysical facts (about the temporal extension of theself) to provide a firm ground for prudential reasons, and their conception of principlesof practical reason as external standards against which decisions can be measured fortheir rationality. What, then, might a conception of prudential reasoning look like that dif-fered from time-slice management on all three dimensions? In this section, I sketch out boththe general parameters of such a view and one specific example. I call this general con-ception of prudence ‘prudence as integrity’ for reasons that will become clear below.

We can start to develop an alternative by working out a different way to conceive of theparts of the self. Doing so requires altering two features of the time-slice managementapproach. The first is the division of the self into temporally restricted parts. Prudence isdifficult precisely because the parts of the self can make rational claims on the wholeself, and so what we conceive of as the parts of the self must also play a role as eitherthe matter or of the ground of reasons. We can thus avoid some of the problems of thetime-slice approach if we can divide the self into already temporally extended parts.

The second is the claim of the unity of the self as already, metaphysically given. As wesaw above, I need a prudential principle precisely when my faith in my unity is faltering. Ifthe mere assertion that I am anyway unified won’t help, then we need the conception of aunified, whole self to do other work. One possibility is that the unity of the self serves as akind of teleological end of reasoning rather than its ground. Prudential principles wouldthen serve as guides to constituting and maintaining a unified self rather than as measuresof rationality that derive their authority from the purported prior fact of our unity.

The idea that a unified self is a practical achievement that requires ongoing work is, ofcourse, not new. It is arguably the guiding thought of Plato’s Republic, and plays a role inthe moral and political philosophy of Rousseau, Hegel and Nietzsche and the psychologicaltheories of Freud. And it is surely interesting in this context to note that for none of thesethinkers is the problem of unification primarily about the stringing together of temporalslices. Instead, what we must unify in order to construct whole selves for all of these thin-kers is something like our commitments, allegiances, self-conceptions or guiding ideals.However we describe these parts of the self, they all share the feature of being temporallyextended. That is, to have a commitment to some value, person or cause is to project one’ssupport of it into the future. It is thus part of the internal logic of commitments that theycannot be held by single time-slices.14 Although it is possible for my current commitmentsto conflict with commitments I have had in the past or will form in the future, and even ifone way of resolving some conflicts will be through forms of scheduling, the basic form ofconflict between commitments is not inter-temporal.

To fix ideas, I’ll describe the parts of the self that prudence as integrity helps to unify asaspects of what Christine Korsgaard calls our ‘practical identity’ (1996a, p. 101).


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Korsgaard, like the earlier figures mentioned above, not only divides the self along theselines, but argues that they serve as the matter of our practical reasons. A practical identity,according to Korsgaard, is a normative conception of oneself that can take the form of anendorsed collection of rules for deciding what considerations count as reasons for you. As aresult, your practical identity describes both how you decide what to do, and also expresseswho you are by capturing what you take to be worth doing. Joan is a doctor, and so ‘do noharm’ is one of her guiding principles when she practices medicine. When figuring out howto treat a patient, the fact that a proposed cure will harm must figure in her deliberations.That is how a practical identity describes how we make decisions, what reasons we takeourselves to have. But if someone were to ask Joan to justify a decision she reached onthe basis of her ‘do no harm’ principle, she might reply by saying that she is a doctor,and that is part of what being a doctor amounts to. That is how our decision rules arebound up in our identities. Finally, in identifying herself as a doctor, Joan implicitlyvalues that identity and what it stands for and what it leads her to do. When her decisionis challenged, she can reply not by citing the Hippocratic oath, but her identity, sayingalong with Dr. McCoy from the original Star Trek: ‘Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor!’15 Thatis a statement of her values as well as the source of her paycheck, and it is why the ideaof a practical identity can capture our reasons, our values, and our identities all together.

Of course, none of us is just one thing, and so each of our practical identities will havemany aspects, and we can conceive of each of these as a part of the self.16 A list of some ofthe major aspects of my practical identity might include the roles I play, such as father,professor, and citizen, the groups to which I belong, such as philosophers, Jews, andAmericans, the particular relationships I form, such as being this person’s husband, thatperson’s friend, and perhaps certain values or virtues I try to embody, such as beingkind, generous, or spontaneous. What makes a practical identity aspect mine is my attach-ment to it, whether this comes about through explicit voluntary endorsement, or a morepassive recognition that this is, after all, part of who I am.

