Levine et al. carefully caveat that their contractualist theory of moral cognition is intended to apply only to situations which (potentially) involve other people. While logically consistent with the authors’ position, this caveat excludes a large and interesting set of “character”-related decisions, such as fortitude, courage, and prudence, as well as the classical virtues that have dominated thinking about morality for centuries. We believe that this position is overly pessimistic and that the ideas presented by the authors could be extended to produce a theoretical account of personal virtues by taking into consideration the fact that people are able to think about their future selves.

On this view, personal virtues could be thought of as implicit/explicit contracts with one’s future self. For example, someone may choose to persevere while undertaking a difficult activity by anticipating remorse from their future self for having quit prematurely. In general, people may actively employ negotiations and contracts within themselves in order to resolve conflicts and arrive at a mutually beneficial solution that incorporates their present and future selves.

Consider the virtue of courage – having the strength to admit to your boss when you have made a significant error in a multi-million-dollar project. Despite the current self holding higher bargaining power, being courageous could be explained as taking an action derived from a contract with the future self to generate mutual benefit for the current and future self. When one is courageous despite the high cost to one’s current welfare, one acts according to what one’s future self aspires to be, either by anticipating the regret of not acting or mentally simulating how the error may affect one’s future wellbeing.

The idea that multiple selves within individuals may be in negotiation to arrive at an optimal decision is not new. Thinking about possible states that one’s future self may act as a guide for actions has been advocated since Aristotle. In the economic literature, multiple formal models of dual self theory have been proposed in order to explain the role of self-control in intertemporal choices (Thaler & Shefrin, Reference Thaler and Shefrin1981), bargaining in habit formation (Ainslie, Reference Ainslie2017), and as a proposed solution to time inconsistency and preference reversals (Fudenberg & Levine, Reference Fudenberg and Levine2006; Henkel, Reference Henkel2021). Thaler and Shefrin (Reference Thaler and Shefrin1981) proposed that the economic man must be an organization that is at odds with its present self (the “Doer”) and the future self (the “Planner”). Conflict arises between the farsighted planner and the myopic doer when the doer seeks instant gratification at the cost of long-term plans and the planner seeks lifetime utility maximization at the cost of pleasure. On similar lines, Ainslie (Reference Ainslie2017) argues that “intertemporal bargaining,” where self-control and temptation are often pitted against each other, lies at the heart of addictive behaviors and habit formation.

We think resource rational intra-individual negotiations function through a similar mechanism as inter-individual negotiations, where bargaining based on present and future selves’ utility enables one to arrive at working solutions, which can be updated later based on additional information. For instance, one may overplan their diet after eating junk food since the simulated gain to future welfare is inflated in this context. However, after eating salads for a week, they may renegotiate their original contract (introduce cheat days) or drop this contract and reformulate another (exercising more instead of dieting). Thus, individuals in the contractualist framework can adaptively modulate their plans and choices based on constraints imposed by their present or future selves, with such bargaining potentially revealing itself in the form of moral vacillations (Shivnekar & Srivastava, Reference Shivnekar and Srivastava2023).

This contractualist frame for studying virtues offers several opportunities to generate testable predictions. For example, procrastination has occasionally been framed as an observer’s rational decision to put off work to the future with the understanding that their future self would be better equipped at doing the work than their present self. Such a mechanism for procrastination would predict that people are more likely to procrastinate in situations when their present competence at performing a task and the marginal value of increase in present effort on the task are both low, which is consistent with data from recent experiments (Jagga, Srinivasan, & Srivastava, Reference Jagga, Srinivasan and Srivastava2021).

A similar line of argument may also be extended to intertemporal choices or decisions extending in time. Although it is often considered virtuous to delay immediate gratification for the sake of later benefits, intertemporal bargaining necessitates one to strike a contract between temptation and self-control (Ainslie, Reference Ainslie2017). Thus, resource-rational agents would find an optimal decision point that balances the perceived distal benefit and immediate costs of waiting. Using simulated gaming environments, it has been experimentally shown that when people are introduced to a portfolio of different intertemporal choices in a non-turbulent, resource-constrained environment, they learn to identify and opt for the utility-maximizing distal reward over time. However, in the presence of unpredictable turbulence, a lack of resources leads people to recalibrate their optimality and switch their preference to short-term goals (Mitra, Srinivasan, & Srivastava, Reference Mitra, Srinivasan and Srivastava2025). Such adaptation in intertemporal planning horizons suggests that people can reason with their future selves about their choices in ways that adapt to environmental demands in a resource-rational manner.

Finally, contractualist explanations also accommodate moral flexibility and progress. For example, an individual considering whether they were a coward all their lives may trigger an internal conflict where past consequences could be seen as direct consequences of not having acted correctly. If such a conflict is high, the perceived cost to future welfare could be inflated, leading one to perceive their future self being angry at their current self. This may lead to reevaluating the current self’s actions and future welfare, thus renegotiating and bargaining between selves to arrive at a more courageous decision. Thus, an intra-individual contractualist perspective not only equips us with a tool to decipher our rich moral and psychological lives but also projects our imperfect decisions in a resource-rational light.