ABSTRACT
Despite the heavy weight of the past deliberations and decisions, temporally structured agents, such as we are, conceive of themselves as free to revise and alter their plans, free to come to terms with the claims of the past, and free to question whether past commitments still provide compelling reasons for action. Indeed, preserving such a freedom is an ethical and political priority, related to the right to develop a conception of the flourishing life of one’s own. To fully understand freedom to change and develop, we have to take into account temporal constraints on rational agency in ways that have largely escaped current debates. This chapter argues for a dynamic conception of practical rationality, which draws on a plastic network of normative and cognitive capacities and competences, such as temporally oriented emotional attitudes and meta-cognitive capacities. Freedom to change is vital to the developmental dynamics of self-governance, and therefore it is a requirement of dynamic practical rationality to protect it by fostering suitable normative adjustments. The resulting conception of dynamic self-governance is marked by ambivalences and dissonances, but it is robust enough to tolerate normative change without leaving us with a multitude of scattered selves.