So conceived, the aspects of a practical identity are temporally extended. In order forsomething to count as an aspect of my identity and not merely a passing fancy, my attach-ment to it must project into the future and/or the past. Needless to say, it need not projectinfinitely into either temporal direction. If, for instance, I identify myself as a student, I willnot regard that as an aspect of my identity that will hold forever. Nevertheless, even suchclearly delimited aspects of my practical identity will be temporally extended.

How the temporal extension of practical identity helps

The temporally extended nature of our practical identity aspects provides a differentsolution to the temporal bridging problem that worried Nagel. Because aspects of ourpractical identities supply the matter of our practical reasons, those reasons will also beinherently temporally extended and perhaps also limited. If being a vegetarian or acitizen makes it the case that certain circumstances or facts or desires give me reasonsto act now, then they will also give me reasons to act in the future, and now with an eyeto the future. If I am a vegetarian, then the fact that some food has animal products in itgives me reason not to eat it, a reason that overrides any reasons that might come fromrun-of-the-mill hunger. Insofar as my being a vegetarian is an indefinitely temporallyextended aspect of my practical identity, it is also the case that at any time in the foreseeablefuture, the fact that some food has animal products in it will give me a powerful reason notto eat it. Thus, my vegetarianism gives me reasons now to plan my days and my life so as toavoid being in situations where I am hungry and there is no vegetarian food to hand. Since


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these reasons stem from this temporally extended part of my whole self, the questions aboutthese reasons that arise are not, first and foremost, about how to bridge temporal distance.Deciding that I won’t eat meat now is not the same as deciding to be or remain a vegetarian.The latter carries with it already a commitment to future commitments. It thus authorizessimilarly forward-looking reasons.17 Of course, how far forward those commitmentslook will depend on the value of the commitment and of the person committing. Some iden-tities run their course and others we abandon or leave behind.

Because aspects of my practical identity are temporally extended, a theory of practicalreason that grounds reasons in identity aspects avoids the horns of what might be calledParfit’s dilemma. On the one hand, a theory of practical reason like the present-aimtheory runs into all sorts of problems with temporally distant reasons, as Nagel’s discussionof such theories makes abundantly clear. On the other hand, time-slice management theoriesof prudence, insofar as they require temporal neutrality, seem to give insufficient weight tothe agent’s current aims and preferences, as Parfit’s Venice case is meant to show. Parfit’sdilemma, then, is how to both acknowledge that practical reasoning takes place from some-where and sometime, and yet not lose track of the force of future-grounded reasons. If,however, reasons find their support in temporally extended aspects of our practical identity,then my reasoning from the aspects of my identity that I have now properly roots mydeliberation in the here and now without cutting that deliberation off from the future orpast. It provides a way of developing, we might say, a present-aim theory that is not amerely-present-reasons theory, as the theory Parfit describes is.

Furthermore, while the question of whether time slices form a whole looks to be a ques-tion of metaphysics, the question of how identity aspects fit together into a whole self is apractical one. Thus, by shifting from a division of the self into temporal segments to a div-ision of the self into temporally extended but potentially conflicting commitments, we makeit easier to also shift from a metaphysical conception of the self to a practical one. To con-tinue with the example in terms of identity aspects, a whole self is, clearly, going to be madeup of the various aspects of its practical identity. I am, for instance, not just a father or just aphilosopher, but a whole host of different things, all at the same time: a father, a husband,a son, a brother, this person’s friend, that person’s teacher, a citizen, a Jew, a philosopher, avegetarian, and so on. These various aspects of my identity do not pop up in a temporallysequential fashion, but persist through time, even when they are not at the forefront of myconsciousness. The work of being a whole self, then, involves integrating the variousaspects of my practical identity at each time, of turning them from a collection of disparatecommitments and projects into a kind of coherent self, a life. It is, ultimately, a problem forme, not my friendly neighborhood metaphysician. What kind of problem it presentsme with becomes clearer if we try to think about how threats to the unity of our practicalidentities come about.

