Why don’t you need to respect the preferences of your past self as you do other dead people. It’s because by rationally changing your values you pass on responsibility, you abdicate responsibility or de-endorse your values. This voids their legitimacy in the moral calculus. If this weren’t possible the vast sea of past time slices of people and future time slices of people would have such contradictory preferences, how could we act to fulfil them. This suggests we ought to fulfil the deads preferences as they were when last of sound mind.
Relatedly, if we go through some non-rational value change, we ought to regard the past self as never having gotten a chance to give up their values, their claims still hold force.
How would that interface with sub agents having different preferences though? Some local final goal changes will always be a rational, or perhaps the sub agent isn’t a moral agent and so can’t consent to give up their own values. What happens then.
This is relevant to McMahan and Parfit on Summative vs. Global Desire Satisfaction Theories
What did Burke say about the wishes of the dead and the issue of it’s time inconsistency?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae is a persuasive case. Also Herzog’s cave film seems relevant.
Huh I just realised that you can sidestep arguments about the importance of cultural preservation of ‘superstitious’ things that current group members believe are valuable by appealing to the wishes of the dead, since the dead couldn’t have been expected to know any better, and so their desires weren’t misinformed, (though they might have been uninformed - which one matters?)
Does whether a (somewhat) misinformed desire being fulfilled benefit the holder of the desire work differently for dead and living people? Does being alive somehow give you the option of reconciling yourself to your slightly misinformed desires? Do the desires of the living somehow have a more magnetic kind of intentionality that latches on to any object in the world that is ‘close enough’ to the mental object of desire?