Time and Value
by Joseph Rowlands

[Speech was originally presented at SOLOC2 in 2003]

Good afternoon, everyone. Today I'm going to talk about ethics. Specifically, I'm going to talk about how morality can provide us a guide to choosing our actions. It allows us to formulate values, and decide on courses of action. But sometimes it's not very easy.

My goal for this talk is to discuss how we choose between values in the present and values in the future. How do we know which is better? How do we choose between going out with friends on one hand, and staying home to finish that book on epistemology on the other hand? How do we choose between the immediate payoff, and those jobs that might require years before you see the return on your investment?

Before I discuss this topic, we need to do a little background work to understand what the issue is. After all, we make these kind of decisions all the time? What's the big deal? So lets first get into what the real problem is, and then we'll discuss how to solve it.

Rational Ethics

Objectivist ethics is a rational ethics. The word 'rational' is defined as "relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason". What it means is that Objectivist ethics is based on reason. As any system of ethics, it provides a method of selecting values and actions. But unlike some ethical systems, Objectivist ethics can be non-contradictory, analyzable, and systematic. We can use reason to examine and compare our possible values, and choose between them using an objective standard.

What makes it possible to do all of this? A single standard of value. A standard of value is a tool of comparison. It allows you to compare every possible value or action to one another, so you pick the best one. In Objectivist ethics, this standard is life. You can analyze actions based on how well they promote your life. Finishing college will help your life by providing you with better opportunities and the knowledge to pursue new areas. Eating rat poison will harm your life. Staying in a bad relationship would harm your life. Making new friends will help your life. For every action, you can ask "Will this benefit me, or hurt me? Is there something better I could be doing?".

There's a number of ethical standards you can pick from. The ethics of altruism holds that others' lives are the ultimate standard to judge your action. You judge your actions based on how well they help other people. Will spending your money to go to the movies benefit others? Shouldn't you donate it to charity?

Environmentalism holds nature as the ultimate standard. You have to ask yourself if your actions will harm nature, or help it. Hedonism holds pleasure as the highest standard. Does it feel good to do? Then do it! There's no limit to the number of possible ethical standards.

With every ethical system that has a single standard of value, you are able to use reason to choose between the myriad of different possible values, and select those which best further that standard. Of course, I'm not trying to say that any standard you pick is okay or objectively correct. I'm just discussing one way in which epistemology and ethics overlaps. To have an ethics that can be analyzed with reason, it must have a standard of value.

The Problem in Abstract

I'll turn now to the problem. The problem is not really a problem of ethics, but a more general problem in epistemology. We can call it the problem of multiple standards.

The basic issue is in making comparisons between different things. To make a valid comparison, you have to specify some standard by which you're comparing them. For instance, you can use length as a standard, and say that this podium is shorter than I am. You can use intelligence as a standard, and compare your boss to a tree stump. This is very basic stuff, but the point to remember is that to make a valid comparison, you need a standard of evaluation.

A typical reason for doing these comparisons is to pick between multiple options. Say you need something to stand on to change a light bulb, and you have to choose between the foot stool or the chair. If you have a distance to reach, you can choose between the objects based on their height. Furthermore, there's rationality and objectivity in your conclusion. If you were to ask someone else to pick between the same objects, they could come to the same conclusions as you did. If you ask someone to grab which ever one was taller, you could predict which object he'd select.

Now here's the problem. What happens when you try to compare two items by more than one standard? If you asked someone to pick between the foot stool and the chair, and to select between them based on both height and stability, which would you get?

The problem here is that the two standards could provide different answers. The sturdiest object may not be the tallest object. If you were to select based on height, you might go for the chair. If you were to select on the basis of stability, the foot stool might win. So now what? How can you rationally choose between the two?

Now, not venturing outside of this scenario, we can see the problem clearly. If you use two or more criteria for selection, you may find contradictory results. Which criteria do you stick with? Which do you ignore? You can't go with both criteria, since one outcome contradicts the other. How do you choose between them?