Prudence as a response to threats to integrity

Imagine that we are colleagues and are discussing some matter of departmental policy. Inthe course of our deliberation, we will offer reasons to one another that we think the othershould take seriously qua department member. This aspect of our identity will thus take theforeground. But the reasons supported by this aspect can conflict with the reasons supportedby other aspects of each of our identities, and so we will each face the question of whethersuch conflicts should have a bearing on our deliberation.18 Perhaps you suggest that wehold an important meeting at a time when I normally have to pick up my children orduring a religious holiday I observe. And I say we can’t meet then because I will be


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otherwise engaged being a father or a religious observer. What is wrong with one of ourcolleagues trying to rule such a claim out of the discussion by saying, ‘Look, we are delib-erating about a matter of departmental affairs at the moment, and so the only relevantreasons are departmental, not familial or religious or anything else’?

Well, we might explain what is wrong by adapting an insight of Nagel’s we saw above.Nagel takes the problem of prudence to be of the form: why should I now give any rationalweight to my future desires. And his answer is that me-now and me-in-the-future arejust parts of me-over-time. As a result, something that is a reason for me-in-the-future isalso a reason for me-now—both are reasons for me. It is part of my being me that I amtemporally extended.

Turning to our rude colleague, I can invoke a similar dynamic. I am not merely amember of the department and a father, but me (a member of the department), and assuch, also at the same time me (a father). As a result, something that is a reason for me(qua department member) must also be a reason for me (qua father), and thus compatiblewith the reasons I have that are grounded in my being a father, because part of my beingme is that I am both a member of the department and a father. (Of course, this goes theother way, too). Note that this reply to my rude colleague does not give us an answerabout when to schedule the meeting because it doesn’t yet tell us how to fit together theconstraints on the reasons I can have that come from these different aspects of my self.All it is meant to show is that his proposal does place me under a genuine conflict, andthat resolving that conflict will be necessary if I am to be properly responsive to thedemands of the different parts of my self. In other words, our rude colleague has presentedme with the sort of problem for which I need prudential principles.

This suggests that if I want to solve this particular conflict I will need two resources:reasonable colleagues and principles of prudence as integrity. Reasonable colleagues willrespond to the conflict I face as giving them reasons to consider meeting at a differenttime, thus lessening the centrifugal pressure on me. There is a lot more to be said aboutthe virtue of reasonableness in this context, but I won’t try to say it here, in part becauseI have said it elsewhere (Laden, 2000, 2005). Instead, let’s focus on what prudence willhave to look like if it is going to help me out in such situations.

First, note that the principles I need in such a case will invoke the idea of a unified self ina fundamentally different way than the principles of time-slice management. Rather thantelling me that I am already a unified self and thus have reasons to do one thing ratherthan another, principles of prudence as integrity will tell me what a unified self mustlook like, so that I can create or preserve my own unity. That is, what I need here is a prac-tical guide forwards, an ideal to hold on to, rather than the possibly hollow sounding reas-surance of metaphysics. Again, depending on some of the details of how we conceive of theactivity of practical reasoning and the parts of the self that need bringing together, what thatideal of unity will look like may vary. Although Kant, Nietzsche, Rousseau and Freud allagree that the unity of the self is an achievement, they have very different pictures of what aunified self ultimately looks like.

To see how a practical ideal of unity can help to respond to the dilemmas brought on byour multiple identities, we can consider some rather everyday strategies we each use tohandle such conflicts. I can accord various aspects of my identity priority in differentarenas of my life, as when I take my identity as a citizen to override other identities in demo-cratic politics, but to take a back seat in deliberations within my family about where to go onvacation or how to divide up household responsibilities. I can allow for a greater devotion toa particular aspect of my identity now by limiting the duration of its hold on me, as when Ithrow myself into a project or a game because I know it will only last for a few hours or


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weeks. Or I can re-conceive one or more otherwise conflicting identities so that they fitmore easily together, as when I rein in my professional ambitions to make room for myambitions for a fulfilling family life.

These strategies help me to achieve a kind of integrity, because they involve payingheed to the demands of all my various identities and commitments, of not jettisoningthose commitments in the face of difficulties. But they also help me achieve integrity ina more literal sense: in being prudent in this sense of the word, I hold myself together.That is, I make of my various aspects something whole, some one thing: me. And it ishere that the practical conception of the unity of the self would help: it would tell mewhat sorts of arrangements and compromises are consistent with such unity, and thushelp guide those choices.

Note as well that when I reason in this way, balancing various disparate commitments,ideals and allegiances, the force of a reason that finds its matter in one aspect of my identityis transformed by placing it in the context of all the demands made by my various identities.In other words, in all of them, I wind up acting with an eye to my whole self rather thanmerely one of its parts. In short, they are prudential strategies.

