In today’s Guardian there is an article about a dispute between Julian Assange and publisher Canongate about whether the publisher is right to publish the early draft of an autobiography that they had commissioned and paid for, but where no final version has been received nor the advance returned to the publisher.

There are lots of complex legal and moral issues here, but I want to use this to raise an issue that I’ve been thinking about for a while. We always assume that the current state of a person is the one that is allowed to make decisions that override the wishes of the person at other times. Let’s just introduce some informal notation: let person_time represent the mental state of person at time, person_time1-time2 represent the generalisation to a range of times (to do this properly requires a lot more complexity which will detract from the argument).

So, we can phrase our argument thus: why should Assange_Sept 2011 be able to unmake a decision that Assange_Dec 2010 made? That this is a meaningful question seems at first doubtful—he has changed his mind, and the current state of mind is the one that we universally accept as completely dominant overall all other previous states of mind (except, perhaps, in cases of temporary “out of mindness” such as mania or drunkenness).

And yet, and yet…this seems to throw up some bizarre consequences. Consider for example the case of Alice, who from 1980 to 2010 wanted to will her money to her children. At the beginning of 2011 she converts to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and changes her will to leave her money to the church. A few months later, in a tragic incident involving a pasta strainer, Alice dies and all of her money gets left to the Church, in accordance with the will of Alice₂₀₁₁. The much longer lasting will of Alice_1980-2010 is completely ignored. Why should Alice_1980-2010 not have some—indeed, most—of the rights over what happens at the end?
Note that we are not talking about the state where Alice₂₀₁₁ discovers that the beliefs that Alice_1980-2010 were false—e.g. that the children that she was to give her money to were acting in some way that she disapproved of; we are just talking about the case where she “merely” changed her mind.

This gets even more complex when we think about future states too. Imagine depressive Bob, who has had quite a good time of it from 2005-2010, but in 2011 decides that it is too much and that Bob₂₀₁₁ wants to commit suicide, against the will of Bob_2005-2010. Perhaps this doesn’t matter—but, what about the will of Bob₂₀₂₀, who has successfully gone though therapy and is now basically happy with his life? Should Bob₂₀₂₀ not get some consideration, even some legal protection, from the murderous intentions of Bob₂₀₁₁?

A somewhat lighter example concerns phrases like “their marriage failed”. If Charlie_1990-2005 and David_1990-2005 are both in a happy marriage, which falls apart between 2006-07 ending in divorce during 2008, why should the opinions of Charlie₂₀₀₈ and David₂₀₀₈ be the definitive opinion on the marriage as a whole? If, in a counterfactual world, David had had a sudden heart attack in 2004, the eulogy would have talked about his “happy marriage”; why is it suddenly rendered unhappy by the events of 2006-08?

Underpinning all of this seems to be some notion of “progress” throughout life. We have worked hard to be critical of naive notions of progress in other domains; we are, on the whole, critical of accounts of, say, politics or technology as being a universal progress towards better states. Yet in terms of an individual’s personal life, we are uncritical about this. There is the occasional exception—the temporary loss of mind discussed earlier, the person who loses decision-making capability due to mental illness, or the individual who is painted as “throwing away” their previous rationality for short-term gain (as in the Anna Nicole Smith case). But, on the whole, the idea that the current person has valid domain over that person at other points in their life, particularly the past person, seems to dominate and support the notion that a person just makes “progress” throughout their life.