Ideas from Les raisons et les personnes

By Derek Parfit

Back to Les raisons et les personnes

1004 ideas

Sample Ideas

Advances in science have greatly increased our ability both to affect future people and to predict how our actions will affect them, thereby intensifying the moral problems these effects raise.
Parfit distinguishes between (i) the moral question of which theory we ought morally to try to believe and (ii) the intellectual or truth-seeking question of which theory is true or best justified, and maintains that a self-effacing theory can still be the true or best justified moral theory even if, by its own lights, no one ought morally to accept it.
New A – an outcome where there are many extra groups whose lives are just above the Bad Level and two groups of ten billion with extremely high quality of life – is better than A+ (or at least not worse) because (i) the extra groups’ existence is not in itself bad, (ii) inequality between the best-off groups disappears, and (iii) the remaining inequality is produced by Mere Addition and therefore does not worsen the outcome.
The 'New Physical Criterion'—that a future person is me iff he is living and has more than half of my brain—satisfies the intrinsic one‑one requirement but fails Requirement (2) because it makes identity depend on the trivial difference between having half versus slightly more than half of the brain and yields the implausible result that a person with less than half a functioning brain ceases to exist despite full psychological continuity.
Rawls’s canonical formulation of the Difference Principle—'social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged'—does not exactly capture his intended maximin rule, as shown by an India–Britain example where Rawlsian maximin favours Constitution (3) but his wording does not.
Parfit acknowledges, following Williams, that the Reductionist claim that survival questions in the middle of the Psychological Spectrum are 'empty' seems incredible from the first‑person perspective: most of us are deeply inclined to think that our identity must always be determinate, that in any case of a future sufferer either it is simply me or simply not me, and we cannot make sense of a third alternative such as being 'partly me'.
Narveson’s person‑affecting view holds that happiness is good only because it is good for people, and that causing someone to exist cannot benefit that person, so that 'making happy people' is morally neutral even though 'making people happy' is good.
Parfit concludes that we still lack an acceptable principle of beneficence: we need a new principle that both solves the Non-Identity Problem and avoids the Repugnant Conclusion, and we may also want it to explain the Asymmetry; both the Impersonal and Wide (person-affecting) versions of the Average Principle achieve the first two goals but not, by implication, all three.
The S‑Theorist’s 'appeal to later regrets'—arguing that Proximus’s bias towards the near is irrational because he will later regret it—fails, since future regret about having had a bias does not show that the bias is irrational now, any more than self‑interested agents’ regret about others’ self‑interest shows that self‑interest is irrational for them.
Parfit introduces and labels the Moderate Claim: that Relation R does give each of us a reason to be specially concerned about his own future; he holds that both the Extreme and the Moderate Claims are defensible and that he knows of no argument showing that we ought to accept the Moderate rather than the Extreme view.