The rationality of prudence as integrity

But why are they rational? Answering this question requires making the biggest shift fromtime-slice management theories. As we saw above, such theories regard practical reasoningas a kind of management technique, one which must measure up to an external standardwhose ground lies in metaphysical facts such as the unity and temporal persistence ofthe self. The picture of practical reason that comes into view as we construct a conceptionof prudence as integrity, however, is rather different. It is not an activity that steps awayfrom the self’s conflicting parts, but one which goes on from within those parts. And sodetermining its rationality requires not looking to an external standard by which wemeasure it, but at the activity itself.

To see clearly the distinction I am pointing towards, we can ask where am I going wrongif I fail to adopt such prudential strategies. If I fail to reason as a time-slice manager, saysNagel, I lose my grip on myself as a being who persists through time. I thus make a mistakein my reasoning about the kind of thing I am. The fact of my temporal persistence groundsan external standard that my reasoning should measure up to in order to count as rational.

What have I done wrong if I fail to hold my identity aspects together in accordance withprudence as integrity? I want to suggest that the answer must be, and is, that I have failed toreason. The answer must look like this for it to invoke an internal, rather than an externalstandard, one that makes reference to the activity of reasoning itself, and not to some furtherstandard. Only when we have an internal standard can our account of the rationality of pru-dence actually be helpful in the moments when we need it. Recall my earlier discussion ofthe failure of the time-slice management approach. One point I made there was that at themoments when imprudence tempts me, my sense of my own unity is precisely what I amlacking, and so it will seem a perfectly good question to ask why should I act in line with astandard whose ground doesn’t have a firm hold on me. I don’t feel like a unified self and so,thinking about what to do, this fact is unlikely to convince me to give up my desire of themoment. If, however, principles of prudence are internal principles to the activity of prac-tical reasoning, then the answer such principles give me when I feel temptation’s pull is notone whose force temptation has already weakened. After all, the kinds of cases that we havebeen imagining involve an agent, tempted by imprudence, who is nevertheless trying tofigure out what to do. She is, that is, trying to find reasons for giving in to or resisting


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the temptation. Thus, though she may have lost her grip on her self as unified, she has notabandoned the attempt to act for reasons. So those standards still have some sort of claimon her.

To see why prudence as integrity is in fact an internal standard of reasoning, we need aslight detour into the nature and authority of reason. These are, of course, controversialwaters and such a detour can not hope to provide convincing arguments for one theoryover another. And so rather than argue for a particular conception of reasoning, I willmerely lay out one possible example to give a sense of how prudence as integrity couldbe justified as an internal standard of reasoning. Take, then, Kant’s oft-quoted remarkabout the authority of reason from the Critique of Pure Reason:

Reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism; should it limit freedom ofcriticism by any prohibitions, it must harm itself, drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion.Nothing is so important through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be exemptedfrom this searching examination, which knows no respect for persons. Reason depends onthis freedom for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict isalways simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted toexpress, without let or hindrance, his objection or even his veto. (1965, p. 593 (A738/B766))

The idea that I want to take from this passage is that in order to reason, I have to leave con-siderations open to criticism from all comers. The moment I prevent some line of criticismfrom being considered, I stop reasoning and start issuing dictatorial commands. But noticewhat this means for the activity of reasoning. In order to be reasoning, I have to be in aposition to entertain criticisms and not choke them off. In the course of deciding how torespond to the demands I face that stem from the various parts of my self, criticisms ofproposed solutions and strategies will come from, among other sources, various otherparts of my self. To take up Kant’s metaphor, we might say that I have to be able to leteach of my parts raise, without let or hindrance, its criticism or even its veto. ShouldI fail to do so, I am no longer reasoning, but allowing some part of my self dictatorialauthority over my choices and actions.

