cubefox 4 days ago

> (The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)

Your current preferences matter now. You currently don't want to die tomorrow in your sleep, therefore dying tomorrow in your sleep is already bad now. Independently of other things you want to do tomorrow or next week.

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gjm11 4 days ago

That is also my opinion. I would also say that because I have a persistent preference for not dying if I needn't, dying tomorrow in my sleep is bad then too even though I will be asleep/dead at the time and therefore any preferences I have won't be actively motivating me at that point. And -- this is I think clearly more debatable -- that if I prefer now that I eat a slice of chocolate cake tomorrow, then to that extent it's a bad thing if tomorrow I don't eat any chocolate cake, even if tomorrow I prefer not to have any. Not a bad thing on balance; if I make a choice tomorrow, then tomorrow's preferences are rightly more important than today's in most circumstances. But, still, the fact that today I preferred chocolate-cake-tomorrow makes no-chocolate-cake-tomorrow a worse thing than if I hadn't had that preference yesterday. And, similarly, if today I prefer that tomorrow I eat chocolate cake, or kiss my wife, or conquer Spain, and I die tonight, then one reason why that's bad is that those preferences don't get satisfied, even though by the time they fail to get satisfied the person who had those preferences is gone.

But, again, a reasonable person could disagree with most of that.