This week’s NYTimes Magazine has an interesting article about soft paternalism. In the course of offering a few different approaches, writer Jim Holt explains the theory of “multiple selves”.

You might naïvely imagine that you are one person, the same entity from day to day. To the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, however, the idea of a permanent “I” was a fiction. Our mind, Hume wrote, “is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” According to this way of thinking, the self that inhabits your body today is only similar to, not identical with, the self that is going to inhabit your body tomorrow. And the self that will inhabit your body decades hence? A virtual stranger.

The implication here is that my current self has no right to restrict the behavior of my future self and use the law to help me. It’s an interesting approach that I have to think more about before passing judgment. But the article follows with a flawed argument to support it.

The idea of multiple selves may seem like a stoner’s fantasy, but economists who study human decision-making have found it surprisingly useful. Consider: Most people, if given a choice today between doing seven hours of irksome work on May 1, 2007, versus eight hours on May 15, 2007, opt for the former. When May 1 arrives, however, they will find that their preference has flipped: they now wish to put off the work for a couple of weeks, even at the cost of having to do the extra hour’s worth. Why this inconsistency, if the self calling the shots is one and the same?

Perhaps for B-theorists, this presents a serious problem (although I don’t think a fatal one), but for A-theorists like myself, there’s no contradiction because the question asked on May 1 is fundamentally different from the one asked “today”.

If you ask a person today to choose between “doing seven hours of irksome work on May 1, 2007, [and doing] eight hours on May 15, 2007″, he will quite rationally choose the former. Significantly though, doing the work today is not one of the options, but it is an option when you repeat the question on May 1. Then, the question becomes, would you rather do seven hours of irksome work today or two weeks from today.

By replacing “May 1, 2007″ with “today”, it’s clear why there’s no contradiction between the two answers. When asked on May 1, 2007, the respondent doesn’t want to do any work today, if given a choice. He would rather put it off for two weeks. When asked today, the rejected option (doing work today) isn’t offered. If it’s true that most people would prefer to put off irksome work for two weeks if it meant only adding an additional hour, then it’s just as true on December 3, 2006 as it will be on May 1, 2007.

That said, it does remind me of a Seinfeld routine, which is certainly a point in its favor.

I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, ‘cause I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. What about getting up after five hours sleep? Oh that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want. So you get up in the morning, you’re exhausted, groggy, oooh I hate that Night Guy! See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There’s nothing Morning Guy can do. The only thing Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy looses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.