Derek Parfit
Encyclopedia
Derek Parfit is a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 philosopher who specializes in problems of personal identity, rationality
Rationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...

 and ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

, and the relations between them. His 1984 book Reasons and Persons
Reasons and Persons
Reasons and Persons is a philosophical work by Derek Parfit, first published in 1984. It focuses on ethics, rationality and personal identity....

 (described by Alan Ryan
Alan Ryan
Alan James Ryan, FBA was Warden of New College, Oxford, and Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and currently a lecturer at Princeton University....

 in The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times (UK)
The Sunday Times is a Sunday broadsheet newspaper, distributed in the United Kingdom. The Sunday Times is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News International, which is in turn owned by News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns The Times, but the two papers were founded...

 as "something close to a work of genius") has been very influential. His most recent book, On What Matters (2011), has already been widely discussed, having circulated in draft form for many years. He has worked at Oxford for the whole of his academic career, and is presently an Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford
All Souls College, Oxford
The Warden and the College of the Souls of all Faithful People deceased in the University of Oxford or All Souls College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England....

. He is also a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

, Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, and Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

. He is married to the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards
Janet Radcliffe Richards
Janet Radcliffe Richards is a British philosopher who has written about feminism and bioethics.She was Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University 1979-1999, and Director of the Centre for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine at University College London until 2007...

.

Early life

Parfit was born in China but his family returned to the United Kingdom. He read Modern History at the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

, graduating in 1964. In 1965-66 he was Harkness Fellow at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. He abandoned historical studies for philosophy during the time he held the fellowship.

Ethics and rationality

Reasons and Persons is a four-part work, with each successive section building on the last. Parfit believes that nonreligious ethics is a young and fertile field of inquiry. He asks questions about which actions are right or wrong and shies away from meta-ethics
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...

, which focuses more on logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

 and language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

.

In Part I of Reasons and Persons Parfit discusses "self-defeating theories", namely the self-interest theory
Rational egoism
In ethical philosophy, rational egoism is the principle that an action is rational if and only if it maximizes one's self-interest. The view is a normative form of egoism. However, it is different from other forms of egoism, such as ethical egoism and psychological egoism...

 of rationality (S) and two ethical frameworks: common sense morality (CSM) and consequentialism
Consequentialism
Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness of that conduct...

 (C). He posits that S has been dominant in Western culture for over two millennia, often making bedfellows with religious doctrine, which united self-interest and morality. Because S demands that we always make self-interest our supreme rational concern and instructs us to ensure that our whole life goes as well as possible, S makes temporally neutral requirements. Thus it would be irrational to act in ways that we know we would prefer later to undo.

As an example, it is irrational for a 14-year-old to listen to loud music or get arrested for vandalism if he knows such actions will detract significantly from his future well-being and goals (such as an academic career in philosophy or having good hearing).

Most notably, the self-interest theory holds that it is irrational to commit any acts of self-denial or to act on desires that negatively affect our well-being. One may consider an aspiring author whose strongest desire is to write an award-winning novel but who, in doing so, suffers from lack of sleep and depression. Parfit holds that it is plausible that we have such desires outside our own well-being, and that it is not irrational to act to fulfill these desires.

Aside from the initial appeal to plausibility of desires that do not directly contribute to one's life going well, Parfit contrives situations where S is indirectly self-defeating. That is, it makes demands that it initially posits as irrational. It does not fail on its own terms, but it does recommend adoption of an alternative framework of rationality. For instance, it might be in my self-interest to become trustworthy in order to participate in mutually beneficial agreements, even though in maintaining the agreement I will be doing what will, ceteris paribus
Ceteris paribus
or is a Latin phrase, literally translated as "with other things the same," or "all other things being equal or held constant." It is an example of an ablative absolute and is commonly rendered in English as "all other things being equal." A prediction, or a statement about causal or logical...

, be worse for me. In many cases S instructs us precisely not to follow S, thus fitting the definition of an indirectly self-defeating theory.

