ABSTRACT
Suppose you value both pleasant dinners and productive work after dinner. One pleasant aspect of dinner is a glass of wine. Indeed, two glasses would make the dinner even more pleasant. The problem is that a second glass of wine undermines your efforts to work after dinner. So you have an evaluative ranking concerning normal dinners: dinner with one glass of wine over dinner with two glasses. So far so good. The problem is that when you are in the middle of dinner, having had the first glass of wine, you frequently find yourself tempted. As you see it, your temptation is not merely a temporary, felt motivational pull in the direction of a second glass: if it were merely that we could simply say that, in at least one important sense, practical reason is on the side of your evaluative ranking.1 Your temptation, however, is more than that; or so, at least, it seems to you. Your temptation seems to involve a kind of evaluation, albeit an evaluation that is, you know, temporary. For a short period of time you seem to value the second glass of wine more highly than refraining from that second glass. It is not that you have temporarily come to value, quite generally, dinner with two glasses of wine over dinner with one glass. You still value an overall pattern of one glass over an overall pattern of two glasses; after all, productive after-dinner work remains of great importance to you. But in the middle of dinner, faced with the vivid and immediate prospect of a second glass this one time, you value two glasses over one glass just this one time.
