I think we have to separate Parfit the person and Parfit the philosopher. Parfit the person does seem like a tragedy of the sort you only find in the narratives tortured artists self-perpetuate. But in his case it seemed to be genuinely motivated. Certainly not a life I want to live but also not a life wasted *if his work was truly great*.
It's on that point that I feel like a crazy person. You're absolutely right to point out that seemingly no one has read it. I've asked at least a dozen moral philosophers, professors, grad students, hobbyists, and I've met exactly 0 people who have read it. So it was incredibly surprising to find that when I finally got around to reading On What Matters (I'm wrapping up volume 1 this month), I was shocked to find that it's, well, incredibly good.
I've gone through all the big names: Scanlon, Korsgaard, Foot, Railton, Lazari-Radek, Singer, etc. and I would say that Parfit is leagues ahead of them in both precision, clarity, force of argument, and cogent ideas. I would even go as far as to say he's the best Kantian I've read, and I say this as a Korsgaard fan.
I think he gets the core right: reasons are the fundamental unit of account in normative thinking. Reflective equilibrium is the best methodology we have to uncover anything approximating moral truths. It's intuitionism, but intuitionism is the best we can do. And Parfit, over the course of countless pages, considers principle after principle, subjecting it to various unusually not-outlandish thought experiments, and shows which principles stand the relentless scrutiny. On What Matter's Parfit is best described as a tactician who, with 25 years worth of patience, ends up inching his way towards the land grabs of a masterful tactician.
The real failure in Parfit's work, it seems to me, is his failure to be more concise. Because the quality is most certainly there. It's even significantly clearer than Reason and Persons which I found at times unnecessarily hard to follow. Perhaps it's not as mind bending as Reasons and Persons, but the arguments are just as sharp and for something with significantly higher stakes. It seems to me that given the typical load of an academic's work schedule, it's simply infeasible to read 2000 pages of analytic philosophy. But as a hobbyist with time on his hands, I can and in my estimation thus far, he seems to have succeeded. So I don't think it's crazy to say Parfit was the greatest moral philosopher since Kant.
fascinating review. lol at people looking down their nose at him for not having a proper philosophy degree!
I'd be curious to hear more about why you consider meta-ethics a waste of time. Afaik a big chunk of his second book is defending objective moral realism, which seems like it could be an important project if you subscribe to the Deutsch line on this kind of thing
Yeah I go back and forth about this honestly. I wouldn't go so far as to say that meta-ethics is a total waste of time. But I think we can say that Parfit's project failed, and that he wasted a lot of time trying to solve problems, or engage in thought experiments, that were useless. And I think the reception of his later work bears this out. *On What Matters* didn't really move the needle on anything, and this was supposed to be his epic final solution to the questions that he worked on for 35 years. The biggest influence seems to be on Peter Singer, who switched from one flavor of utilitarianism to another (something like that). But I don't think it influenced Singer, or anyone else, when it came to practical ethics.
How about Sam Harris? He lists Parfit as one of his key mentors for his work on ethics / Moral Landscape.
I personally struggle to follow Parfit’s arguments & gave up on Reasons and Persons 50 pages in. May say something about my abilities and not about their soundness.
My sense of Harris' views on Parfit is that he's mostly impressed that someone took ethics so seriously, and also liked some of this earlier thought experiments (teleporter, etc). And he agrees with Parfit that morality is objective.
But I don't think he bases his arguments off Parfit's. The Moral Landscape is certainly not advancing the argument that deontology is the same as consequentialism. And I think I've heard Harris say somewhere that he hasn't read On What Matters. So overall I think they simply agree, but I don't think you can trace Harris' arguments back to Parfit's in any meaningful way
It's not clear to me that they do agree other than, superficially, both being moral realists. Harris's moral realism is idiosyncratic and doesn't appear to be grounded much within contemporary metaethics, especially not non-naturalism. Harris explicitly appears to have disavowed the value of metaethics in an endnote that appears early in the book as well, and my overall assessment of TML is that Harris does not know very much about analytic metaethics, nor does he appear to care to know.
You are probably right Ben. I was more alluding to the idea that there is an objective basis to make progress on moral matters which Sam and (it appears) Parfit share. Perhaps Parfit pushes the unification argument too far looking trying to equalise all the theories we have.
Btw, I really enjoy the work you do in particular, but not only, the stuff you do at Increments.
Even if he did influence Sam Harris I'm not sure that'd be a good thing. Harris's work in TML is very confused and poorly articulated, and is unlikely to have a lasting influence, especially among people working on these topics.
I think we have to separate Parfit the person and Parfit the philosopher. Parfit the person does seem like a tragedy of the sort you only find in the narratives tortured artists self-perpetuate. But in his case it seemed to be genuinely motivated. Certainly not a life I want to live but also not a life wasted *if his work was truly great*.
