Parfit in Seven Parts
Overview and Table of Contents
Derek Parfit was a great philosopher, but his work is not known for being especially approachable. Reasons and Persons was 500+ pages of incredibly dense (yet rewarding!) philosophy. The three volumes of On What Matters total almost 2000 pages. Very few people will (or should) read all this. In Parfit’s Ethics, I critically introduce Parfit’s central insights and arguments in around 130 pages (according to my preprint; Cambridge University Press somehow squeezes this into just 55 pages). But even this very short book is still, you know… a book… and so unlikely to be as widely read as random blog posts on the internet. Solution: turn the book into a series of blog posts!
So, here we are. I’ve written seven posts that break down different elements of Parfit’s thought into manageable chunks. (The first six draw heavily from my book; the seventh, on metaethics, contains more new material.) I hope this will prove valuable to philosophers, students, and philosophically-interested readers who would like to learn more about Parfit’s ideas without requiring a huge investment of time and effort. If some of your friends might meet this description, do them a favour and let them know of this resource!
Table of Contents
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
I’ll conclude by sharing Parfit’s own concluding comments, on what he took to matter most:
One thing that greatly matters is the failure of we rich people to prevent, as we so easily could, much of the suffering and many of the early deaths of the poorest people in the world. The money that we spend on an evening’s entertainment might instead save some poor person from death, blindness, or chronic and severe pain. If we believe that, in our treatment of these poorest people, we are not acting wrongly, we are like those who believed that they were justified in having slaves.
Some of us ask how much of our wealth we rich people ought to give to these poorest people. But that question wrongly assumes that our wealth is ours to give. This wealth is legally ours. But these poorest people have much stronger moral claims to some of this wealth. We ought to transfer to these people… at least ten per cent of what we inherit or earn.
What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and we are discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through the galaxy.
Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good… Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would have given us all, including those who suffered most, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.
Thank you for your expert summaries of Parfit’s work which I have found valuable.
Here's a brief counter-argument to Parfit's precept to tithe 10% of one's income.
1. A productive economy is far and away the most effective institution for improving the material circumstances of persons in poverty.
2. Effective charity alleviates suffering over the short term.
3. Investment in economic activity alleviates much more suffering over the long term.
4. Therefore, investing 10% in responsible capitalist endeavors relieves more suffering than contributing 10% to charity.
Obviously this is a sketch, but it bears consideration.