To see this, think again about the deliberation among colleagues. Someone makes a pro-posal for a meeting time and I object because it places me under a conflict between myduties as department member and my duties as parent. And now our rude colleague triesto rule this objection out of court on the grounds that it comes from a part of my selfthat isn’t relevant to the discussion. We can now say that he is trying to give our collectiveidentity as colleagues dictatorial authority, authority that brooks no criticism from othercommitments we might have. It is, thus, important, that the colleague’s rudeness consistin his attempt to pre-empt the reason rather than merely rebut it. If Kant is right aboutthe nature of reasoning, pre-emption of this sort is not a way to reason with me, but anattempt to command me. Similarly, if I do not allow the various parts of my self to havetheir say, as it were, in my deliberations about what to do, then I am not integratingmyself into a whole, but neither am I reasoning. Of course, spelling out just what countsas giving one identity aspect ‘its say’ is not a simple or straightforward task, and it is notone I can take up here.19 It is, however, worth highlighting here that if a principle ofintegrity is to be a constitutive standard of reasoning, the nature of the integrity producedwill need to be rather loose. We do not need (and, on this view, should not want) a fullyspelled out external standard of what a balanced or unified self looks like beyond itbeing a self whose parts are, as it were, on speaking terms, are available as grounds forthe considerations that figure into the activity of reasoning.


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Let me take stock of what we have so far, even if in skeletal form: prudence as integrityconceives of the parts of the self as themselves temporally extended, and thus the problemof combining the parts of the self not as one of bridging temporal gaps. In taking these tem-porally extended parts of the self to provide the matter for reasons, it builds the temporalextension of reasons into their matter. It conceives of the unity of the self as a practicalachievement rather than a metaphysical fact. Finally, it conceives of prudence as a consti-tutive standard of reasoning rather than an external standard of rationality. It thus avoids thesources of the problems that plagued the conception of prudence as time-slice management.There is reason to hope, then, that such a conception can also avoid those problems.Showing that it does so will be the task of the next section.

Integrity and the change of values

In criticizing the conception of prudence as time-slice management, I generated my criticismsby looking at how Nagel and Parfit treat so-called change of values cases. My point in lookingat these cases was not so much to argue that time-slice management views could not adequatelyhandle such cases, but that they were led to do so in a way that seemed foreign to the problemssuch cases present. So what we need to see in thinking about these cases from the point of viewof prudence as integrity is not so much whether this approach gives us better answers, butwhether it provides a more appropriate framework for thinking about them.

Imagine, then, that I become convinced that I am likely to have, in 20 years, a set ofvalues that are radically different than those I have now. I realize, say, that at least someof my current commitments, projects or identity aspects will no longer have a hold onme, and a set of radically different ones will have taken their places. To borrow fromParfit’s Russian nobleman example, imagine that I am now a poor student and a revolution-ary socialist, but I know that I will inherit land and money and so in 20 years will be a richlandowner and expect also to have become a conservative. First, it is important that we haveshifted perspective to the first-person, for now some of the incongruity and incompletenessinherent in change of values cases becomes clearer. Even if I could really imagine the tran-sition from poor student to rich landowner by merely attending to its external causes, it isunclear how to envision the more important and troubling change in political values. Aremy current convictions not only so shallow, but known to be so shallow that I justexpect that the presence of money in my life will change them? If so, why should I nowmake any important decisions on the basis of them? Are they deep, but rooted in mysense of my own self-interest, so that the shift from revolutionary to conservative is notreally a change of values at all (the change is merely in where my interests lie)? Thenthe reasoning problem may be technically difficult, but not philosophically problematical.

If we want to approximate the kind of dilemma Parfit and Nagel have in mind when theydiscuss these cases, however, I think we need to fill in a different kind of story, one in whichI recognize the powerful corrosive forces on strongly held youthful values brought on byother commitments, say to family loyalty, the demands of respectability when onebecomes head of a family, and so on. If we imagine the story this way, however, itseems natural to think that in working out a question of how to act now in light of allthis knowledge, I might very well, and rationally, decide to do what I can to bracemyself against these social forces to be able to hold fast to my present ideals. Alternatively,I might try to look for a way to integrate these two seemingly contradictory moments of mylife into a whole. Note that such solutions are different from the one the nobleman in Parfit’sstory goes for. What I am suggesting is that the nobleman hold himself together, whereasParfit imagines him doing the equivalent of tying his hands to the mast.20


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And it is in trying to hold myself together that I will need something like prudence asintegrity. Such integration, after all, is not a question of acting in light of a pre-existing,perhaps metaphysical fact of my unity or integrity, but an attempt to fashion integrity outof seemingly disparate elements. At the same time, how to go about such unificationcannot be determined by the principle of prudence alone. Here, I think, Nagel is correctand Parfit’s present-aim theory is mistaken: the temporal position of the matter of myreasons can not be the determining feature of their force. But we need not conclude fromthat that we must take up the standpoint of temporal neutrality in order to reason. Integrityis what I will achieve through skillful prudential reasoning, not what I will rely on inreasoning correctly.21 To see this, notice that the criterion of my success in facing downthe temptations of imprudence will not be that I have warded off what I or somemetaphysician has identified as a temptation, but that, as my life develops, I can continueto reason about what to do rather than merely issue myself (and others) commands (asParfit’s nobleman is forced to do).

