Must I have a Reason for Changing My Mind?

Laws of inertia and past versus future selves

Photo by Vit Ch on Unsplash

I find myself often in predicaments such as this:

I wake up with a desire to have an In N’ Out hamburger for lunch. Its not that I want to eat the burger then, for breakfast. I want it for lunch. I want my future self to eat a burger, not my current self. Then lunch comes around and I’m not really feeling the burger any more, I want a slice of pizza instead. When this happens, I always get the pizza. No one thinks this is a weird choice. No one thinks what I wanted in the past for my current self matters anymore. It matters what I want now.

What would be weird is this: knowing that I typically will change my mind, I tell my roommate to prevent me from going anywhere near a pizza place come lunch time. If I change my mind then, my roommate is to take my car keys, take my phone and wallet, and walk them over to an In N’ Out so as to force me to have a burger for lunch. I want the burger for my future self so much that I will prevent that very future self from getting the pizza. Wouldn’t this be a self-undermining act?

Here’s another situation I have been thinking about for years. When very rich people die, they have a will or living trust that indicates what they want to happen to their bodies and estates after they die. There are interesting cases that pop up in the news once in a while like authors who want their unpublished work published, or destroyed, upon their deaths. What happens is that courts and legal actors take the will as written by the person at that one time as fixed for all eternity, and execute those wishes, so long as they are not illegal, as long as the wealth lasts. For very wealthy people, that could be forever. Dead people aren’t around to change their minds.

Now consider a single individual across time who wants competing things for their future self. I am writing a novel that I want really badly to publish when it is done. That is, I want the future version of myself to publish the finished version. You can even imagine I issue a directive to my future self. That same directive might say, if I die, my sister or whoever is my executor should publish this novel. Now, later, the novel is done, and I forget about it for years. Then at 75 I find a note from my past self to my future self, talking about how important it is to publish the novel. I look over the novel, and decide it sucks, and toss it. This is just like the pizza case, right? Kind of sad, but no moral objections, let alone rational objections to me changing my mind.

But suppose I die before finding that same note, and my sister finds it, picks up the novel, decides it sucks, and tosses it. Turns out a lot of people think this is wrong (experimental philosophy, still yet unpublished, has shown this, just take my word for it.). If that note turns out to be a will with the force of probate law behind it, there is legal action, a requirement of the state, to enforce those wishes of my past self. And if we’re talking about money rather than a novel, in the billions, to be put into an endowment, for whatever purpose I want, then the state is going to enforce my wishes for all eternity, with no consideration of whether I would ever change my mind or had more complex intentions. And how could I, I’m dead? The wishes of the dead person, and a very specific moment of that dead person’s life, persist for all eternity.

Why is it considered such a serious wrong that we do something contrary to the wishes of a past person, so much so that we have state enforcement of it, but it is no wrong to my past self that I decide to throw away the novel I wrote? Okay, so that’s the premise of the book, lots to say, look out for it in a year or two when its published. Today I want to talk about the tiniest little cutting room question that I had when thinking about these situations. What are we to make of the idea that a person’s wishes persist as part of the natural course of a life, or even afterlife, absent any reason to think it has changed? Is this a safe assumption or an unjustified one?

I’ve heard it considered a truism of common sense that people change. When I was 13 there was nothing I wanted more than to be a House DJ. I didn’t rationally change my mind so much as just dropped that desire. I’ve also heard it considered a truism that people never change. You meet up that guy you once knew in high schools and he’s exactly the same. Maybe common sense cliches shouldn’t be data for philosophical theory. But there is a question in the vicinity here that I think bears on the puzzles I’m thinking about. When I start wanting a burger for lunch, and then later want pizza, must this change be explained, or is it just a natural occurrence that requires no explanation? The word “natural” here is doing a lot of work. What counts as “natural” means there is no more explanation required. It means, metaphysically, that something is basic, a fundamental feature of nature and reality, that explains other things, but itself needs no explaining.

