Jul 152011
Derek Parfit is a former teacher whom I revere and whose Reasons and Persons (1984) I regard as one of the great books of the twentieth century. The work many regard as his magnum opus, On What Matters is now out, and I am wondering whether I should read it. Ordinarily it would be a no-brainer decision to do so, but I have two concerns.
- It’s a 1400+ page toe-breaker of a book, and life is short and time scarce, and more importantly
- This review by Simon Blackburn (h/t to Brian Leiter) suggests that Parfit might be going in a direction I would regard as unproductive, given my own increasingly neo-Humean sympathies.
Comments from anyone who might have read all or part of On What Matters will be especially valued.
11 Responses to “Should I read Derek Parfit’s Magnum Opus?”
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Is this the text that had been available online under the working title “Climbing the Mountain”?
I believe that Climbing the Mountain is a subset/draft of On What Matters. The Wikipedia entry on “Derek Parfit” appears to confirm this.
“Neo-Humean”?
Yes, Neo-Humean. The view that “morality” is to be understood as something generated out of human psychology, rather than as some body of mind-independent propositions which we discover somehow (through intuition or “reason” or something). This view could easily be called any number of things, but the term Neo_Humean (which Blackburn uses) seems fairly reasonable to me, given that among the canonically great philosophers David Hume worked out such a psychological theory more thoroughly than any other. There seems to be a range of different metaethical views among Neo-Humeans but, unsurprisingly, most of them seem to some variety or other of anti-realist.
I don’t see any point to such discussions… whatever you want to call it, morality is morality. It’s like the people who endlessly argue over free will. Why keep arguing about semantics when the reality is always the same?
It matters, because time and intellectual energy are scarce. You can’t explore every possible path and you have to figure out which way it makes sense to go. If you’re a moral realist (like Parfit) then it makes sense to spend time and energy (in Parfit’s case, prodigious amounts of time and energy) figuring out which moral propositions are true. If you’re an anti-realist, you don’t have to worry about which moral propositions are true (because you either think that moral discourse is non-assertoric or you think all moral propositions are false), and you’re likely to spend your worrying about problems like whether we should keep morality talk with some sort of implicit fictionalist understanding of what morality is (which I think is Richard Joyce’s position) or whether we would be better off without morality talk altogether, a view defended by Richard Garner and the late Ian Hinckfuss.
Whether moral realism is true or not matters also because it might tell us something about what means of persuasion to use when we find ourselves in disagreement. If there really are moral “facts” of some kind to appeal to, then we need to somehow direct people’s attention to those. But if there aren’t then persuasion will necessarily take a different form, usually of an appeal to our passions, rather than our reason. (There’s Hume again!) As Richard Posner (himself a moral skeptic) remarks “Charities know that the way to get people to give money for the feeding of starving children is to publish a picture of a starving child, thereby to trigger a feelings of sympathy, rather than to talk about a moral duty.”
Again, there’s no point in acting as if “morality” does not exist. Because it is obvious that something does exist, and it doesn’t matter if you call it “morality” or not. It’s just a word. The reality, on the other hand, needs to be examined very, very carefully.
Isn’t it essential, then, to examine where morality originates from (as it appears James is doing)? If a person believes that morality is a firm set of established rules sent down to us from the heavens, then I’d reckon that that person would engage the world differently than someone who considers himself Neo-Humean.
And, as far as free will goes, philosophical discussions regarding recent neuroscientific findings might end up changing the realities of crime and punishment.
I don’t know how the neurology of choice changes the reality of crime and punishment. The fact is that the reality of crime and punishment is almost diametrically opposite to what we do now. The fact that it might change would not be to neuroscience’s credit.
This document is a draft of the book; the first twenty pages are a summary written by Parfit himself. I think I may have read a similar (the same?) summary of it a year ago–I was intrigued but won’t have time to tackle reading a 1400-page work for quite a while.
Not that I’m recommending this strategy, but I’m first going to read the chapters 35 and 36, at the end of volume two, where Parfit engages Nietzsche and concerns most centrally related to those raised by antinatalism, before deciding whether to tackle the whole thing, especially given Blackburn’s review.