Conclusion

The trouble with prudence is two-fold. First, acting prudently in the face of temptations notto is difficult. It does not come naturally, and requires reasoning in accord with principles ofpractical reason. But it is precisely the difficulty of acting prudently that makes the analysisof prudential action and reasoning such a potentially fruitful site for understanding practicalreasoning more generally.

Here, however, we run into the second trouble with prudence, or at least many standardtheories of prudence. Theories that characterize prudence as time-slice management havemisunderstood what prudence requires of us and what prudential reasoning might looklike. If the analysis of prudence is going to serve as a stepping stone to thinking moregenerally about practical reasoning and in particular, moral reasoning, then this mistakewill have widespread consequences. Although any even rudimentary exploration of theseconsequences lies beyond the scope of this paper, I end here by gesturing to the possibilitiesand noting how three features of the two conceptions of prudence I have discussed findechoes in the moral theories they support.

Prudence as time-slice management is conceived of as a way to reach across temporaldistance, so that distant interests have normative force. For Nagel, this is also the way tounderstand principles of altruism, as principles that explain how to reach across interperso-nal distance. We thus get a picture of individuals standing at a distance from one another,but, as it were, tied together by a web of altruistic reasons that bridge these distances.

In contrast, prudence as integrity sees the point of prudential principles as helpingconflicting interests and identity aspects find common ground, a shared self. We can thenask what a moral analogue would be: are there principles which would allow us to solveour interpersonal conflicts through finding common ground, shared actions, decisions orwills?22

Second, prudence as time-slice management takes principles of practical reason to beexternal standards of success against which our reasoning is to be measured to see if it isrational. It is not surprising, then, that both Parfit and Nagel offer realist conceptions ofmorality that treat moral principles as external standards by which we judge our behavior.23

In contrast, prudence as integrity treats principles of prudence as constitutive principlesof reasoning, principles that an activity must follow to be considered reasoning at all.We might then think of moral principles in the same way, as constitutive principles ofreasoning, perhaps of reasoning together.24


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Finally, time-slice management views of prudence take the self’s unity to be metaphysicallygiven and thus a stable ground for prudential principles of practical reasoning. This suggeststhat if moral principles of practical reasoning are to have firm grounding, there will have tobe a metaphysical fact that grounds them. Nagel argues that altruistic principles rely on thefact that we are each just one person among others, equally real.

In contrast, conceiving of prudence as integrity requires seeing the unified self as anachievement, and in large part an achievement of successful and skilled practical reasoning,reasoning that obeys prudential principles. This suggests a different relationship betweenmoral principles and moral facts: that our interpersonal unity, our moral community, issomething that we might bring about and preserve through our moral action and reasoning,rather than something that already, inevitably exists. That a moral community as well as aunified self are things we must construct suggests, then, a final trouble with prudence: thereis still, and always will be, a lot of work to be done.

AcknowledgementsThis paper has been incubating for a long time, and so there are many people whose comments havebeen helpful in its reaching its current form and whom I would like to thank: Marya Schechtman, AbeRoth, Tamar Schapiro, Tamar Szabo Gendler, Daniel Sutherland and audiences who heard a versioncalled ‘Prudence Reconceived’ at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Wisconsin,both in Milwaukee and Madison, Northwestern University, Children’s Hospital of Chicago’s lectureseries on the virtues, and The 2006 Summer Institute of the Center for the Study of the History ofEconomic thought at George Mason. I have been able to make the most significant progress onthis paper during a number of research leaves, supported by the Philosophy Department and theHumanities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Alexander von Humboldt Foun-dation. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for the journal for their helpfulsuggestions.

Notes1. For a discussion of what I am calling prudence that distinguishes these different types of

prudence, see Korsgaard (2004, esp. pp. 78–85).2. This last description is from Ainslie (2001). Ainslie argues that all sorts of imprudent and akratic

behavior is best understood as a result of the effect of hyperbolic rather than exponential dis-counting of the future.