Well, one not so good answer is "you just pick". What does that mean? You go with whatever you feel like, or you flip a coin or something. When you do this, you leave the area of rationality and objectivity. You're no longer using reason to guide your selection. This is a place where you're emotions can't be based on reason, because reason is impossible. But is this really what people do? Generally not.

The solution to this kind of problem is to find some new standard that actually encompasses the other standards. A really simple example is when you're trying to buy property to develop a house. Now say for the price you are able and willing to pay, you've got two choices. One piece of property is really long, but pretty thin. The other is somewhere in-between in both width and length. Instead of trying to select these by width on the one hand and length on the other, you could resort to the total area of the two. In this way, you're including both of the important features you're looking for.

This is pretty easy to do in practice. Generally, when you're trying to select between multiple options, you have some purpose in mind. There may be many relevant factors you'd like to use in your comparison, but ultimately you have to combine them in a way that best satisfies your goals. It's your goals that allow you to determine which of the criteria to look at, and compare the importance of each criteria.

In the property example, you're trying to build a house. All else being equal, you'd like the larger area. But in fact, other consideration might become more important. A very long strip of land might be too thin to actually build a house on. In life, you rarely get to make choices with such a simple standard as length.

So one more time. The problem is trying to make a choice while using two different standards at the same time. Whenever there is a disagreement between the results, you cannot rationally choose between them. That is, unless you resort to some new standard that takes into consideration both standards.

As an aside, two standards at once is never useful. If the results are actually the same in both cases, you could have gotten by with just one. The second one is redundant. And whenever the two provide different results, you're stuck without guidance.

Is that clear?

Multiples Standards in Ethics

Let's take the example of the light-bulb again. When choosing between things like a foot stool versus a chair, you can resort to the goals that you are trying to accomplish. What are some of your goals? The first is to change the light bulb. But if that were the only goal, you could just pick the taller of the objects. In actuality, you have another goal. To survive this exercise in home repair.

How do you compare these two goals now? Each of them, if taken as a criteria, might produce a different result. Is either more important? And if so, by what standard? This is where a rational ethics requires some ultimate standard by which you judge all of your actions. Only in this way can you hope to make valid comparison between the different goals. In Objectivist ethics, this standard is "life".

One recurring problem that other ethical systems have is that the values they promote can be in opposition to your own life. Altruism, as an example, holds the lives of others as the ultimate value. When a choice is to be made between something that benefits yourself, and one that benefits another, altruism will support the latter. How then does an altruist stay alive? Only by abandoning his ethical standard at times.

The point here is that the altruist can't rationally pick between a standard of self-interest and a standard of other people. There's no way of reconciling the two goals. He can't live consistently by a standard of helping other people, so he has to live inconsistently. He has to compromise and choose based on emotions or whims.

So to conclude the background part of this speech, a rational ethics requires a single standard of value by which you can compare all of your possible values and actions. We can't have more than one standard, or we lose the ability to analyze our values rationally. Hopefully this is all clear, and we can move on to the main topic.

Decision Making over Time

Here's the problem. You have a choice to make. You can study for your exam tomorrow morning, which may have some impact on which college you get into, what career you can get into, and basically how you live the whole rest of your life. Your other choice is to quit studying, go out with friends, and have a good time. Which do you do?

You might be tempted to say "stay and study". After all, studying could have a lasting impact on your life, whereas hanging out with your friends probably won't. But what if you've already done a lot of studying already? Isn't it time for a break? Do you always have to sacrifice the present to achieve some task in the future?

If you haven't guessed it, we have here the problem of multiple standards again. We have values that we can achieve now or in the short-term (going to a party with friends), and we have different values we can pursue for the future (studying for that test, filling out your college applications, learning about different careers, etc). How do we pick between these different values? How do we integrate values that happen at different times.

Maximize Value?

Normally when making an ethical choice, we attempt to maximize our total value. What's so different about this kind of situation? Sure we have values occurring at different periods of time, but why does this matter? Can't we just pick whichever value is greatest? If the greater value happens later than another, why do we care? To put it another way, can't we just ignore the time component of the value?

