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Temporal Neutrality Implies Exponential Temporal Discounting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2023

Craig Callender
Craig Callender*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
*
Email: ccallender@ucsd.edu
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Abstract

How should one discount utility across time? The conventional wisdom in social science is that one should use an exponential discount function. Such a function is a representation of the axioms that provide a well-defined utility function plus a condition known as stationarity. Yet stationarity doesn’t really have much intuitive normative pull on its own. Here I try to cast it in a normative glow by deriving stationarity from two explicitly normative premises, both suggested by the philosophical thesis of temporal neutralism. Putting the argument in this form helps us better understand exponential discounting and challenges to it.

Type
Contributed Paper
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 90 , Issue 5 , December 2023 , pp. 1469 - 1479
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association

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