Most of us are hedonically future-biased: other things being equal, we
prefer pains to be in the past and pleasures to be in the future. Recently,
various authors have argued that future bias is irrational, and that we
should be temporally neutral instead. I argue that instead of temporal
neutrality, the putative counterexamples and the rationales offered for
them only motivate a more narrow principle I call Only Action Fixes Utility:
it is only when you act on the basis of assigning a utility to an outcome
that rationality requires you to give it the same value retrospectively and
prospectively, other things being equal. When hedonic experiences are
untethered from action, hedonic future bias is rationally permissible. I
support this principle by appeal to additional scenarios and more general
asymmetries between agential and experiential goods