The answer is no. It's true that the basics of ethics is maximizing your values. You try to pick the actions that will provide you the best return on your effort. But this is actually a derivative step in ethics.

The foundation of ethics is in selecting your values, not in just picking the highest of them. Before you can choose the highest values, you first have to go through the process of evaluating the different ends to which you can pursue. You have to decide which of the myriad ends you can pursue will benefit your life, and which oppose your life. And you have to rank them in a value hierarchy, understanding the degree to which they can promote or detract from your life.

The truth is, certain accomplishments have different value depending on when you accomplish them. Having a billion dollars now is a lot more valuable then if you got it a minute before you died of old age, even if you ignore inflation. Getting your high school diploma early makes a bigger impact on your life then getting it later. A glass of water now means less to you then it will when you get stuck in that desert someday.

The point is that you can't just maximize your values to solve this problem. It's just pushing the problem back a step. Ultimately, you have to be able to figure out if going to a party is more valuable then studying one more night for that exam. And to do this, you need a single ethical standard.

Short-term vs. Long-term Interest

One way people have viewed this problem is by breaking up the values into a short-term self-interest and a long-term self-interest. Both are ways of trying to understand how life as a standard of value can be applied to different time periods. There's a bunch of problems here, though.

The first is that the idea of a short-term self-interest is meaningless. Self-interest is only meaningful if you're talking about the conditions necessary to live. How can you have an ethical system that is range of the moment? If your actions will shortly lead to death, in what way could it be considered in your interest?

Of course, long-term interest is equally flawed. It seems to continuously call for sacrifice of the present for the future. A future that you'll never get to. You can never stop to enjoy the moment, because you could be doing something better with your time. In the example I gave before, you could always be studying a little more for that test.

Well, neither of these seems very appealing. A short-term interest where long range planning is impossible and you live at the range of the moment, vs. a long-term interest where sacrifice of your happiness is the norm. So an easy way out is to say that you need both. You need your short-term interest and your long-term interest together.

And here's where the background part of the speech comes into play. We can easily see that we're dealing with two different standards again. We now know that we cannot rationally pick between two different standards. If neither is satisfactory on their own, adding more doesn't help any. We need to find a single standard by which we can compare all of our choices, regardless of when the different values will be achieved.

Life as the Standard of Value

Well, we don't have to look far for that single standard. Objectivism already has an answer for it, although it might not be that easy to apply it. The Objectivist ethics holds life as the ultimate value, and the standard by which we judge all of our actions. Of course, that's easy enough to say, but using it to select all of your actions is a bit more difficult.

Let's look at life in the context of short-term and long-term values. Long-term interest is usually associated with those actions that lead to your well-being in the future. Short-term values is associated with those values that make you enjoy the present. Both seem to be important components of life, but as we've seen, they don't work alone.

Quantity vs. Quality

Another way of phrasing this classic divide is quantity vs. quality. The long-term interest correlates to quantity. You perform actions that have the best chance of maintaining your life for the foreseeable future. The short-term values correlate to the quality of life, because they focus on enjoying the moment.

It's not exactly the same, of course. Quality of life need not be a short-term concern. You might plan a party for the end of the year, where enjoyment is your primary consideration. The quality can be a long-term goal or a short-term goal.

But quality vs. quantity has the same problems as before. The first is that quantity as an end in itself is pointless. Why would you want to live a long life if it was dull? Life isn't a duty, it's a value. It's something to be enjoyed. So quantity on its own is pointless.

But quality is scarcely better. Having a ton of fun all at once, and then dying a sudden death isn't really the point either. We want to live long lives, enjoying it the whole time. Not a few minutes of hedonistic pleasure and then it's over with. You can't even say that quality of life can be based on a standard of life.

Also, we're again dealing with two different standards. We might say that both standards are life, but we're using that term in two different ways. In one case, we're talking about mere survival. Quantity of living is how long you are alive for. On the other hand, we have enjoyment of living, but divorced from any actual requirement of life.

Static vs. Dynamic

In my speech last year at SOLOC 1, I discussed what I called the static and dynamic views of life. I'll recap briefly because it's relevant to this discussion, and can provide insights into how life as a standard of value can be used properly.

