The Thief of Time The Thief of Time Philosophical Essays on Procrastination Edited by Chrisoula Andreou Mark D. White 2010 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The thief of time: philosophical essays on procrastination / edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-537668-5 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Procrastination. I. Andreou, Chrisoula. II. White, Mark D., 1971– BF637.P76T45 2010 128'.4—dc22 2009021750 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Mike and Kaemon and Paul and Ree Acknowledgments We owe special thanks to the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature for funding a workshop in New York City in the summer of 2008 for the contributors to gather and share ideas; Jennifer Hornsby and Olav Gjelsvik, the research directors of the Rational Agency section of CSMN, played an integral role in arranging this tremendous collaborative opportunity. We also thank the philosophy program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for hosting the workshop. We are very grateful to Peter Ohlin and Brian Hurley at Oxford University Press for their support and encouragement of this project. Most of all, we would like to thank the contributors, who not only developed insightful analyses of procrastination but helped prove wrong everybody who heard about this book and joked, “Oh, but you will never get it done.” vii Contents Notes on the Contributors, xi Introduction, 3 Chrisoula Andreou & Mark D. White Part I 1 Procrastination: The Basic Impulse, 11 George Ainslie 2 Economic Models of Procrastination, 28 Don Ross 3 Is Procrastination Weakness of Will? 51 Sarah Stroud 4 Intransitive Preferences, Vagueness, and the Structure of Procrastination, 68 Duncan MacIntosh 5 Bad Timing, 87 Jon Elster Part II 6 Prudence, Procrastination, and Rationality, 99 Olav Gjelsvik 7 Procrastination and Personal Identity, 115 Christine Tappolet 8 The Vice of Procrastination, 130 Sergio Tenenbaum 9 Virtue for Procrastinators, 151 Elijah Millgram 10 Procrastination as Vice, 165 Jennifer A. Baker ix Part III 11 Overcoming Procrastination through Planning, 185 Frank Wieber & Peter M. Gollwitzer 12 Coping with Procrastination, 206 Chrisoula Andreou 13 Resisting Procrastination: Kantian Autonomy and the Role of the Will, 216 Mark D. White 14 Procrastination and the Extended Will, 233 Joseph Heath & Joel Anderson 15 Procrastination and the Law, 253 Manuel A. Utset Bibliography, 275 Index, 293 x Notes on the Contributors George Ainslie is a behavioral economist who has used several different methods to explore the basic determinants of choice. His modeling of higher mental processes from the motivated interaction of simple reward-seeking interests has been published in journals of psychology, philosophy, economics, and law; in many book chapters; and in two books: Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person (1992) and Breakdown of Will (2001). Ainslie is a research psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Joel Anderson studied philosophy at Princeton, Northwestern, and Frankfurt Universities and taught at Washington University in St. Louis for nine years before becoming a research lecturer in 2004 at the philosophy department of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He specializes in moral psychology and social theory and focuses especially on issues of autonomy, agency, mutual recognition, and normativity. He coedited, with John Christman, Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism (2005) and is currently writing a book entitled Scaffolded Autonomy: The Construction, Impairment, and Enhancement of Human Agency. Chrisoula Andreou is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research areas are theoretical and applied ethics, action theory, practical reasoning, and rational choice theory. She is especially interested in dynamic choice problems, analyses of temptation, and Humean conceptions of practical reason. Her earlier publications on procrastination include “Understanding Procrastination” (2007) and “Environmental Preservation and Second-Order Procrastination” (2007). Her articles on closely related topics have appeared in American Philosophical Quarterly, Bioethics, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Public Affairs, and Ratio. Jennifer A. Baker is in the philosophy department at the College of Charleston. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Arizona and has taught at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research is focused on virtue ethics; she promotes a traditional, practical, rationality-based account of virtue against contemporary accounts that attempt to do without a final end. In her xi paper “Operationalizing Virtue,” she presents her own data on moral reasoning and reports on other means of gathering empirical support for the traditional accounts of practical rationality. In “Virtue and Meaning,” she attempts to distinguish an integrated moral psychology from meaning in a life. Her most recent publications include “Money Is the Product of Virtue” and “Virtue and Behavior: The Intersection of Ethics and Economics.” Jon Elster is the Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He also holds the Chaire de Rationalité et Sciences Sociales at the Collège de France. He has previously taught at the Universities of Oslo, Paris (XIII), and Chicago. Among his recent books are Alchemies of the Mind (1999), Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (2004), Explaining Social Behavior (2007), Le Désintéressement (2009), and Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist (2009). His main current research interests fall within philosophical psychology and the study of collective decision making. Olav