Recently Released Biography of Derek Parfit

We have mentioned Derek Parfit several times here He is arguably one of the key moral philosophers of the last century. His book Reasons and Persons is particularly relevant to the type of people who read the current blog. His work is rooted in Utilitarianism but takes it in many directions, some of which I don't have any understanding of, but others that border many questions we address in the broad behavioural public policy literature around how people think of themselves in relation to their personal identity and experience of being in time. A recently released biography of Parfit by David Edmonds is reviewed here in the Literary Review by Jane O'Grady (paper copy of this magazine is available in most good newsagents *in the UK and Ireland and highly recommended). The paragraph below gives a sense of the liveliness of Parfit and Reasons and Persons in particular. Anyone who enjoys Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror series might recognise some of the themes.

Parfit’s character and way of life were enmeshed in his theories. He almost seemed more the creation of his ideas than their creator. Unworldly, lacking self-awareness and indifferent to discomfort, he envisaged remote, unlived futures as a way of conceptualising his theories. Thought experiments in which brains are split and transplanted were already familiar, but Parfit’s were the stuff of science fiction. In one, Parfit’s body and brain are digitally scanned, then destroyed; a blueprint is beamed to Mars, where an exact physical and psychological replica of Parfit is made, which insists that he is Parfit. In another, which challenges our ‘bias towards the future’, a man is in hospital gloomily awaiting a long, painful operation (of which he will remember nothing). When told that in fact he has already had it, his gloom is unabated. Surely the ordeal is just as long, painful and life-altering whether it is over or yet to come.

An overview of the book is below and I look forward to speaking to people about it. 

Derek Parfit (1942–2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Parfit was anything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think about things that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even what it means to be a person. In Parfit, David Edmonds presents the first biography of an intriguing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.

Believing that we should be less concerned with ourselves and more with the common good, Parfit dedicated himself to the pursuit of philosophical progress to an extraordinary degree. He always wore gray trousers and a white shirt so as not to lose precious time picking out clothes, he varied his diet as little as possible, and he had only one serious non-philosophical interest: taking photos of Oxford, Venice, and St. Petersburg. In the latter half of his life, he single-mindedly devoted himself to a desperate attempt to rescue secular morality—morality without God—by arguing that it has an objective, rational basis. For Parfit, the stakes could scarcely have been higher. If he couldn’t demonstrate that there are objective facts about right and wrong, he believed, his life was futile and all our lives were meaningless.

Connecting Parfit’s work and life and offering a clear introduction to his profound and challenging ideas, Parfit is a powerful portrait of an extraordinary thinker who continues to have a remarkable influence on the world of ideas.