Parfit’s Final Arguments in Normative Ethics

This paper starts by juxtaposing the normative ethics in the final part of Parfit’s final book, On What Matters, volume iii (2017), with the normative ethics in his earlier books, Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters, volume i (2011). The paper then addresses three questions. The first is, where does the reflective-equilibrium methodology that Parfit endorsed in the first volume of On What Matters lead? The second is, is the Act-involving Act Consequentialism that Parfit considers in the final volume of On What Matters as plausible as Rossian deontology? The third is, how is the new argument that Parfit puts forward for Rule Consequentialism supposed to work?

Nonlegislative Justification

If moral theorists who otherwise disagree, all approach moral theorizing as a search for a set of desirable moral principles for the general regulation of behavior, then there is a sense in which they are all, as Parfit says, climbing the same mountain. But it is the wrong mountain. Morality should not be understood as hypothetical legislation; it is a mistake to set about constructing morality as if we were making law. Real legislators evaluate possible legal rules by considering the effects they would have. They can do this because enforcement and acceptance of law ensure a high level of compliance. Moral legislators have no reason to assume any particular level of acceptance; the effects of counterfactual acceptance of a principle are not morally relevant. The argument targets rule consequentialism and Scanlon’s official version of contractualism. The paper begins in a positive mode by arguing that a nonlegislative version of Scanlon’s approach, that seeks justification for conduct of such-and-such a kind in such-and-such circumstances by comparing the reasons in favor and the reasons others have to object, is a very attractive way to think about what we owe to each other.

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.

Duties That Become Supererogatory or Forbidden?

This chapter first examines certain of Derek Parfit’s views in his On What Matters, volume iii on the relation between not harming, aiding, and making personal sacrifices to achieve each. It compares his views with those of the author on two different measures of the stringency of duties and the distinction between supererogation and obligation. The chapter goes on to consider implications of these views for cases in which an agent must choose whether to save many people by either (i) not saving or harming someone else or (ii) suffering some large personal loss himself. The chapter continues by arguing against one way in which Parfit thinks an agent-relative deontological conception of one’s duty incorrectly bars our having common aims by requiring each person to minimize the harm he does.

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.

Special Concern and Personal Identity

As discussed by John Locke, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid, prudence involves a special concern for the agent’s own personal good that she does not have for others. This should be a concern for the agent’s overall good that is temporally neutral and involves an equal concern for all parts of her life. In this way, prudence involves a combination of agent relativity and temporal neutrality. This asymmetrical treatment of matters of interpersonal and intertemporal distribution might seem arbitrary. Henry Sidgwick raised this worry, and Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit have endorsed it as reflecting the instability of prudence and related doctrines such as egoism and the self-interest theory. However, Sidgwick thought that the worry was unanswerable only for skeptics about personal identity, such as David Hume. Sidgwick thought that one could defend prudence by appeal to realism about personal identity and a compensation principle. This is one way in which special concern and prudence presuppose personal identity. However, as Jennifer Whiting has argued, special concern displayed in positive affective regard for one’s future and personal planning and investment is arguably partly constitutive of personal identity, at least on a plausible psychological reductionist conception of personal identity. After explaining both conceptions of the relation between special concern and personal identity, the chapter concludes by exploring what might seem to be the paradoxical character of conjoining them, suggesting that there may be no explanatory priority between the concepts of special concern and personal identity.

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.

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.

Overdetermination and Obligation

This chapter is concerned with circumstances where a person’s act makes no difference to the occurrence of a negative outcome, but is a member of a group of acts that does make such a difference. In the light of an analysis of these circumstances, it argues against two familiar ideas. One is Derek Parfit’s view that the wrongness of an act directly depends on the consequences of the group of acts of which it is a member. The other is the view that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility. The chapter suggests that wrongness and permissibility, in these cases, is distinguished by the intentions of those who act. It also argues that intentions make a difference to a person’s liability to punitive, compensatory, and defensive harm. Finally, it briefly considers cases involving mixed motives.