David Edmonds
About
Author of a biography of Derek Parfit
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Claims by David Edmonds (20 of 45)
Climate Action Changes Who Is Born
Drastic policies such as banning cars or planes to address climate change would alter the timing of conceptions and therefore change which people are born, since each person is the product of a unique sperm and egg at a unique moment—meaning the case for climate action cannot rest on benefiting the very people who would otherwise have existed, but on the better-off people who will exist instead.
Later Parfit Was the Authentic Parfit
Although Parfit's early life was rich with interests—history, music, sport, chess, journalism, debating, a social circle—he shed them all to become a monomaniac with only two interests, philosophy and photographing the same buildings in Venice and Leningrad each year; Edmonds concludes the later, socially-withdrawn Parfit at All Souls was the more natural and content version of him.
Parfit's Critique of 'Giving What We Can'
Parfit objected that the pledge should not be called 'giving' because Westerners do not deserve their fortunate circumstances and the wealth was never truly theirs to give, and that '10%' is not 'what we can' since people could clearly give far more—criticisms reflecting his literalism, set against the marketing reality that 10% is psychologically doable and thus effective.
Parfit as Godfather of Long-Termism
Parfit influenced the effective altruism movement by insisting that the Giving What We Can pledge allow donations to causes benefiting future people—existential risk, climate change—rather than only present development and global health, effectively making him the godfather of long-termism; the movement changed its pledge as a result.
Step-Wise Argument to Repugnant Conclusion
The repugnant conclusion follows from a chain where each step seems an improvement: adding lower-but-positive lives harms no one, then leveling everyone toward equality at a slightly lower top raises total well-being and equality, and repeating this process drives the population toward enormous numbers of barely-worth-living lives, with no obvious point at which the chain can be stopped.
Late Parfit Shifted Toward Animalism
Later in life Parfit became more sympathetic to animalism—the view that we are organisms—but did not go all the way; he came to believe psychological continuity still matters but can only survive within an evolving organism, a subtle refinement of his original view.
Parfit Among Greatest Moral Philosophers
Derek Parfit is one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century, with some serious philosophers claiming he is the greatest moral philosopher since John Stuart Mill, though unlike Wittgenstein there exist philosophers who think he did moral philosophy in entirely the wrong way.
Identity Is Not What Matters
Identity is not what matters; what matters is psychological continuity—having the same dispositions, memories, and so on—which means our connection to our future and past selves weakens while our connection to other people strengthens, with implications for guilt over forgotten past acts and saving for the future.
The Repugnant Conclusion
The repugnant conclusion is that for any population of very happy people, there must exist a much larger population—possibly trillions—whose lives are barely worth living that is a better outcome, a conclusion Parfit found counterintuitive yet could not escape through any robust argument.
Reasons and Persons Was Accidental Compilation
Reasons and Persons was not intended as one book but became a strange mishmash because All Souls College threatened to expel Parfit for failing to produce a book in 14 years, forcing him to throw together work that was potentially several books into one by a 1984 deadline.
Split-Brain Cases Show Identity Is Arbitrary
Split-brain cases, where epileptic patients have the connection between hemispheres cut and develop two streams of consciousness, illustrate that there is no non-arbitrary way to say which resulting person is the 'original': neither can be uniquely identical to the original, and both cannot be identical to it since they go on to live different lives.
The Non-Identity Problem
The non-identity problem shows that an action can be morally wrong even though it harms no particular person: a 14-year-old having a child does not harm that child (whose life is still better than nothing), and a different child would exist if she waited, so we cannot ground the wrongness in harm to an individual—yet we still judge it a mistake, overturning the assumption that morality must be about harming particular individuals.
Teletransporter Copy Is As Good As Survival
In Parfit's teletransporter case, even when a copy is created on Mars before the original on Earth is destroyed, Parfit held that one has 'as good as survived' because what matters—psychological continuity—is fully preserved in the copy, even though most people would find this deeply distressing.
Temporal Distance Is Morally Irrelevant
Just as spatial distance makes no moral difference to whether harming a person is wrong, temporal distance makes none either: Parfit's buried-glass example shows that a child cut by glass in a century's time suffers a harm just as morally bad as a child cut tomorrow, so we should not morally discount future suffering—though practical uncertainty about the future may justify privileging the present.
Extinction Far Worse Than Near-Total Catastrophe
Parfit argued, against the common empirically-confirmed intuition, that the difference between near-total destruction (losing all but a remnant of humanity) and complete extinction is far greater than the difference between peace and near-total destruction, because complete extinction forecloses potentially billions or trillions of future happy lives.
The Asymmetry Argument
Parfit's asymmetry argument holds that if it is bad to bring a 'wretched child' (a short life dominated by pain) into existence, it seems hard to deny that it is good to bring a happy life into existence—and since this generates a reason to add each further happy life, it pushes toward the repugnant conclusion, an asymmetry Parfit could never satisfactorily resolve.
Moral Intuitions Are an Evolutionary Hangover
Existing short-termist and spatially-bounded moral intuitions are likely a hangover from our hunter-gatherer evolutionary development, when we could not know what happened in the next valley or care about distant meals; now that we can know and effect change globally and across time, there is no longer an excuse not to act.
Williams on Internal vs External Reasons
Bernard Williams argued that a husband treating his wife badly has a reason to behave better only if he can be brought to endorse it (an internal reason), and that it is incoherent to say he has a reason if he rejects all such considerations; Parfit insisted to the contrary that the husband objectively has a reason to behave better whether or not he believes it (an external reason).
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