Why It Does Not Matter What Matters: Relation R, Personal Identity, and Moral Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (278) ◽  
pp. 178-198
Author(s):  
Bastian Steuwer
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
The Future ◽  
Separateness Of Persons ◽  
What Matters

Abstract Derek Parfit famously argued that personal identity is not what matters for prudential concern about the future. Instead, he argues what matters is Relation R, a combination of psychological connectedness and continuity with any cause. This revisionary conclusion, Parfit argued, has profound implications for moral theory. It should lead us, among other things, to deny the importance of the separateness of persons as an important fact of morality. Instead, we should adopt impersonal consequentialism. In this paper, I argue that Parfit is mistaken about this last step. His revisionary arguments about personal identity and rationality have no implications for moral theory. We need not decide whether Relation R or personal identity contain what matters if we want to retain the importance of the separateness of persons.

Morality and the Distinction between Oneself and Others

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
Ingmar Persson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
The Future ◽  
What Matters

In On What Matters Derek Parfit adopts Henry Sidgwick’s idea of a duality of practical reason consisting in there being personal reasons to care about our own well-being as well as moral reasons to care about everyone else’s well-being. But this sits ill with his well-known claim in Reasons and Persons that personal identity is not what matters. For this implies that were we to divide into two individuals, we would have the same reasons to care about these individuals as ourselves, though they are distinct from us. It is suggested that this is because we empathize with them in the same way as with ourselves in the future, ‘from the inside’, and that considerations of justice do not apply to them because their wills are too dependent on our wills.

Parfit on Love and Partiality

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Roger Crisp
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Concern For Others ◽  
Instrumental Reasons ◽  
What Matters

It is generally held that in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit was advocating greater impartiality in ethics. In his later work, On What Matters, he seems more inclined to accept that we have partial reasons, for example, to give priority to those we love. This chapter raises some questions concerning Parfit’s arguments for partiality, including whether affection is too contingent to be valuable in itself, and whether partial concern for others, shared histories, or commitments can plausibly be said to ground non-instrumental reasons or value. The paper ends with a discussion of gratitude and an argument based on Parfit’s reductionist conception of personal identity.

On What Matters for African Americans: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness” in the Light of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons

Janus Head ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-131
Author(s):  
Michael Wainwright ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk ◽  
What Matters

In Reasons and Persons (1984), the greatest contribution to utilitarian philosophy since Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874), Derek Parfit supports his Reductionist contention “that personal identity is not what matters” by turning to the neurosurgical findings of Roger Wolcott Sperry. Parfit’s scientifically informed argument has important implications for W. E. B. Du Bois’s contentious hypothesis of African-American “double-consciousness,” which he initially advanced in “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897), before amending for inclusion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). An analysis of “Of the Coming of John,” chapter 13 in The Souls of Black Folk, helps to trace these ramifications, resituating Du Bois’s notion from the pragmatist to the utilitarian tradition, and revealing how his concept effectively prefigured Parfit’s scientifically informed Reductionism.

Temporal Neutrality and the Bias Toward the Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-114
Author(s):  
Samuel Scheffler
Keyword(s):  
Derek Parfit ◽  
The Future ◽  
Equal Concern

Many philosophers have held that rationality requires one to have an equal concern for all parts of one’s life. In the view of these philosophers, temporal neutrality is a requirement of rationality. Yet Derek Parfit has argued that most of us are not, in fact, temporally neutral. We exhibit a robust bias toward the future. Parfit maintains that this future-bias is bad for us, and that our lives would go better if we were temporally neutral. Like other neutralists, he also believes that the bias is irrational, however widespread and robust it may be. This article assesses these criticisms and offers a qualified defense of the bias toward the future.

Personal identity and concern for the future

Philosophia ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 481-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Haugen
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Future

Ethics, Personal Identity, and Ideals of the Person

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Scheffler
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Side Constraints ◽  
Regulative Principle ◽  
Moral Conception ◽  
Moral Philosophers

It is not uncommon for contemporary moral philosophers to appeal, in support or in criticism of one moral theory or another, to supposed features of or facts about persons. Rawls, for example, maintains that ‘utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons,’ and that since ‘the correct regulative principle for anything depends on the nature of that thing,’ we should not expect utilitarianism to be the correct regulative scheme for human beings. Nozick, in a similar spirit, suggests that the deontological restrictions he calls ‘side constraints’ are desirable components of a moral conception because, without them, a moral scheme is unable to ‘sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that … [each individual] is a separate person,’ unable to take account of the fact that, with respect to each individual, ‘his is the only life he has.’ And Williams, to cite still another example, suggests that utilitarianism is a defective moral theory because ‘it cannot coherently describe the relations between a man's projects and his actions.'

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document