Gjelsvik is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo since 1994. He earned his D.Phil. at Oxford University in 1986 and has since published articles and papers in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of language. He participated from 1994 to 1998 in an international and interdisciplinary project on addiction, organized by Jon Elster. Since 2002, Gjelsvik is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters; he is currently head of the group that includes psychology, philosophy, and history of ideas. He is presently working mainly on a general account of human agency, and he codirects, with Jennifer Hornsby, the Rational Agency project within the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo. Peter M. Gollwitzer holds the Social Psychology and Motivation Chair at the University of Konstanz in Germany and is Professor of Psychology at New York University. His research focuses on the willful pursuit of goals. He is coeditor, with John A. Bargh, of Psychology of Action: Linking Cognition and Motivation to Behavior (1996) and, with Ezequiel Morsella and John A. Bargh, of The Oxford Handbook of Human Action (2009). Joseph Heath is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Communicative Action and Rational Choice (2001), Following the Rules (2008), and a number of scholarly articles on the subject of practical rationality. Duncan MacIntosh is Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University. Lately, he has been working in decision theory, the theory of practical xii rationality, meta-ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, and epistemology. He has published in Analysis, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, The Journal of Philosophy, and elsewhere. Elijah Millgram received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1991 and held positions at Princeton and Vanderbilt before joining the faculty at Utah in 1999. His current research is focused on theory of rationality, particularly on practical reasoning and on inference in the face of partial truth. He is the author of Practical Induction (1997), Ethics Done Right: Practical Reasoning as a Foundation for Moral Theory (2005), and Hard Truths (2009). His historical research interests include John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche. He is editor of Varieties of Practical Reasoning (2001) and a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Don Ross is Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town and Professor of Economics and of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research concentrates on impulsive consumption, game theoretic modeling of personal development and socialization, and trade and industrial policies in Africa. Recent books include Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation (2005), Midbrain Mutiny (with C. Sharp, R. Vuchinich, and D. Spurrett, 2008), and Every Thing Must Go (with J. Ladyman, 2007). He is coeditor, with H. Kincaid, of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics (2009). Sarah Stroud is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. Her research interests range across moral psychology, moral and practical reasoning, moral theory, and metaethics; she is currently working on partiality in moral psychology and moral theory. With Christine Tappolet, she coedited Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality (2003/2007), and she recently contributed the entry on weakness of will to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Her work has appeared in Ethics and Philosophy and Public Affairs, among other journals. She is one of two associate editors of the International Encyclopedia of Ethics, now under preparation for Wiley-Blackwell with Hugh LaFollette as editor-in-chief, to be published in 9 to 12 volumes in 2012. Christine Tappolet is Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Metaethics and full professor in the philosophy department at the Université de Montréal. She has coedited several volumes, including, with Sarah Stroud, Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality (2003/2007) and, with Luc Faucher, The Modularity of Emotions (2008). She has written articles in metaethics and moral psychology and is the author of Émotions et Valeurs (2000) and, with Ruwen Ogien, of Les Concepts de l’éthique (2009). xiii Sergio Tenenbaum is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason (2007) and various papers on ethics, practical reason, and Kant’s practical philosophy. He is also the editor of a collection of papers in moral psychology for the series New Trends in Philosophy (2007), and he is currently editing a volume of original work on the relation between desire and the good, entitled Desire, Good, and Practical Reason (forthcoming). Manuel A. Utset is the Charles W. Ehrhardt Professor at the Florida State University College of Law. He is a leading scholar on applying behavioral law and economics to issues in corporate, securities, and criminal law. His recent work has examined how people’s preference for immediate gratification can lead otherwise rational actors to engage in repeated misconduct and how the content and operation of different types of legal rules help reduce or exacerbate people’s self- control problems. Before joining Florida State, he taught at the Boston University and University of Utah law schools. Mark D. White is Professor in the Department of Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and the economics doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center. His edited books include Theoretical Foundations of Law and Economics (2009) and Economics and the Mind (with Barbara Montero, 2007), and he is the author of several dozen journal