Whether morality is primarily about social/interpersonal stuff or about dealing with reality effectively

[Max]

@JustinCEO

If you think your future self and your current self are different people, and you define “current self” as you in the current moment , then any decision could only ever affect a future self (and possibly others), and could never affect your current self (which I think was the point of @ingracke’s question).

Based on your reply, it seems like you have some idea of what counts as “future self” that’s different than “yourself at any point in the future (as opposed to yourself in the current moment)”, but I’m not sure how you’re thinking about it exactly.

I think decisions matter to different degrees, and have different like scopes of effect. Particularly, some decisions (like what to have for lunch) have a local effect – there’s no reason to think that it will have a substantial effect on your future. It’s qualitatively different to decisions that we know will have a substantial effect on your future. Those sort of local decisions are the ones that only really involve your current self. Put another way: since there’s no real impact on your future self (salad vs pasta won’t change your life much), those decisions don’t involve your future self. Caveat: habits around these decisions might affect your future self. Like if you choose KFC for lunch every day, that could be a problem.

So the definition of current/future self in this case depends on whatever breakpoint we choose regarding like magnitude and scope of the impact of choices. WRT decision making, that’s the qualitative difference between current/future self.