The Moral Relevance of Past Preferences

Abstract

Preference utilitarians think that our most fundamental goal is to make sure that people get what they want. Many objections have been raised against this exclusive focus on preference satisfaction. One particularly damaging objection seems to be that preference utilitarians in their pursuit of overall preference satisfaction have to take into account past preferences.¹ But to satisfy all past desires seems unreasonable, especially if they have been replaced by new ones. Richard Brandt even goes so far as to suggest that this problem shows that a morally relevant concept of desire-satisfaction is unintelligible.² In this paper, I am going to show that preference utilitarians can answer this objection. In particular, I am going to show that we can avoid the problem of past preferences without adopting a time-partial standpoint according to which past preferences should be excluded just because they are past. This is a result that should interest not just preference utilitarians but all preference-sensitive theorists, i.e., all who claim that preferences have some moral importance. So, for instance, if you think that one important moral goal is to promote people’s happiness, and that happiness is not just a matter of feeling satisfied but also a matter of successfully pursuing one’s lifetime ambitions, or to live in accordance with one’s overall plan of life, then you will have to face the problem of past preferences. For you have to decide what to do when people change their minds and form new ambitions.