ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two questions about appropriate attitudes to time: within a single life, is it permissible to weight the well-being of one’s near future selves more heavily than that of one’s farther future selves? And as a society, is it permissible to weight the well-being of near-future people more heavily than that of farther future people? While many economists and philosophers have suggested that these two questions are independent, so that our answer to one does not tightly constrain our answer to the other, it is argued that they should be treated in parallel, so that individual time-bias is permissible if and only if social discounting is permissible.