The static view of life is the view that life is a state of existence. Specifically, it's the state of not being dead. If you uphold the static view of life as your standard of value, you will aim merely at staying alive. Every action you take will be aimed at distancing yourself from death. This fits in well with the "quantity of life" view we just went over. One of the big problems with this view of life is that it becomes a burden instead of a value.

The dynamic view of life sees life as a process. Instead of focusing on any particular point in time, it looks at an integrated view of your life. How are you living your life? Are you growing as a person? Are you advancing in your career? Do you enjoy your life?

By focusing on the positive acts of living, the dynamic view focuses on how you live your life, not just staying alive. Your methods become as important as your ends. Your achievements build off of each other, and you progress in your life. You try to expand your range of possible actions, so that you can do more with your life.

An Integrated View of Life

The nice part about the dynamic view of life is that it integrates your entire life. Instead of looking at life as a series of unconnected actions and goals that eventually ends in death, you integrate it into a single unified image. Think of it like a game of chess. Instead of focusing on any particular move, you can look at the entire game, what the different strategies were, and how it all played out. And you can view the game of chess both at the end, as well as while you're actually playing the game.

We can do the same for life. Image you're at the Pearly Gates in front of Saint Peter. You're dead, and it's time to figure out whether god has a sense of humor about this whole Objectivism thing. You look back at your life and see it as a whole. Instead of a series of unrelated events, you see it as a progression from your birth up to the end. When you tell the story of your life, you start at the beginning and show where your actions led. You say "This is what I did with my life." Or better yet, "This was my life."

Of course, you shouldn't wait for death to think about your life as a totality. It's important to look at your life while you're living it, and evaluate it. Only by seeing it as an integrated whole can you shape it into what you want it to be. Without taking that wider look at things, you're stuck with a range of the moment view of life.

Life is Enjoyable? Imagine that.

Let's turn back to the problem. We're trying to figure out how to choose between actions that lead to values in the short-term, and those that provide value in the more distant future. In a simple way, the life as a process view solves many of these problems.

Instead of thinking about the advancement of your life as some kind of burden or chore, the dynamic view of life encourages you to view it as really living. It's when you're accomplishing things, expanding your horizons, and developing yourself, that you're really living.

This is important because it shows that your actions aren't split into some false alternative of being fun on the one hand, and benefiting you on the other. Too often people think of trying to balance your enjoyment with your productivity. If you except that false dichotomy, you'll have strange views of your actions. If it's productive, you'll see it as a task or chore that you don't like. If it's for entertainment, you'll feel like you're wasting time and not getting anything done.

Viewing enjoyment and productivity as mutually exclusive can lead you to a juggling act in life. You may try to avoid doing either kind of action too much, for fear of neglecting the other. In this way, your ethics becomes focused on negatives instead of positives. You spend your time avoiding, instead of pursuing.

The dynamic view of life overcomes this problem by recognizing that enjoyment is impossible without productiveness. Happiness is an emotion based on your evaluation of how well you're living your life, and that part of the living is the enjoyment of that living. You want to look at your life and say "I do great things and love every minute of it".

Accomplishments aren't a moral duty that you perform without benefit. Your accomplishments further your life, and make it exciting to live it. Similarly, recreational activities like games or parties add to your life by providing opportunities to spend time with friends, giving yourself a break from other activities, meeting new people, and giving you intense stimulation you might otherwise be lacking.

Bigger Picture

The dynamic view of life is useful because it allows you to see a bigger picture. Instead of focusing on your state of existence now or in the presence, you can combine it all to see an integrated view of your life. In this way you combine what seems to be very different criteria for evaluating your actions, and merge them into a single standard.

This applies to the problem of choosing between values now and values in the future. The only way you can compare values at two different times in your life is to combine the different points in your life into a single coherent picture. By looking at the big picture of your life, you suddenly have the means to compare values now vs. in the future.

