I suspect that present and future selves normally have fairly similar preferences. The challenge is that present self has imperfect ability to predict future consequences, and is a multilayered being. It seems pretty reasonable for the supervising reflective self to want to change the rules that the impulsive self operates under, so that it makes decisions more consistent with the long run.

There’s a distinction between protecting the “right” of merely possible people to come into existence on the one hand, and protecting the interests of future people provided they come into existence on the other (as we do when we consider, e.g., environmental protection, budget deficits, etc.).

The “successive selves” idea can never genuinely catch on, true as it may be, because then we couldn’t lock people up for rapes and murders for long periods of time. (How do you punish a past self?)

If suicide is murder, then spending in the present is theft from a future self, sex is rape and a boxing match is battery. Steve Pinker wrote (I believe it was in “How the Mind Works” though it could have been “The Blank Slate”) that if couples had completely identical genetic interests, they would cease to be distinct individuals but one harmonious entity. My future self has the same genetic interests as me, so shouldn’t we expect the same here?