Doing Right by Wrong

A striking contrast between Reasons and Persons and On What Matters is the vastly different attitude Parfit takes towards Act Consequentialism. Parfit’s defense of Act Consequentialism against a battery of criticisms in Reasons and Persons was legendary. In On What Matters, however, Parfit remarks that Sidgwick’s act-consequentialist principle of rational benevolence is best regarded, like egoism, as an ‘external rival to morality’. What lies behind this remarkable change in attitude, if not in view, is Parfit’s focus in On What Matters on deontic moral concepts, like wrongness, and their relation to accountability and reactive attitudes like moral blame. This essay explores the details of Parfit’s later views, arguing that he did not go far enough in pursuing this line of thought and that doing so is necessary to bring out the distinctive normativity of deontic moral concepts. Parfit’s claim that the ‘ordinary’ concept of wrongness is indefinable threatens to rob the concept of normativity in the ‘reason-involving sense’. If, however, we understand wrongness in terms of there being reason to blame, lacking excuse, we can account for its distinctive normative contours.