I think some people view points in their lives as if they were different people. "Why should I care about the future? I'm alive now and should be having a good time. It's not me that I'm hurting." In a myriad of ways, they justify being irresponsible and doing things that will hurt them eventually. Instead of realizing that they're just hurting themselves, they ignore the damage because it's not present immediately. Later, they might regret having done it, but it doesn't mean they'll be more responsible afterwards.

The alternative is owning your entire life. By projecting your life into the future, you can make decisions and trade-offs. You don't have to consistently sacrifice the present for the future, or vice versa. You can decide what's the appropriate amount of work you need to get done, and occasionally put off pleasure until you can reap it in its entirety.

For instance, if you are given a specific number of vacation days at your job, you might use them slowly over the course of the year to make lighten your load. But you can also choose to save them up, and take the time to really unwind. For some people, it maybe take a couple weeks from work before they can let themselves relax. Others might do it easier. But in both cases, you are looking at a period of time (say a year) and trying to maximize your value over that year. You don't just take all the vacation immediately because it would be the most rewarding thing you can do in the short-term. Instead, you look at your life over that whole period and make the choice.

Break Even

This shouldn't be a surprise. People don't live long if they can't project their lives into the future. We all have a ton of experience doing this sort of thing. You can explore how you've done it in your own life. Many of you have gone or are going to school before entering the workforce. You're giving up an income and a small amount of wealth in the short-term in order to get a significantly higher salary later. It only takes a couple of years to put yourself in a better position than you ever would have if you had skipped higher education.

Thinking about things in terms of a break-even point helps. You might not be as well off financially over the first couple of years, but quickly you'll be in a better position then you ever could have been without the additional education. This happens because some course of actions provide a much higher rate of return then others. Although the costs might be high at first, it quickly makes up for it.

The interesting thing here is that the values we normally consider short-term, like entertainment, are often limited at first. As you progress, such as after you get a high paying job, your entertainment choices increase. In a short period of time, you're able to afford all of the things you wanted before, and a whole lot more. You end up better off overall, and sometimes significantly so. So those that want to spend a bit of time and money on entertainment or luxury may be making a large sacrifice in the future for a relatively small gain in the present.

Plan of Action

So how do use this expanded view of life? How do you go about weighing values and making decisions? The first thing you need to do is avoid thinking about each decision you make as being isolated from every other. You don't just make a series of isolated value choices. You don't say "I'm hungry" and get something to eat, and then "I'm bored" on work on writing a book. Although a series of value choices might still allow you to progress in life, they're left unconnected and not integrated.

Instead of a series of unconnected decisions that you constantly reevaluate, there's a much easier tool. You may have heard of it. It's called planning.

By having concrete goals over various periods of time and formulating a plan, you can coordinate your actions. Your decisions aren't made in isolation to each other anymore. Instead, you're bundling several decisions together in order to accomplish bigger tasks.

There's a big advantage to this. By formulating a plan of action, you don't have to constantly be concerned with advancing your life. You can stop to smell the roses. You're not making the choice between present and future constantly. Instead, you're find a series of actions that leads to an advancement in your life, but it's done in a way that you can enjoy it.

For instance, you may decide that you want to get a college degree. You know it'll take four years and you have certain requirements for graduation. You can then decide how many classes each year need to be aimed towards your degree, and how many can be for fun. You can take some classes that interest you but aren't related to your career. You might take less classes to get more time in with friends or other activities.

Planning a course of action into the future allows you to integrate your short-term values with your longer-term values. You incorporate both into your plan, and the successful accomplishment of the plan benefits you in both respects. This is a way of removing the sense that your short-term and long-term goals are in opposition. It ties them together in a beneficial way.

Rate of Progress?

So how do you set an appropriate plan? It's not enough to have expanded view of life and make decisions accordingly. There's still a question of how you make the decisions. We've kind of buried the problem by saying look at your life as a whole and coordinate your actions along these lines. We can take into accounts factors like whether you're enjoying your life, or the uncertainties that come with trying to guess what the future has in store, or our own morality. We can see our answer to this problem taking shape, but there's still some open questions.