3. Though Nagel takes the fact that the present-desire theory commits an agent to this attitudetowards his future self to be a serious flaw in the view, some who defend such theories seemless troubled by it (MacIntosh, 2001, p. 355).

4. One might wonder why the present desire theory of reasons is committed to the temporalrestrictedness of the matter of reasons. It is a necessary feature of the theory because withoutit the theory loses all distinctive content. If reasons’ matter is not temporally restricted, thentheir temporal location (now or distant) doesn’t matter, and so there is no content to a viewthat insists that only present desires can serve as the matter of reasons.

5. Since Nagel goes on to argue that reasons must be objective (impersonal) as well as tenseless,and thus must be able to transmit motivational force from person to person, he does not strictlyspeaking need the temporal extension of a unified self to support the claim that future desirescould ground present reasons. However, in the absence of the claim about the temporal exten-sion of the self, there would be no specifically prudential reasons, and his position would moreclosely resemble Parfit’s, at least in its structure: what we think of as prudential reasons wouldjust be a peculiar sort of moral reasons. I am grateful to a referee for the journal for pushing meto see this point about Nagel’s view.

6. Ainslie (2001) argues that issues of prudence boil down to intertemporal bargaining betweendifferent interests within a person, and that both short- and long-term interests often succeedby using strategies that block the other’s prominence at given moments. Some of these strategiesinvolve forms of identification discussed above.


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7. A time-slice management theorist might reply that the ground of her principle of prudence is notthe unified self as such but something like the overwhelming cost of disintegration. But noticethat unless such a theory comes with a claim that rationality requires each of us to minimizecosts impersonally (to the universe?), then she will need to be able to answer the question,with regard to the disintegrated agent, ‘costs to whom?’ I am grateful to an anonymousreferee for the journal for both pointing out this line of argument and its potential problems.

8. One might try to rescue Nagel from the recourse to brute attitudes in the cited passage by bring-ing to bear the more robust realist picture of reasons that lies in the background of his overallargument. Thus, the time-slice manager could appeal to the fact of the reasons that do, time-lessly, exist, in choosing one course of action over another. Whether this move would countas shoring up Nagel’s view or digging it into a deeper hole may depend on one’s philosophicaltemperament. But for the purposes of this paper, note that it would saddle Nagel’s view ofprudence with extraneous baggage that isn’t essential to it, thus wouldn’t count as a defenseof the view of prudence itself. Thanks to a referee for the journal for pointing out the bearingthat Nagel’s realism has on these cases.

9. When criticizing the present-desire account of prudence, Nagel seems to be quite aware of thispoint. There he raises a somewhat different change of values case, ‘Suppose that for no reasonhaving to do with the future, I conceive now a desire to become a policeman on my 35th birth-day. If I do not believe that the desire will persist, or that any circumstances then obtaining willprovide me with reason for being or becoming a policeman, is it possible to maintain neverthe-less that the desire itself gives me reasons to do what will promote its realization? It would beextremely peculiar if anyone allowed himself to be moved to action by such a desire, or regardedit as anything but a nervous symptom to be looked on with suspicion and got rid of as soon aspossible’ (1970, pp. 43–44). My point is that it would be just as peculiar if someone allowedherself to be motivated by the sort of belief about future values posited in the change of valuescases, where it is completely detached from an account of how the change occurs. Moreover,once such an account is added to the case, then it either ceases to be coherent or it ceases tobe a problem. See Schechtman (2002) for a similar analysis, though focused on a discussionof Parfit.

10. Surveying ways of answering the normative question is the aim of Korsgaard (1996a). Shediscusses the question (pp. 9–10), and discusses why Nagel’s realist approach can’t give asatisfactory answer (pp. 40–47). The point I am trying to raise here is not that such reasonscan’t motivate me, so is not about whether such reasons are internal and external in the sensemade famous by Williams (1981), but whether they can speak to me.

11. The thought that the standards of morality are internal or constitutive standards of agency orrationality can be found in Korsgaard (2002) and in a somewhat different register, in Velleman(2006), both of whom take their views to be Kantian in this regard.

12. Note as further evidence that something is going wrong in Parfit’s analysis of his case that theself-interest theory as he represents it gives an absurd answer to the question of why he shouldsupport saving Venice even when he does care about it. The self-interest view is going to have tosay that he should do so because caring for Venice will turn out to be one of the longest lastingconcerns of his life rather than that it is something that he presently cares deeply about.