It's on that point that I feel like a crazy person. You're absolutely right to point out that seemingly no one has read it. I've asked at least a dozen moral philosophers, professors, grad students, hobbyists, and I've met exactly 0 people who have read it. So it was incredibly surprising to find that when I finally got around to reading On What Matters (I'm wrapping up volume 1 this month), I was shocked to find that it's, well, incredibly good.
I've gone through all the big names: Scanlon, Korsgaard, Foot, Railton, Lazari-Radek, Singer, etc. and I would say that Parfit is leagues ahead of them in both precision, clarity, force of argument, and cogent ideas. I would even go as far as to say he's the best Kantian I've read, and I say this as a Korsgaard fan.
I think he gets the core right: reasons are the fundamental unit of account in normative thinking. Reflective equilibrium is the best methodology we have to uncover anything approximating moral truths. It's intuitionism, but intuitionism is the best we can do. And Parfit, over the course of countless pages, considers principle after principle, subjecting it to various unusually not-outlandish thought experiments, and shows which principles stand the relentless scrutiny. On What Matter's Parfit is best described as a tactician who, with 25 years worth of patience, ends up inching his way towards the land grabs of a masterful tactician.
The real failure in Parfit's work, it seems to me, is his failure to be more concise. Because the quality is most certainly there. It's even significantly clearer than Reason and Persons which I found at times unnecessarily hard to follow. Perhaps it's not as mind bending as Reasons and Persons, but the arguments are just as sharp and for something with significantly higher stakes. It seems to me that given the typical load of an academic's work schedule, it's simply infeasible to read 2000 pages of analytic philosophy. But as a hobbyist with time on his hands, I can and in my estimation thus far, he seems to have succeeded. So I don't think it's crazy to say Parfit was the greatest moral philosopher since Kant.
You said "Reasons and Persons" twice in the last paragraph. Did you mean On What Matters in the first instance?
No it's written correctly. The point I was making is that the often praised R&P is not as clearly written as OWM.
Oh gotcha thanks for clarifying. Maybe I shouldn't try to make sense of anything that early in the morning.
fascinating review. lol at people looking down their nose at him for not having a proper philosophy degree!
I'd be curious to hear more about why you consider meta-ethics a waste of time. Afaik a big chunk of his second book is defending objective moral realism, which seems like it could be an important project if you subscribe to the Deutsch line on this kind of thing
Yeah I go back and forth about this honestly. I wouldn't go so far as to say that meta-ethics is a total waste of time. But I think we can say that Parfit's project failed, and that he wasted a lot of time trying to solve problems, or engage in thought experiments, that were useless. And I think the reception of his later work bears this out. *On What Matters* didn't really move the needle on anything, and this was supposed to be his epic final solution to the questions that he worked on for 35 years. The biggest influence seems to be on Peter Singer, who switched from one flavor of utilitarianism to another (something like that). But I don't think it influenced Singer, or anyone else, when it came to practical ethics.
How about Sam Harris? He lists Parfit as one of his key mentors for his work on ethics / Moral Landscape.
I personally struggle to follow Parfit’s arguments & gave up on Reasons and Persons 50 pages in. May say something about my abilities and not about their soundness.
My sense of Harris' views on Parfit is that he's mostly impressed that someone took ethics so seriously, and also liked some of this earlier thought experiments (teleporter, etc). And he agrees with Parfit that morality is objective.
But I don't think he bases his arguments off Parfit's. The Moral Landscape is certainly not advancing the argument that deontology is the same as consequentialism. And I think I've heard Harris say somewhere that he hasn't read On What Matters. So overall I think they simply agree, but I don't think you can trace Harris' arguments back to Parfit's in any meaningful way
It's not clear to me that they do agree other than, superficially, both being moral realists. Harris's moral realism is idiosyncratic and doesn't appear to be grounded much within contemporary metaethics, especially not non-naturalism. Harris explicitly appears to have disavowed the value of metaethics in an endnote that appears early in the book as well, and my overall assessment of TML is that Harris does not know very much about analytic metaethics, nor does he appear to care to know.
You are probably right Ben. I was more alluding to the idea that there is an objective basis to make progress on moral matters which Sam and (it appears) Parfit share. Perhaps Parfit pushes the unification argument too far looking trying to equalise all the theories we have.
Btw, I really enjoy the work you do in particular, but not only, the stuff you do at Increments.
Even if he did influence Sam Harris I'm not sure that'd be a good thing. Harris's work in TML is very confused and poorly articulated, and is unlikely to have a lasting influence, especially among people working on these topics.