Parfit contends that to be indirectly individually self-defeating and directly collectively self-defeating is not fatally damaging for S. To further bury S, Parfit exploits its partial relativity, juxtaposing temporally neutral demands against agent-centered demands. The appeal to full relativity raises the question whether a theory can be consistently neutral in one sphere of actualization but entirely partial in another. Stripped of its commonly accepted shrouds of plausibility that can be shown to be inconsistent, S can be judged on its own (lacking) merits. While Parfit cannot offer an argument to dismiss S outright, his exposition lays S bare and allows its own failings to show through. It is defensible but the defender must bite so many bullets that he might lose his credibility in the process. Thus we need to search for a new theory of rationality. Parfit offers the Critical Present Aim Theory (CP), a broad catch-all that can be formulated to accommodate any competing theory. Parfit constructs CP to exclude self-interest as our overriding rational concern and to allow the time of action to become critically important. He leaves the question open, however, whether it should include "to avoid acting wrongly" as our highest concern. Such an inclusion would pave the way for ethics. Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women...

 longed for the fusion of ethics and rationality and, while Parfit admits that many would more ardently avoid acting irrationally as opposed to immorally, he cannot construct an argument that adequately unites the two.

But S is not the only self-defeating theory. Where S puts too much emphasis on the separateness of persons, C fails to recognize the importance of bonds and emotional responses that come from allowing some people privileged positions in one's life. If we were all pure do-gooders, perhaps following Sidgwick, that would not constitute the outcome that would maximize happiness. It would be better if a small percentage of the population were pure do-gooders, but others acted out of love, etc. Thus C too makes demands of agents that it initially deemed immoral; it fails not on its own terms, for it still demands the outcome that maximizes total happiness, but does demand that each agent not always act as an impartial happiness promoter. C thus needs to be revised as well.

S and C fail indirectly, while CSM is directly collectively self-defeating. (So is S but S is an individual theory.) Parfit shows, using interesting examples and borrowing from Nashian games, that it would often be better for us all if we did not put the welfare of our loved ones before all else. For example, we should care not only about our kids, but everyone's kids.

Parfit often poses more questions than he answers. In ethics, he points to a need for a dynamic framework that combines CSM and C but he offers no specific solution. Such an attitude tracks his stance that nonreligious ethics is a young, fertile field.

Personal identity

Parfit uses many examples seemingly inspired by Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...

 and other science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

, such as the teletransporter
Teletransporter
Teletransporter or teleporter refers to a fiction machine that allows teleportation. It is widely used in literature science fiction and fantasy....

, to explore our intuitions about our identity. He is a reductionist
Reductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...

, believing that since there is no adequate criterion of personal identity, people do not exist apart from their components. Parfit argues that reality can be fully described impersonally: there need not be a determinate answer to the question "Will I continue to exist?" We could know all the facts about a person's continued existence and not be able to say whether the person has survived. He concludes that we are mistaken in assuming that personal identity is what matters; what matters is rather Relation R: psychological connectedness (namely, of memory and character) and continuity (overlapping chains of strong connectedness).

On Parfit's account, individuals are nothing more than brains and bodies, but identity cannot be reduced to either. Parfit concedes that his theories rarely conflict with rival Reductionist theories in everyday life, and that the two are only brought to blows by the introduction of extraordinary examples. However, he defends the use of such examples because they seem to arouse genuine and strong feelings in many of us. Identity is not as determinate as we often suppose it is, but instead such determinacy arises mainly from the way we talk. People exist in the same way that nations or clubs exist.

A key Parfitian question is: given the choice of surviving without psychological continuity and connectedness (Relation R) or dying but preserving R through the future existence of someone else, which would you choose?

Parfit described the loss of the conception of a separate self as liberating:

Criticism of Personal Identity View

Fellow reductionist Mark Johnston of Princeton rejects Parfit's constitutive notion of identity with what he calls an "Argument from Above." Johnston maintains, "Even if the lower-level facts [that make up identity] do not in themselves matter, the higher-level fact may matter. If it does, the lower-level facts will have derived significance. They will matter, not in themselves, but because they constitute the higher level fact."

In this, Johnston moves to preserve the significance of personhood. Parfit's explanation is that it is not personhood itself that matters, but rather the facts in which personhood consists that provide it with significance. To illustrate this difference between himself and Johnston, Parfit makes use of an example of a brain-damaged patient who becomes irreversibly unconscious. The patient is certainly still alive even though that fact is separate from the fact that his heart is still beating and other organs are still functioning. But the fact that the patient is alive is not an independent or separately obtaining fact. The patient's being alive, even though irreversibly unconscious, simply consists in the other facts. Parfit explains that from this so-called "Argument from Below" we can arbitrate the value of the heart and other organs still working without having to assign them derived significance, as Johnston's perspective would dictate.