articles and book chapters in the intersections of economics, philosophy, and law. He is currently writing a book collecting and expanding on his work on economics and Kantian ethics. Frank Wieber studied psychology at the universities of Jena, Louvain-la-Neuve, and Canterbury before accepting a research associate position at the University of Konstanz in 2006. He has published several journal articles and chapters on the impact of self-regulatory strategies on the goal attainment of individuals as well as groups, and is the editor of an interdisciplinary special issue of Social Psychology on the limits of intentionality, to be published in 2011. xiv The Thief of Time Introduction Chrisoula Andreou Mark D. White Procrastination is familiar and interesting but also puzzling. Although it is generally perceived as harmful and irrational, recent studies suggest that most of us procrastinate occasionally and many of us procrastinate persistently.1 Not even saints are immune: Saint Augustine records in his Confessions how, after years of sexual hedonism, he vowed to return to Christianity and prayed for chastity and continence—“only not yet.” Although he “abhorred” his current way of living and “earnestly” wanted to change his course, he kept deferring any change until “tomorrow.”2 What, exactly, is procrastination? According to one simple and familiar characterization, procrastination involves simply putting things off until the last minute. But some people do this intentionally, maintaining that they do their best work under pressure. Taking the simple, familiar characterization of procrastination as their starting point, some psychologists have explored the question of whether procrastination improves or reduces quality of work and quality of life. Prominent studies suggest that, in general, the strategy of leaving things until the last minute is not a good one—the agent pays a steep price in the form of reduced well-being and shoddy work.3 But does this really get to the core of the problem of procrastination? In a unique classic essay on procrastination, psychologists Maury Silver and John Sabini suggest that the answer is no.4 According to their view, we do not discover that procrastination is a problem by discovering that it has bad consequences. Rather, proper analysis of the concept reveals that delay does not count as procrastination unless it is “irrational.” Taking this as their starting point, they then look into the factors that prompt or support irrational delaying. 3 Here, philosophical distinctions and debate concerning reason and rationality become relevant. Presumably, a person does not count as a procrastinator simply because she performs an action later than it should have been performed. For instance, given the information available, she may have had very good reason to believe that she should act later rather than sooner. In this case, she need not count as irrational, even if she failed to do what she had most reason to do. Drawing on a common philosophical conception of irrationality, one might characterize procrastination as acting later than one thinks one should. Before accepting this characterization, one must carefully think through the following questions: Is there room for a subtle form of procrastination that works precisely by influencing one’s thinking about when something ought to be done? For example, can procrastination take the form of discouraging one from forming any clear judgment about the need to act promptly, perhaps by distracting one’s attention away from certain inconvenient truths (or possibilities), such as that one will be even more tired tonight than one is now? What if one is not only distracted from inconvenient truths but also develops a rationalization for delaying (for example, “I really must watch this DVD so that I can return it to Maria promptly”)? Can this still count as procrastinating? If so, must the rationalization be interpreted as self-deception? Otherwise put, must it be true that, on some level, one thinks delaying is uncalled for? Another thing to consider in relation to the idea that procrastination involves acting later than one thinks one should is the possibility of procrastinating with respect to an action that one commits to against one’s better judgment. Suppose someone forms the intention to tell a lie even though he believes he should not do so. He can, it seems, procrastinate with respect to his akratic intention, but it is not clear that procrastination of this sort can be squared with the idea that procrastination involves acting later than one thinks one should. Perhaps more promising is the idea, taken for granted by some psychologists, that procrastination involves irresoluteness, which is possible even with respect to an akratic intention. In being irresolute, one violates a prior intention. But this alternative characterization of procrastination might also be too restrictive. For it seems that there could be a form of procrastination that works precisely by discouraging one from forming any specific intention about when to act.5 Evasiveness of this sort is particularly easy to get drawn into when vagueness concerning when one must get started on goal- directed actions makes it possible to interpret oneself as having a goal (such as retiring with enough funds to live comfortably), though one has not acted on the goal or even yet formed any plan for realizing it. 4 The possibility of vague goals raises questions concerning the connection between procrastination and hypocrisy, as well as questions concerning procrastination and self- management problems associated with the fact that our choices are spread out over time. Based on the idea that actions speak louder than words, it might be suggested that