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David Strohmaier, Choosing for Changing Selves, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 71, Issue 3, July 2021, Pages 675–678, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqaa051
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As we change throughout the course of our lives, so do our values. People who once studied philosophy for the love of wisdom now publish it in pursuit of tenure. As decision theorists continue to grapple with the dynamic nature of choosing agents, Richard Pettigrew's Choosing for Changing Selves offers a general and ambitious recipe for agents with changing values. Whether in the pursuit of wisdom or as a foil for future publications, the book offers philosophers something to chew on.
Choosing for Changing Selves is divided into two parts. The first argues that for a changing agent the right way to choose is to use a weighted average of the values of past, present, and future selves. The second part provides some arguments on how the weights are to be determined.
After the outline and the basics of standard expected utility theory, chapters 3–5 introduce various solutions to the problem of choosing for changing selves that Pettigrew rejects. Neither denying that utility changes (chapter 3), nor introducing higher order utility functions (chapter 4), nor postulating one true utility function (chapter 5) is a convincing solution. While Pettigrew provides serious objections to these proposals, chapters 3 and 4 are shorter than other chapters. The reader might find that higher order utilities deserve more than three pages, especially because they reappear in chapter 14.