The future

Parfit's most famous postulations come in Part IV of Reasons and Persons where he discusses possible futures for the world. He shows that, in the discussion of possible futures, both average and total utilitarian standards lead to unwelcome conclusions. Applying total utilitarian standards (absolute total happiness) to possible growth paths of population and welfare leads one to what he calls the Repugnant Conclusion. Parfit illustrates this with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a choice between possible futures, in A 10 billion people would live during the next generation all having extremely happy lives, lives far happier than anyone lives today. In B, there are 20 billion people all living lives, while slightly less happy than those in A, are still very happy. Under total utility maximization we would prefer B to A, and through a regressive process of population increases and happiness decreases (in each the happiness decrease is more than outweighed by the population increase) we are forced to prefer Z, a world of hundreds of billion people all living lives barely worth living, over A. Even if we do not hold that coming to exist can benefit someone, we still must at least admit that Z is no worse than A.

Parfit makes a similar argument against average utilitarian standards. If all we care about is average happiness, we would be forced to conclude that an extremely small population, say 10 people, over the course of human history is the best outcome if we assume that these first 10 people (Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...

 et al.) had lives happier than we could ever imagine. Then consider the case of American immigration
Immigration
Immigration is the act of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence...

. Presumably alien welfare is less than American, but the would-be alien benefits tremendously from moving from his homeland. Assume also that Americans benefit from immigration (at least in small doses) because they get cheap labor, etc. Under immigration both groups are better off, but if this increase is offset by increase in the population, then average welfare is lower. Thus although everyone is better off, this is not the preferred outcome. Parfit asserts that this is simply absurd.

Parfit then moves to discuss the identity of future generations. He first posits that one's existence is intimately related to the time and conditions of conception. I would not be me if my parents waited 2 more years to have a child. While they would still have had a child, it would certainly be another being; even if it were still their first born son, it would not be me.

Study of weather patterns and other physical phenomena in the 20th century has shown that very minor changes in the initial conditions at time T, have drastic effects
Butterfly effect
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions; where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state...

 at all points after T. Compare this to the romantic involvement of future childbearing partners. By this we can see that any actions taken today, at time T, will affect the resulting people that exist after only a few generations. For instance, a significant change in global environmental policy would shift the initial conditions of the conception process so much that after 300 years none of the same people that would have been born are in fact born. Different couples meet each other and conceive at different times—different people exist. This is known as the 'non-identity problem.'

We could therefore craft disastrous policies that would be worse for nobody, because none of the same people exist under the different policies. If we consider the moral ramifications of potential policies in person-affecting terms, then we will have no reason to prefer a sound policy over an unsound one provided that its effects are not felt for a few generations. This is the non-identity crisis in its purest form: the identity of future generations is causally dependent, in a very sensitive way, on the actions of the present generations. So much so that they effectively have no identity if one looks as little as a half century into the future. Philosophers have long ignored this problem and have devised systems of ethics that are powerless to argue against our temporally biased policies.

Prioritarianism; ethics

Recently, Parfit has expressed sympathies toward the priority view, or prioritarianism
Prioritarianism
Prioritarianism or the Priority View is a view within ethics and political philosophy that holds that the goodness of an outcome is a function of overall well-being across all individuals with extra weight given to worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism thus resembles utilitarianism...

.

For years Parfit made available online a large (650+ pages) draft manuscript on ethics initially titled Climbing the Mountain. In 2011 the book was finally published as On What Matters.

Writings (selected)

  • 1964: Eton
    Eton College
    Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....

     Microcosm; edited by Anthony Cheetham and Derek Parfit. London: Sidgwick & Jackson
  • 1971: "Personal Identity", Philosophical Review; Vol. 80: 3-27, 1971.
  • 1984: Reasons and Persons
    Reasons and Persons
    Reasons and Persons is a philosophical work by Derek Parfit, first published in 1984. It focuses on ethics, rationality and personal identity....

    . Oxford: Clarendon Press ISBN 0198246153
  • 1997: "Reasons and Motivation", The Aristotelian Soc. Supp. Vol. 77: 99-130, 1997.
  • 2006: "Normativity", in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. I, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • 2011: On What Matters, Oxford University Press.

External links

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