13. I mean this term to gesture towards so-called ‘narrative’ theories of the self and personal identitywithout making particular claims about their details (for one such theory, see Schechtman,1996). That is, I don’t think we need here a complete theory of how the role of an event inone’s overall life gives it significance and place and a connection to one’s identity over timeto note that we are attending to a different feature of an event when we attend to its significanceto the person than when we attend to its temporal location. And this basic distinction is all I needhere.

14. Korsgaard (1989/1996b, pp. 371–372) makes something like this point with regard to Parfit.What I am suggesting here is that a similar complaint can be made against Nagel.

15. It is important to stress here that the connection of values to identity aspects does not make allvalues values of self-expression. The connection explains why I take a given value to give mereasons to act one way rather than another, but not why I take that value to be worth identifyingwith.

16. There is temptation here to talk of practical identity aspects as if they were like mini-me’s, fullyfunctional, rational sub-parts of the self. While there is some value to be had from the metaphorof the multiple self as a kind of miniature city of deliberating parts, taking the picture too


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seriously obscures certain features of the internal logic of the self. Working out precisely wherethe dangers here lie and how to avoid them is well beyond the scope of the paper, but wouldcertainly be necessary in any attempt to decide among the various alternatives to the time-slice management approach that would fit the general confines of the prudence as integrityview. For two very different discussions of intrapersonal conflict that attend to these issueswhile seeing prudence as integrity, see Lear (1998) and Ainslie (2001).

17. See Nozick (1993, chaps. 1–2) for a somewhat different account of the forward-looking natureof reasons, which relies in part on Ainslie’s work. Of course, my vegetarianism might beshallow – adopted on a whim and ready to be abandoned at the first sign of difficulty. Alarge part of what determines which of my identities are deep and which shallow is, I think, ulti-mately my future actions. This is one of the ways in which our futures affect our pasts.

18. I discuss how to answer this question at greater length in Laden (2005).19. Lear (1998) draws a contrast between defensive and non-defensive uses of reason that might be

helpful in further thinking through this issue. Defensive uses of reason provide us with consist-ent stories about and explanations of our behaviors that save us from having to confront theirunderlying motivations. They are thus a bar to self-integration. Clearly, the kind of reasoningI have in mind here is the non-defensive kind.

20. See chapter 9 of Korsgaard (2009) for an illuminating discussion of Parfit’s example, and whyhe both fails to integrate himself and thereby fails to be someone others can relate to.

21. As such, prudential reasoning on the integrity model will look a lot like the strategies found inMillgram (1997) and Taylor (1997) for approaching incommensurable values. Both argue thatthe commensurability of values is an achievement of practical reasoning, rather than a meta-physical or other fact that allows for practical reasoning in the first place.

22. For the beginnings of a view of practical reason as the process of forming such common ground,see Laden (2000).

23. This is clearer for Parfit, who is a Utilitarian, than for Nagel, who defends a kind of Kantianism,but it is no less true for Nagel.

24. For two recent attempts to do this that take their inspiration from Kant, see O’Neill (1989) andKorsgaard (2009). Both argue that the categorical imperative is a constitutive principle ofreasoning. Another approach is to see the demands of morality in terms of the demands ofreasonableness (Laden, 2000).

Notes on contributorAnthony Simon Laden is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is theauthor of Reasonably Radical (Cornell, 2001) and co-editor, with David Owen, of Multiculturalismand Political Theory (Cambridge, 2007). He is currently at work on a book on reasoning together,rationality and casual conversation.

ReferencesAinslie, G. 2001. Breakdown of will. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Brink, D. 2003. Prudence and authenticity: Intrapersonal conflicts of value. Philosophical Review

112: 215–245.Kant, I. 1965. Critique of pure reason (Norman Kemp Smith, Trans.). New York: St. Martin’s Press.Korsgaard, C. 1996a. The sources of normativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Korsgaard, C. 1996b. The unity of agency: A Kantian response to Parfit. In Constructing the kingdom

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Korsgaard, C. 2009 (forthcoming). Self-constitution: Action, identity and integrity. Oxford: Universityof Oxford, UK chapter 9.

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Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Schechtman, M. 1996. The constitution of selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Schechtman, M. 2002. Self and self-interest. In Personal and moral identity, eds. A.W. Musschenga,

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The trouble with prudence