Morality and the Distinction between Oneself and Others

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.

Temporal Neutrality and the Bias Toward the Future

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.

Relational Egalitarianism

Derek Parfit famously introduced a now commonly adopted distinction between telic and deontic distributive egalitarianism. This chapter argues that we can draw a similar distinction between telic and deontic relational egalitarianism. Interestingly, telic relational egalitarianism might be less vulnerable to the levelling-down objection than telic distributive egalitarianism. However, while some relational egalitarian concerns are best captured by telic relational egalitarianism, other concerns are better captured by deontic relational egalitarianism and yet others relating to intergenerational justice are better captured by telic distributive egalitarianism. Accordingly, insofar as we are egalitarians, we should be pluralist egalitarians in a more thoroughgoing way than Parfit entertained.

Parfit on Love and Partiality

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.

Parfit on Act Consequentialism

In the first two volumes of On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues that three major normative theories—Kantianism, Contractualism, and Consequentialism—are, in their most defensible forms, compatible, and can be reconciled as a ‘Triple Theory’. The form of Consequentialism that Parfit argues is compatible with Kantianism and Contractualism is Rule Consequentialism. This has led many to assume that Parfit does not believe that Act Consequentialism is a defensible form of Consequentialism. We draw on personal correspondence to show that this assumption is incorrect. We then consider how, in On What Matters, volume iii, which Parfit completed shortly before his death, he seeks to narrow the differences between Act Consequentialism and the Triple Theory. One of the ways in which he does this is to suggest that Impartial Rationality may be an external rival to Morality, in much the same way as egoism is an external rival to morality. We argue that this move undermines morality, as shown by Parfit’s own example of the judgements that we may make in the case of terror bombing. We conclude that Parfit’s attempts to bridge the gap between Act Consequentialism and Triple Theory meet with only limited success.

Separating Persons

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit argues for a reductionist view of persons and that our ethical thinking should become more impersonal. While doing so, he argues that we may need to give up some widely shared intuitions about the Separateness of Persons and all of those views which crucially hinge upon it. However, this chapter argues that Parfit was mistaken. His reductionist views of persons and his more general claim that our ethical thinking should become more impersonal are in fact compatible with several plausible interpretations of the Separateness of Persons. Parfit’s project in Reasons and Persons should thus be understood not as undermining the Separateness of Persons, but as transforming our understanding of it. The chapter closes by considering the degree to which Parfit had reason by his own lights to accept some version of the Separateness of Persons.

Principles and Persons

This book is a collection of essays, most of which appear here for the first time, that were written in honour of the legendary moral philosopher, Derek Parfit. The essays are mainly concerned with issues that Parfit addressed in his book, Reasons and Persons. They include the relevance of personal identity to ethics, the rationality of different attitudes to time, the nature of well-being, the varieties of consequentialism, reasons for action, aggregation in ethics, causal overdetermination, egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and supererogation.

Personal Identity and Impersonal Ethics

On the Reductionist View, the fact of a person’s existence and that of her identity over time just consist in the holding of certain more particular facts about physical and mental events and the relations between these events. These more particular facts are impersonal—they do not presuppose or entail the existence of any person or mental subject. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit claims that if the Reductionist View is true, then ‘it is … more plausible to focus, not on persons, but on experiences, and to claim that what matters morally is the nature of these experiences’. But why think that the Reductionist View has this implication? As critics such as Robert Adams, David Brink, Mark Johnston, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Wolf have suggested, it is not clear why the Reductionist View should have any implications regarding the moral importance of persons. This chapter argues that in contrast to Non-reductionist views, Psychological Reductionism, a version of the Reductionist View that assumes a psychological criterion of personal identity, supports the kind of impersonal moral outlook that Parfit describes.

Giving Reasons and Given Reasons

Derek Parfit, as a leader of the ‘reasons first’ movement, says that the concept of a reason is fundamental and indefinable. But his concept of a reason differs from most philosophers’. Most philosophers take a reason to be a fact, whereas Parfit says that reasons are given by facts, not that they are facts. This paper distinguishes Parfit’s concept of a reason, which it calls a ‘given reason’, from the more common one, which it calls a ‘giving reason’. It argues that, whereas the concept of a giving reason is easily defined, the concept of a given reason is not. Parfit is therefore better placed than most philosophers to defend the claim that the concept of a reason is fundamental and indefinable.

Introduction

This introduction explains that the chapters that follow were, with a few exceptions, written in honour of Derek Parfit, describes the background to the book, and identifies the book’s main aim, which is to make progress in our thinking about moral issues, particularly in normative ethics, that Parfit rightly believed to be of great importance.