Derek Parfit

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Derek Parfit (April 2015)

Derek Parfit Antony (* 11. December 1942 in Chengdu , China ; † 1. January 2017 in Oxford ) was a British philosopher , who at All Souls College of Oxford University researcher. Parfit's focus was on questions of personal identity , normative ethics and the justification of morality.

Life

Parfit's parents, Norman and Jessie Parfit, née Browne, were both medical professionals who had taught preventive medicine at various mission schools in China since 1935. In 1943, a year after Parfit's birth, they returned to England, where Parfit attended Eton College . During his school days he wrote a number of poems, which he also published in the college's journal. He studied modern history , he graduated from 1961 at Balliol College of Oxford University with the degree of BA in 1964. In the years 1965 and 1966 studied Parfit as a Harkness Fellow at Columbia University and at the Harvard University philosophy. On his return to Oxford, he became a fellow at All Souls College on the basis of a prize he had won. Here he worked, without ever having obtained an academic degree in philosophy, from 1974 as a Junior Fellow, Research Fellow (from 1981) and Senior Research Fellow (from 1984) until his retirement in 2010. Parfit was visiting professor at the Harvard University, Rutgers University , Princeton University , Temple University , Rice University and the University of Colorado at Boulder . In 1986 he was elected to the British Academy and in 1992 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Parfit was an ambitious architecture photographer and for this purpose traveled several times to Venice and St. Petersburg . During his professional time he lived almost exclusively in All Souls College. In 2014 he received the Rolf Schock Prize in the field of philosophy for his fundamental contributions to personal identity, for his consideration of future generations and his analysis of the structure of ethical theories.

Derek Parfit and the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards married in 2010 after a long partnership.

Parfit supported the social movement of effective altruism . As a member of the organization Giving What We Can , he publicly pledged to donate at least ten percent of his income to effective organizations.

plant

Derek Parfit is considered one of the most influential ethicists today. His first major work "Reasons and Persons" from 1984 attracted particular attention because, in a detailed analysis, he took the view that personal identity is not an essential prerequisite for describing reality and that there is no clear determination of personal identity. He described persistent (diachronic) personal identity over a period of time essentially as psychological continuity due to overlapping strands of memories, intentions, beliefs, goals, desires or corresponding character traits. For personal identity it is not necessary that there is a physical identity. The weaker relation of the psychological connection suffices. The aim of Parfits concept was to break the close connection between rationality and self-interest, because because we do not remain the same people in the course of our lives, we should concentrate less on the fuzzy rational self and focus more on humanity as a whole. The background of the thesis is the question of whether it is important that there is a dependency on the evaluating individual when evaluating world conditions, i.e. ethical questions. Parfit develops a normative realism from which he concludes that the question of personal identity is of less importance for questions of ethics than that of survival. The ethical point of view has its own standards, for which it is not essential in which form a person exists and continues to live.

Michael Quante , who classifies Parfits concept as a provocation, has put together an overview of the authoritative reviews. On the one hand, Parfit's argument is based essentially on thought experiments to prove that psychological continuity and identity can fall apart. A biological conception of identity cannot be overcome with this. Furthermore, a purely logical argumentation is not sufficient for evaluation questions relevant to ethics. In the case of ethical questions, personal identity is always relevant if the purpose of the action is that the agent participates in the result of the action. Parents want z. B. experience that their children have a successful life. According to an argument by Christine Korsgaard , Parfit also neglects the fact that a person is not only determined by passive experiences, but also by active action. As an agent, however, man presupposes identity with practical reason. So it makes perfect sense to take on pain now in order to avoid much more serious suffering later.

From the notion that personality changes over time, Parfit develops the problem of non-identity (Chapter 16, non-identity problem ). By choosing, man influences the future. It also determines who lives in a more distant future. By default, moral philosophy deals with the question of how existing people are affected by our actions. If one looks at the problem of responsibility for future generations ( intergenerational equity ), an expanded problem arises. Because we do not affect a certain person through our actions - because who lives later is only determined by our actions and is unknown to us today - there can also be no “victims” of our actions. The example is a sick woman who will give birth to a disabled child in the event of an immediate pregnancy or a healthy child in the event of a later pregnancy. If she postpones the pregnancy, the disabled child will not be born, even if it would have been a very happy person despite its disability. On the other hand, the potential healthy child could have far less happy living conditions. Can the woman rightly refuse the life of the potential disabled child? Logically, the woman is neither responsible for one nor for the other fate. Another consideration of non-identity leads Parfit to the " repugnant conclusion" . Here he shows that according to the utilitarian principle, which determines the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the goal, under otherwise constant conditions it is better if there is a very large number of people with a low standard of living in the world than a smaller number by people with a significantly higher standard of living - as long as all individual living standards are rated positively. Parfit presents a variant of Kenneth Arrow's theorem of impossibility with special reference to moral philosophy.

