Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, by David Edmonds (Princeton University Press)
Philosophers today are typically unknown outside their discipline, but within it Derek Parfit, when he died in 2017, was considered one of the top moral philosophers of the last fifty years. He enjoyed putting moral theories under the kind of logical pressure that revealed their weaknesses. We may believe, for example, that an action is wrong only if it causes harm to particular individuals. But consider our relation to future generations. We might act well today to preserve the planet’s ecology or we might act very badly in this regard. In the latter case, those a couple of centuries from now will have livable but difficult and non-flourishing lives. It seems we have failed in our moral duty to these individuals. Parfit argues that what makes a particular self is the joining of a particular egg and sperm at a particular time. Think of all the possibilities that might have made your parents meet later and have a different child instead of you. Then consider the future individuals who live centuries from now in a world created by our resource-depleting behavior. Without that very behavior, with all the historical contingencies involved, they would not have been around. Much more responsible behavior by us today would have changed history enough to generate a very different cohort of individuals. The ones in our thought experiment are surely better off than if they had never existed at all, so they cannot claim that we have harmed them. There are no existing individuals, it seems, who have been wronged by us. So, the account of one moral theory for the wrongness of our present bad behavior is unsuccessful.
That argument is quintessential Parfit. Reactions to his work typically depend on whether one finds such arguments to be disturbing threats to our moral frameworks or merely the type of puzzle that sets certain kinds of philosophy seminars and certain kinds of analytical minds in pleasurable motion. Or consider a utilitarian ethical theory, one based not on duties to individual persons but on consequences, so that one aims at producing the best ratio of pleasurable states to painful ones. It seems we could get a superior utilitarian score if we keep increasing the earth’s population to twenty or thirty billion individuals, so long as each new life adds at least slightly more pleasurable states than painful ones. Such an outcome, Parfit says, is repugnant. He considers not only issues regarding future individuals and desirable population size, but also the kinds of actions, regarding environmental damage for example, that bring substantial benefit to the individual agent but at the same time cause harms to millions of others that that are so small as to be neither felt nor measured. It is only when these actions are combined with those of many, many others that the harm becomes measurable. Traditional ethical theories do not seem well-designed for such cases. Parfit also asks whether the moral intuitions that make us suppose we owe a great deal more to those very close to us, such as our own children, than to those halfway around the world are misguided.
He did not wish to encourage moral skepticism but to point the way for a more adequate moral theory. He felt that we are at the beginning stage of developing such a secular theory, now that religious and other implausible metaphysical frameworks have been given up. Parfit was what is called a non-naturalist cognitivist. That is, he believed there are ethical truths to be discovered in the way that there are mathematical truths to be discovered, but that these are not reducible to what we can learn from scientific evidence and experimentation. To a highly unusual degree he felt that human life as a whole and his own individual life would be completely meaningless if there is not such a valid ethical theory. Moral values cannot depend simply on what we humans happen to find ourselves valuing.
Parfit also uses rather contrived science-fiction thought experiments (cloning, teleportation, split-brain surgeries and the like) to test our intuitions about personal identity. He concludes that personal identity has no deep basis, may depend on arbitrary choices that cultures make in the future, and in the end does not truly matter very much. We have reason to desire the psychological continuation of mental states that we value, but should not care whether this means that we ourselves have gone on. For Parfit the boundaries between human selves are less important and less rigid than we suppose, so that our concern for others is not that different in kind from our concern for ourselves. The attachment of our early life stages to our later ones is considerably weaker, for there is not a strongly determinate sense we can give to the thought that these are later stages of the very same person. Parfit lost his religious belief when very young because he could not accept a God who punished sinners in hell. To acknowledge a determinist universe, he held, is to acknowledge that our moral-reactive attitudes (praise, blame, shaming, punishment, reward, gratitude, resentment, ostracism) are misplaced.
Parfit was born in Chengdu, China, to British missionary doctors. Back in England his parents used their spare resources on a privileged British education: the Dragon School; Eton; and Balliol College, Oxford. He then won competitive fellowships that allowed him to stay at All Souls, Oxford, for over forty years, with his daily needs taken care of, with no classes to teach, and with other superior minds to challenge his philosophical positions in discussion groups. (He did teach off and on at American universities.) It is hard to imagine a more sympathetic, fair-minded, and appropriately skilled biographer for Parfit than David Edmonds. Parfit was co-advisor for his BPhil and Parfit’s longtime partner, Janet Radcliffe Richards, was his DPhil dissertation supervisor. He is himself a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford, produces the podcast Philosophy Bites, and is co-author of Wittgenstein’s Poker. Edmonds has researched in extraordinary detail Parfit’s writings, prizes, and competitive entrance and fellowship exams at Eton and Balliol, as well as compiling a large number of revealing anecdotes from those who knew him. He very nicely balances the narrative of the life with accounts of Parfit’s thought. That balance is important because the life was in some respects a peculiar one. Parfit felt that discovering the true ethical theory was so important to finding human life meaningful that he often kept to his room and did not engage in the kind of socializing expected of All Souls Fellows. A female colleague whom he had known for two decades was dying of cancer and asked him to dinner; he said he was too busy with his work. His partner, Radcliffe Richards, said she was always “a side show in his life.” His only obsession beyond philosophy was annual trips to Venice and St. Petersburg in order to take photographs. Yet he could be remarkably generous when it came to engaging philosophically with others. An unknown student might send him a 30-page paper and be shocked to receive, in short order, a 40-page single-spaced reply. Edmonds near the end suggests the possibility of autism spectrum in Parfit’s case; he seemed unusually poor at recognizing social cues.
One might object, against Parfit, that ethics is not the sort of subject matter that can yield a systematic theory. There are many poorly compatible goods that a human community might value: liberty, equality, well-being, fairness, notable excellence, aesthetic and intellectual achievement, wealth, and so forth. Deciding among these is more like the negotiations among factions of a complex political coalition than it is like discovering a scientific theory. A valid theory replaces its precursors, while we should wish to keep alive a range of diverse ethical resources from different eras, both philosophical and literary, that will aid us in thinking about what we should do. The thought experiments of Parfit aim at an analogy with the artificial experiments that physicists arrange. The analogy fails; the artificial, contrived nature of the moral cases means that we are not dealing with the kind of ethical decision-making that real individuals actually engage in. Then there is the matter of living out an individual life that possesses integrity, character, and a distinctive style rather than being a mere site where universal moral rules are instantiating themselves.
Parfit may be correct that moral values are not simply projections upon the world of our mental acts of valuing. As we evolve culturally and come to know the world and reflect on our place in it, we discover certain things about what is worth valuing. But it is a long way from that claim to the kind of strong objectivity that Parfit desires. Our biological and cultural heritage will remain relevant to the values that we filter out from our experience as most important. Parfit’s heroes were Henry Sidgwick and Kant. He might have challenged himself by becoming more familiar with Aristotle and Nietzsche. The latter shows how one’s highest intellectual achievements may have roots in unconscious features of one’s character. Parfit does not seem to reflect adequately on how his own personality and upbringing, as Edmonds portrays these convincingly, might have made him prefer a certain “objective” morality over others.
[This review by Frank B. Farrell first appeared in Commonweal magazine]