The author is Samuel Scheffler, and the subtitle is The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment.  He is one of America’s leading philosophers, and proves it once again here.

Much of this book is devoted to arguing against Derek Parfit’s view of “time neutrality,” namely that a pleasure or pain is not intrinsically more or less valuable because it arrives earlier or later in time.  Scheffler has some compelling examples of intuitions that seem to violate Parfit’s time neutrality.  Here are two:

a) If you will have written say 6 good books in your life, you might at a moment of time care how many of them lie in your past, and how many lie in your future.

b) If a loved one dies, you want to be grieving for some particular period of time, and for a period of time of a particular length.  You also (probably)