In 2011 “On what matters” was published, a comprehensive work on rationality and the structure of justifications, in which Kantian ethics, the contractualism of Thomas M. Scanlon and the consequentialism of Henry Sidgwick are combined. It was, according to Parfit, a mistake to assume that these competing theories differed greatly. (Vol. 1, xxiii and pp. 418–419) These theories, from Parfit's point of view, have climbed the same mountain from different directions (Vol. 1, p. 419). After advocating the objectivity of reasons for action (Chapter 1), Parfit developed his concept of a “triple theory” (parts 2 and 3) from an approximate formulation of the different basic principles.

Everyone should follow the principles
  • whose universal acceptance makes things best (consequentialism)
  • whose universal acceptance everyone can rationally want (Kantian contractualism)
  • which no one can reasonably reject (Scanlon's contractualism)

Parfit combines these individual principles into a common principle:

An action is wrong precisely when such actions are forbidden by the principles that are "optimific", which alone are universally desirable and cannot reasonably be rejected. With the made-up word “optimific”, Parfit describes the principle of consequentialism of demanding “best results”.

The second volume of the work, which emerged from the Tanner Lectures at the University of Berkeley in 2002, contains the elaborated contributions to the discussions of the lectures by Susan Wolf , Allen W. Wood and TM Scanlon as well as a later comment by Barbara Herman (Part 4) and contain the detailed answers from Parfit (part 5). Parfit also presented his metaethical position (part 6). He again defended an objective realism of moral norms. He wanted to show that moral progress is possible and that work should be done on this.

Like his first work, On what matters sparked wide discussions. One of the reasons for this was that Parfit made the drafted manuscript available to a wide range of people who were able to comment on it before it was published. As a result, Parfit was able to respond to objections and comments. The first anthology with commentary essays appeared before the book itself. Nevertheless, critical voices remain. So he was accused of having presented a purely rationalist theory in which the empirical view, going back to Hobbes and Hume, that emotions are the decisive basis of moral action, was not taken into account at all, although this was in modern moral psychology, neurosciences and the Philosophy of mind carries considerable weight. Similarly, the virtues and character traits as an important basis for moral action are missing in Parfit's concept. Also, for example, views of Isaiah Berlin or Bernard Williams are not heard that point to the lack of compatibility and diversity of different moral principles. It was also criticized that the representation of the Kantian philosophy is a distortion and thus a subordination to the rule-consequentialism is generated. Classic conflicts such as the trolley problem cannot be brought to a uniform solution. Philip Kitcher reproached Parfit with the fact that his rationalism - in spite of diverse, albeit partly unrealistic thought experiments - is based on a fuzzy and incomprehensible intuitionism that is inferior to a naturalism oriented towards human practice .

In On What Matters, Parfit argues for a strong moral obligation of wealthy people to help the poor . He compared the belief that the poor owe nothing morally to the justifications of slave owners and advocated donating at least ten percent of one's income to alleviate global poverty. Parfit wrote:

“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. "

“Some of us wonder how much to give to the poorest. But this question incorrectly assumes that it is up to us to give our wealth. This wealth is ours by law. The poorest, however, have much stronger moral claims to some of it. "

Fonts (selection)