Here is a direct analog, from the physical sciences. Philosophy of science lore has it that it used to be the case that all motion needed to be explained. Items had a natural place, and moved in nature to return to such a place. Then Galileo showed up and formulated the laws of inertia, which said that rest requires no explanation, only a change from rest to motion required one. Also, motion required no further explanation, only a change in motion did. The laws of inertia ushered in the greatest scientific advance in the history of humankind not just because they postulated true natural laws, but partly in determining what counted as “natural”, i.e., no longer in need of explanation. The laws of inertia, and laws in general, are supposed to describe the natural course of things, any further demand for explanation is the realm of speculative metaphysics. Science doesn’t need to involve itself in that, unless there’s a crisis.

To ask whether human desire or preference persist naturally or if they change naturally is to ask whether there is such a thing as a law of inertia for preferences or desires. If you think there is, then you think it is a law of nature that my wanting a burger for lunch will persist unless something causes it to change. You think that absent any such cause, it is true that I will continue to want a burger for lunch. If I end up wanting pizza, there must be a reason: I saw an ad, I smelled the pizza, I saw someone I hate eating a burger and it made me lose my desire. Absent any of this, the desire for the burger persists. Methodologically and epistemologically, postulating a law of inertia for desires means that it is the best and likeliest assumption or postulation that, if I died before lunch, without evidence that something caused me to change my mind, you conclude I died wanting a burger, not pizza. It also partly explain why, after I’ve died, you continue enforcing my wishes forever. We have a record of what this person wanted forever, basically what they said in their last will and testament.

However, if there is no law of desire or preference inertia, then the natural course of things can be that desires persist, or just change or disappear, without any need to explain why it is the case that it did. It is equally natural for a desire to persist as it is to change or decay without being caused to do so. If this is true, then methodologically and epistemologically, it is not particularly safe to operate on the premise that desires persists. If I died before lunch, its true that I woke up wanting a burger for lunch, but who knows what I wanted at the time of death? Its chancy. Similarly, when I wrote my will at 50, I did want my money to go, at all future times, to the endowment rescuing puppies. But when I died, at 60, who knows what I wanted. Now that it is 50 years after my death, who know whether I would still have wanted my money to rescue puppies.

Right now the last will and testament seems to be sacrosanct, trumping not only all of a persons past wishes and testaments, but also any future considerations as to what the state ought to do with a person’s estate. There was this famous case of Augustus Bacon, a segregationist Senator from Georgia, who willed his entire estate for the creation and maintenance of a park for all and only white people. Baconsfield Park stood for decades.

When the Civil Rights Act passed and segregation was outlawed, it was litigated over whether it was consistent with Bacon’s wishes to have his wealth go to an integrated park. The descendants argued “no”, because he wouldn’t have wanted that. He was an avowed segregationist, so you should instead give us the remaining money, and let us sell the land and pocket that cash. They won the case. Baconsfield Park is now a strip mall and apartment buildings, and has been that way since 1986. See for yourself.

Whenever the wishes of a dead person gets litigated, the court must ask itself the question “what would the person want in this scenario” and the primary evidence for this is what their stated wishes were in the past, and this is usually one very specific moment in the past, the last wishes known or written down. If the wishes are not explicitly stated, or up for interpretation, courts usually rely on testimony from friends and family members. The best evidence of wishes now is wishes then for now, where wishes then for now are assumed to persist because no possible cause could have changed it. The law of inertia for desires seems to be an assumption of the courts.

But consider another possibility, that desires and preferences have a natural expiration date, both in life and death. There is no explanation as to why, its just a law of nature, or rather, the denial that there is a law of inertia for desures. Desires can change across time for no reason, no explanation, on whims, or just die out and decay.

If this is true in the intrapersonal case, where my desire for a burger for lunch can just go away, without any need for an explanation, and the expiration means there is no obligation to satisfy such a desire on behalf of my past self, then we also shouldn’t just take for granted that last wishes and testaments are irrevocable, that satisfying them is a moral requirement on behalf of past people, even if you think we do owe past people. Acting on behalf of a past person might actually mean going against what their past stated wishes are. If you buy me a burger now that I want pizza, on the assumption that the law of inertia holds, you might be giving me something I don’t want to eat. If I take steps at breakfast to force myself to eat a burger at lunch because that’s what I now want for my future self, there is no sense in which my friend is morally forced to execute the wishes of my breakfast self on my lunch self.

And insofar as the legal test for what a court should order depends on “what the person would have wanted for the present, in the present,” evidence, even decisive evidence, of what the past person wanted for the present, in the past, can actually be bad evidence.