The market failures approach to business ethics argues that economic theory regarding the efficient workings of a market can generate normative prescriptions for managerial behaviour. It argues that actions that inhibit Pareto optimal solutions are immoral. However, the approach fails to identify goods that should be regulated or prohibited from the market, something common to the moral limits to markets approach to business ethics. There are, however, numerous assumptions underlying Paretian efficiency, including some about the preferences of market participants. Trade (...) in some goods violates some of these assumptions, and so these goods are morally suspect and can be understood to indicate that the market for these goods is not moral. This creates grounds sufficient for regulating, and possibly prohibiting, these goods. To help determine whether it is then necessary to regulate the goods, I propose a supplementary economic analysis to ascertain why an assumption regarding a particular preference is being violated. (shrink)

We tend to seek immediate gratification at the expense of long-term reward. In fact, the more distant a reward is from the present moment?the more we tend to discount it. This phenomenon is known as temporal discounting. Engaging in mental time travel plausibly enables subjects to overcome temporal discounting, but it is unclear how, exactly, it does so. In this paper, we develop a framework designed to explain the effects of mental time travel on temporal discounting by showing how the (...) subject?s temporally extended self enables mental time travel to generate appropriate emotions that, in turn, via metacognitive monitoring and control, generate appropriate behaviours. Building on existing approaches we outline an initial framework, involving the concepts of emotion and the temporally extended self, to explain the effects of mental time travel on resisting temptation. We then show that this initial framework has difficulty explaining the effects of mental time travel on a closely related phenomenon, namely, overcoming procrastination. We next argue that, in order to explain these effects, the concept of emotion needs to be refined, and the concept of metacognition needs to be added to the framework: emotions involve an action-readiness component, which, through metacognitive monitoring and control, can enable the subject to resist temptation and overcome procrastination. Finally, we respond to an objection to our account?based on the somatic marker hypothesis?such that metacognition is not necessary to account for the role of emotions in decision-making. (shrink)

I argue that procrastination with respect to environmental preservation is in the class of procrastination problems that are particularly difficult to overcome because of the presence of factors that support second-order procrastination. If my reasoning is correct, then second-order procrastination can help explain the distressing fact — assuming it is a fact — that, despite widespread professions of serious concern, the issue of environmental preservation is not getting as much of our attention as it deserves. My reasoning also suggests that (...) improving our situation may require that some of the efforts now focused on promoting concern for environmental preservation be rerouted into tracking procrastination and deploying insights on how to cope with it. (shrink)

Redish et al. suggest that their failures-in-decision-making framework for understanding addiction can also contribute to improving our understanding of a variety of psychiatric disorders. In the spirit of reflecting on the significance and scope of their research, I briefly develop the idea that their framework can also contribute to improving our understanding of the pervasive problem of procrastination.

When discussing the general inertia in climate change mitigation, it is common to approach the analysis either in terms of epistemic obstacles (climate change is too scientifically complex to be fully understood by all in its dramatic nature and/or to find space in the media) and/or moral obstacles (the causal link between polluting actions and social damage is too loose, both geographically and temporally, to allow individuals to understand the consequences of their emissions). In this chapter I maintain that both (...) categories of obstacles now play a secondary role: many people have a clear understanding of the physical and social dynamics involved in climate change. The main reason why so few manage to reduce their ecological footprint is an ethical short-circuit that does not allow most people to reveal their “true” climate-related preferences in their daily choices. This short-circuit manifests itself in two phenomena that can be analysed through the lens of moral psychology. First, as the possibility of anticipated utility approaches, individuals further discount expected future utility and may even reverse their preferences (due to the so-called immediacy multiplier, in addition to the better known and discussed future utility discounting). Second, individuals struggle to order their preferences transitively when presented with the opportunity to obtain small net marginal utilities in the short run. The intertemporal and collective structure of the climate problem creates fertile ground for both phenomena, which means that even those who are sincerely convinced of the need to contribute to climate change mitigation end up trapped in loops of procrastination, both first and second level. If, however, we can understand the origin of these phenomena, then we will be able to devise counteracting solutions that will speed up individual mitigation efforts. I will therefore briefly propose three ethical/public strategies to break the procrastination loop: pre-commitment; increasing the costs of marginal postponements; reducing the disutility of action that is likely to be postponed. (shrink)

Sometimes a series of choices do not serve one's concerns well even though each choice in the series seems perfectly well suited to serving one's concerns. In such cases, one has a dynamic choice problem. Otherwise put, one has a problem related to the fact that one's choices are spread out over time. This survey reviews some of the challenging choice situations and problematic preference structures that can prompt dynamic choice problems. It also reviews some proposed solutions, and explains how (...) some familiar but potentially puzzling phenomena — including, for example, self-destructive addictive behavior and dangerous environmental destruction — have been illuminated by dynamic choice theory. (shrink)

As common experience confirms, procrastination seems not only possible, but widespread. However, procrastination should not be taken for granted. Often, the procrastinator harms herself knowingly. It thus clearly seems that such a person lacks the self-concern that usually characterises us. After having spelled out what procrastination is, and having explored its main varieties, I consider the relation between procrastination and risk-taking. After this, I discuss the implications of this phenomenon for the debates about personal identity. The upshot, I argue, is (...) that reductionist accounts, according to which identity is a matter of psychological continuity, are in a better position as might have been thought. (shrink)