  • Personal Identity . In: Philosophical Review, 80 (1971), 3-27. (German: personal identity , in: Michael Quante (ed.): personal identity, Schöningh, Paderborn 1999, 71–99)
  • Later Selves and Moral Principles . In: Alan Montefiore (Ed.): Philosophy and Personal Relations, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1972, 137-169.
  • Is Common-Sense Morality Self-Defeating? . In: The Journal of Philosophy, 76 (10/1979), 533-545.
  • Personal Identity and Rationality . In: Synthesis 53 (2/1982), 227-241.
  • Reasons and Persons. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1984, ISBN 0-19-824615-3 , ( review by Bernard Williams ; Eng.)
  • The Unimportance of Identity. In: H. Harris (ed.): Identity, Oxford 1995, 13-45. (German: The meaninglessness of identity. In: Derek Parfit: Personen, Normativität, Moral, Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2017, 69-105)
  • with John Broome : Reasons and Motivation. In: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volumes, 71 (1997), ISSN  0309-7013 , 99-146.
  • Why anything? Why this? . London Book Review, 20 (3), February 5, 1998, 22-25
  • Experiences, Subjects, and Conceptual Schemes . In: Philosophical Topics 26 (1999), 217-270.
  • The Unimportance of Identity . In: Raymond Martin, John Barresi (eds.): Personal Identity, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 2003, 292-317.
  • Overpopulation and the Quality of Life . In: Jesper Ryberg, Torbjörn Tännsjö (ed.): The Repugnant Conclusion, Kluwer, Dordrecht 2004, 7–22.
  • Normativity. In: Russ Shafer-Landau (Ed.): Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 1 (2006), ZDB -ID 2240356-5 , 325-380.
  • On What Matters. 3 volumes. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011 (volumes 1 and 2) and Oxford 2017 (volume 3), ISBN 978-0-19-926592-3 . (Excerpts in German published in Derek Parfit: Personen, Normativität, Moral. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2017. Review by Mark Schroeder on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews of January 8, 2011, review by Wilhelm Vossenkuhl in the NZZ of December 21, 2012)

literature

  • Jonathan Dancy (Ed.): Reading Parfit . Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 1997, ISBN 978-0-631-19726-3
  • Jussi Suikkanen, John Cottingham (Ed.): Essays on Derek Parfit's "On What Matters" . Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2009, ISBN 978-1-4051-9698-7
  • Matthias Hoesch, Sebastian Muders, Markus Rüther (eds.): What matters. Derek Parfits practical philosophy under discussion. Meiner, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-7873-3147-5

Web links

Commons : Derek Parfit  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Derek Parfit (1942-2017) . dailynous.com, January 2, 2017, accessed January 3, 2017.
  2. ↑ Short biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica (accessed July 31, 2015) and a biographical essay by Larissa Macfarquhar: How to be Good. An Oxford philosopher thinks he can distill all morality into a formula. Is he right? , The New Yorker , September 5, 2011 (accessed July 31, 2015)
  3. ↑ Larissa MacFarquhar: How To Be Good. New Yorker, accessed July 3, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Jane O'Grady: Derek Parfit obituary . In: The Guardian . January 12, 2017, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed July 3, 2017]).
  5. ↑ Members. Giving What We Can, accessed July 3, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Oxford Union: Derek Parfit - Full Address. October 10, 2015, accessed July 3, 2017 .
  7. ↑ Short biography ( memento of May 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) of New York University (English)
  8. ↑ Already in Parfits essay Personal Identity [1971], German in: Michael Quante (Ed.): Personal Identity, Schöningh, Paderborn 1999, 71-99, here 72
  9. ^ Derek Parfit: Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1984, p. 207.
  10. ↑ Michael Quante: Person. De Gruyter, Berlin 2007, Chapter 7 (Parfits Provokation), pp. 115-134, here p. 121.
  11. ↑ Michael Quante: Person. De Gruyter, Berlin 2007, Chapter 7 (Parfits Provokation), pp. 115-134, here pp. 125ff.
  12. ↑ Christine M. Korsgaard: Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit. In: Philosophy & Public Affairs 18 (2/1989), pp. 101–132, here p. 110 and p. 115.
  13. ↑ Sandra Zusatz-Brinker: Person and Personality: Attempt to clarify terms . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1999, p. 256.
  14. ^ Derek Parfit: Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1984, 419ff
  15. ↑ Gustaf Arrhenius: One More Axiological Impossibility Theorem ( Memento from October 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  16. ↑ The Tanner Lectures on Human Values ​​at UC Berkeley , 2002-2003 Lecture Series with playback in mp3 format (accessed on August 4, 2015)
  17. ↑ Review by Simon Blackburn in the Financial Times, August 6, 2012 (accessed August 4, 2015)
  18. ↑ Michael Rosen: Non-Religious Ethics? A critical notice of Derek Parfit, On What Matters. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (5/2013), 755–772
  19. ↑ Philip Kitcher: The Lure of the Peak , New Republic, February 2, 2012 (accessed August 5, 2015)
  20. ^ A b Dylan Matthews: The whole philosophy community is mourning Derek Parfit. Here's why he mattered. Ed .: Vox. January 3, 2017 (English, vox.com [accessed July 3, 2017]).
personal data
SURNAME Parfit, Derek
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Parfit, Derek Antony (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Chengdu , China
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 2017
Place of death Oxford