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People seem to have pure time preferences about trade-offs concerning their own pleasures and pains, and such preferences contribute to estimates of people's individual time discount rate. Do pure time preferences also matter to interpersonal welfare trade-offs, including those concerning the welfare of future generations? Most importantly, should the intergenerational time discount rate include a pure time preference? Descriptivists claim that the intergenerational discount rate should reflect actual people's revealed preferences, and thus it should include a pure time preference. Prescriptivists claim that the intergenerational discount rate should be based on moral analysis, and thus they (often) claim that the rate of pure time preference should be zero. I argue that regardless of which view is correct, a focus on pure time preference is misplaced. First, the most plausible interpretation of descriptive preferences for intergenerational trade-offs is that people are socially biased and not time biased. Second, social bias is superior to time bias as a prescriptive reason to discount the welfare of future people. Third, recent advances in measuring social bias as a social discount rate make social bias a viable replacement for time bias in economic analyses of intergenerational welfare trade-offs.

When someone is prepunished, they are punished for a predicted crime they will or would commit. I argue that cases of prepunishment universally assumed to be merely hypothetical—including those in Philip K. Dick's "The Minority Report"—are equivalent to some instances of the real-life punishment of attempt offenses. This conclusion puts pressure in two directions. If prepunishment is morally impermissible, as philosophers argue, then this calls for amendments to criminal justice theory and practice. At the same time, if prepunishment is not imaginary, then the philosophers who reject it cannot claim that their view is supported by common sense.

AbstractThis paper empirically investigates whether people's implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something as a news item and preferring it as an object of choice. Finally, we investigate whether differences in people's implicit decision theory correlate with differences in their level of future bias: the preference for positively valenced events to be located in the future and not the past, and negatively valenced events to be located in the past and not the future. We find that people are overwhelmingly non-causalists. We also find that implicit causalists do not make the distinction between news items and objects of choice, and that there is little to no correlation between people's future bias and their implicit decision theory. We end by discussing the philosophical upshots of this work.

Purpose: Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) lose less weight in the Veterans Affairs (VA) weight management program (MOVE!), so we developed MOVE!+UP. Design: Single-arm pre–post pilot to iteratively develop MOVE!+UP (2015-2018). Setting: Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Participants: Overweight Veterans with PTSD (5 cohorts of n = 5-11 [N = 44]; n = 39 received ≥1 MOVE+UP session, with cohorts 1-4 [n = 31] = "Development" and cohort 5 [n = 8] = "Final" MOVE!+UP). Intervention: MOVE!+UP weight management for Veterans with PTSD modified after each cohort. Final MOVE!+UP was coled by a licensed clinical psychologist and Veteran peer counselor in 16 two-hour in-person group sessions and 2 individual dietician visits. Sessions included general weight loss support (eg, behavioral monitoring with facilitator feedback, weekly weighing), cognitive-behavioral skills to address PTSD-specific barriers, and a 30-minute walk to a nearby park. Measures: To inform post-cohort modifications, we assessed weight, PTSD, and treatment targets (eg, physical activity, diet), and conducted qualitative interviews. Analysis: Baseline to 16-week paired t tests and template analysis. Results: Development cohorts suggested improvements (eg, additional sessions and weight loss information, professional involvement) and did not lose weight (mean [ M] = 1.8 lbs (standard deviation [SD] = 8.2); P = .29. Conversely, the final cohort reported high satisfaction and showed meaningful weight ( M = −14 pounds [SD = 3.7] and 71% lost ≥5% baseline weight) and PTSD ( M = −17.9 [SD = 12.2]) improvements, P < .05. Conclusions: The comprehensive, 16-week, in-person, cofacilitated Final MOVE!+UP was acceptable and may improve the health of people with PTSD. Iterative development likely produced a patient-centered intervention, needing further testing.