How fast do we need to progress in life? This one question has a huge impact on our decision making. If we believe that a very slow, gradual improvement of our lives is fine, we'll work mostly at sustaining our lives, and we'll pick more enjoyable but less productive careers. For instance, you might decide to be a school teacher. The pay may not be very good, and there may be very limited chance for promotion, but you get to spend time helping children to learn.

On other hand, you might think that your life needs to progress at a very quick rate. You may feel that starting your own business is the only way to advance that quickly. You might spend long hours at work, and enjoy pushing yourself to the limits.

Is either of these the right choice? Can they both be? This very much hinges on what you believe is an appropriate rate of progress. And this in turn hinges on a couple of things. The advancement in life provides a number of values to you. The first is that it provides security over the long term. By putting yourself in a constantly improving situation, you create a larger and larger barrier between you and misfortune. If things do go bad, things probably won't go very bad. A slow rate of progress will not protect you as well against adversity.

Another factor is that you're exposed to new situations and conditions. You constantly learn and adapt, and life keeps interesting. A fast rate of progress will provide newer situations and changes will happen quickly. This can be great if you get bored easily. Likewise, a slower rate of progress is good if sudden changes cause you undue stress. By having your changes be more gradual, you can still improve yourself without the accompanying pressure.

Another reason to pick a faster rate of progress is that it is progress. By advancing in your career or growing as a person, you have access to more choices. By advancing in a high paying job, you're better able to enjoy the spare time you have. If you're poor and have a week off, you might need to sit around the house or look for other low-cost entertainment. If you're rich, you can take the week off to go to Maui, stay in a nice hotel, and eat great food (and by great food, I obviously mean steak).

Sanity Check

How about a sanity check? The point of philosophy is often to identify things that we already know or do, making them explicit so we can understand them. Since we already manage to make pretty reasonable choices between the future and the present, we should be able to elements of these ideas in our own actions. So does anyone actually do this kind of thing?

Of course. What you often see is someone who decides at some point that his life isn't what he wants it to be. He may have decided his rate of progress was too fast or too slow. In one case, he may decide that he's not accomplishing enough in life. He's stuck in a dead-end job, he doesn't feel like he has enough options, and he just doesn't seem to be able to get ahead. He doesn't feel he's progressing fast enough. Often he'll remedy this by spending more time at work, taking classes to better develop his skill set, and spending less time going out with friends.

Another type of person is the over-worker, who wakes up to realize that he's letting life pass him by. Sometimes this is just a focus on the wrong values, but sometimes it's a realization that he's not enjoying himself enough. To remedy it, he may take an extended vacation, take up a hobby, make a policy to leave work promptly at 5pm, and whatever else is necessary to shift his priorities a little.

So it seems clear that people understand the concept of rate of progress. They may not think about it in those same terms, but they do look at their lives in that way. And it's an effective way of balancing future and present wants. Once you have an idea of how much you want to accomplish over a period of time, you can pace yourself. You don't have to feel guilty about taking vacations because you've already factored them into your schedule. You can take time to really push yourself to get a job done, and know that you'll be able to relax at the end of the day.

Enjoy Life

So is there a right answer for how to choose between these future and present values? Obviously there are some instances that just don't make any sense at all. Spending all your time working for the future while not leaving yourself time to enjoy the present is pointless, as is partying all the time and never getting anywhere in life.

The important thing to remember is that there is no one right answer for everyone. You can't deductively prove what's the correct rate of progress. It depends a lot on your personal context. Some rates of progress are too fast or too slow. Sometimes you have opportunities present themselves that you might not have at other times.

Also, the answer can change over time. Many people recognize that working hard at the beginning of your life or career has a huge payoff compared to working hard later. There can be diminishing return on your efforts as you get older. So it may make sense to push very hard early on in life, and lessen your rate of progress later, enjoying the fruits of your previous actions.

Life is suppose to be enjoyed. You have to determine for yourself what that requires. Looking at your life as a totality can help you to make good decisions by understanding the consequences of the choices. By seeing your life as a progression from the past and into the future, you provide the common standard by which you can weigh alternatives.

Ethics can provide you abstract principles to guide you life, but you have to learn to apply them to your own life.

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