  McMahan himself suggests that, in a conflict between an earlier person and a current nonperson, the interests of the earlier person ought to trump (McMahan 2002, 502-03). He emphasizes that the earlier self is a “higher self,” “rational and autonomous,” and that her interests are associated with the dominant, more substantial and lengthy part of life, integrated — through strong prudential connections among its various stages — into one unified life-segment. But part of McMahan's reasoning is also that the interests of the current nonperson are, as types of interests, not very substantial. Here McMahan relies on the specifics of the example of conflict he happens to analyze (a version of the “preference to die” example we saw earlier), together with a controversial claim that a severely demented patient would not have a strong interest in continuing to live.