See also: [[Review of Parfit, by David Edmunds]] Inbox: - Reading Parfit - Ethics and Existence - Richard Y Chappel book: Parfit's Ethics - Principles and Persons [https://www.ft.com/content/8b4f9470-4816-11e8-8ae9-4b5ddcca99b3](https://www.ft.com/content/8b4f9470-4816-11e8-8ae9-4b5ddcca99b3) [https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/06/derek-parfit-minds-eye-photographs-philosophy-narrative-projects](https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/06/derek-parfit-minds-eye-photographs-philosophy-narrative-projects) [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good) [https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/890/19-Memoirs-03-Parfit.pdf](https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/890/19-Memoirs-03-Parfit.pdf) - Michael Rosen good review https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/12967839/On%20What%20Matters%207%20November%202013.pdf?sequence=1 --- # Questions ## What does Parfit mean by rationality? Parfit has a vast amount to say about what makes an act rational in light of such things as the agent’s beliefs, rational or irrational, but to a very rough approximation, when I speak of an act or a feeling as “rational,” I mean, in Parfit’s vocabulary, that there is sufficient reason to do that thing or feel that way. Is there, then, according to Parfit, “anything that it is” for a consideration to be a sufficient reason? It is, he tells us, for the consideration to have a certain non-natural, non-ontological property, namely that of being a sufficient reason. [...] I have to join Parfit in saying, in an empty way, that to be a sufficient reason is just that: to be a sufficient reason. Alan Gibbard. ## Parfit correspondence with Williams - Parfit is so much more readable here! - Did Parfit deliberately make his books unreadable for the reasons he thinks that Sidgwick did? "My own fuzzy and ill thought out dissatisfaction with utilitarianism is, I now realise, centred in the area you discuss. What you say both gives me a clear statement of what it was that was gnawing at me and, by developing the theme, puts quite new grounds for dissatisfaction into my head— grounds, which, as I say, I find most forceful."". Three kinds of ideal observer theory: 1. Identifying: all people in the society 2. Contractual: one member of society 3. Detached: no one in the society Brandt "accepts the consequence that unamity cannot be expected". Replying to Bernard's Paper on Sidgwick I agree that Sedgwick was wrong to think it's an argument in favour of utilitarianism that this provides a unified systematic moral theory. Here, as in the sciences, We may hope that the best theory will be simple, but we are not justified in assuming that it must be. "We are supposed to see that the general happiness will be enhanced... by a slight admixture of irregularity, along with a general observance of received rules, and hence to justify the irregular conduct of a few individuals, on the ground that the supply of a regular conduct from other members of the community may reasonably be expected to be adequate." # Reviews ## We are not human (Kieran Setiya) https://archive.md/tEQnq # Reasons and Persons ## 99% vs 100% ### If you think metaphysical moral realism is a thing, then you'll think we ought to care much more about making the next billion years go well rather than making the next hundred years go well. A deeply objective view of what matters says that the next billion years is roughly 10 million times as important as the next 100 years. If 100 trillion people will live in the next 10,000 years, it is roughly a trillion times more important that their lives go well than that our lives go well. Is morality about what matters, or about what matters to us? Your answer may determine whether you should work on pandemic prevention, AI, or something else. Two things you might want to do: 1. Reduce the probability of a global catastrophe 2. Reduce the probability of an existential catastrophe We should obviously do both. Some of the best things you could do for 1 are also some of the best things you could do for 2. But, sometimes there's a tradeoff: you can only have more of one. What should you focus on? Derek Parfit says the answer is 2. I think the answer is 1. What's the crux? Morality helps humans cooperate and flourish. Analogy: save yourself or your children? (Or your children's ability,p to have children) ### The famous passage I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be *much* worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes: > (1) Peace. > > (2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world's existing population. > > (3) A nuclear war that kills 100%. (2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than (2). Which is the greater of these two differences? **Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater.** My view is held by two very different groups of people. Both groups would appeal to the same fact. The Earth will remain inhabitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. **If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history.** If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second. One of the groups who hold my view are Classical Utilitarians. They would claim, as Sidgwick did, that the destruction of mankind would be by far the greatest of all conceivable crimes. The badness of this crime would lie in the vast reduction of the possible sum of happiness. Another group would agree, but for very different reasons. These people believe that there is little value in the mere sum of happiness. For these people, what matters are what Sidgwick called the ‘ideal goods’—the Sciences, the Arts, and moral progress, or the continued advance towards a wholly just world-wide community. The destruction of mankind would prevent further achievements of these three kinds. This would be extremely bad because what matters most would be the highest achievements of these kinds, and these highest achievements would come in future centuries. --- $102 The extreme claim It may be claimed that, since we all have this attitude, this is a ground for thinking it justified. This claim is undermined by the evolutionary explanation. Since there is this explanation, we would all have this attitude even if it was not justified; so the fact that we have this attitude cannot be a reason for thinking it justified. Whether it is justified is an open question, waiting to be answered.31 ## Summary of Reasons and Persons https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jeFziEweJCCPpY3Nc/reasons-and-persons-watch-theories-eat-themselves Moral theories vary in two key ways: 1. They can be agent-neutral or agent-relative. In an agent-neutral theory, it should be possible to take any world state and say how good it is. In an agent-relative theory, you can only say how good it is from one person’s perspective. 2. They might care about what happens, or also what we do. The question here is if actions themselves matter, or just the result This matrix illustrates the di|erent attitudes you might take to kids being fed, depending on which kind of moral theory you are operating with. ![[Pasted image 20211226112155.png]] - Consequentialism is indirectly self-defeating because it is agent-neutral—if we only look at outcomes without considering the agent, our lives would be empty, since we’ve evolved to care about our relationships. - Commonsense morality is self-defeating because it is agent-relative. If di|erent people are supposed to prioritize loved ones, then everyone will screw over the world for their ingroup. Parfit suggests that a solution might come from some kind of merger of consequentialism and commonsense morality. He doesn’t say exactly how this would work (except that it’s complicated) but suggests a kind of agent-neutral version of commonsense morality as a starting point: Maybe we should all collectively work to make “kids are fed by their parents” happen, as opposed to robotically trying to feed all kids (consequentialism) or just trying to feed our kids (commonsense morality). The implicit view in economics is that it’s society’s job to align selfish interests with public interests. I’d have liked to know what Parfit thought about that. # Does Anything Really Matter? Essays on Parfit ## Preface Hume assumes, and we commonly believe, that **morality must be able to influence what we do**. Otherwise, we may wonder, what is its point? But **Hume also held that reason alone cannot move us to action. Our wants and desires determine our ultimate goals, and the role of reason is limited to telling us how best to achieve these goals. Reason applies to means, not ends.** Hence, Hume famously held, it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger, and equally not contrary to reason to choose my own total ruin to prevent a trivial harm to a stranger. --- Moral judgments will only be able to influence our actions if they somehow connect with our desires, and my desires may differ from yours without either of us making a mistake. Wants and desires are neither true nor false. An objectively true moral judgment would have to be true for everyone, irrespective of what he or she most desires, but what reason for acting would it offer to those whose desires are not furthered by acting on it? Something like this line of argument has led most of the leading moral philosophers of the past eighty years—figures like A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, R. M. Hare, J. L. Mackie, Christine Korsgaard, Bernard Williams, Simon Blackburn, and Allan Gibbard—to reject the idea that our ethical judgments can be objectively true or false. --- Future Tuesday indifference: He differs from us purely in what he desires. Surely, Parfit claims, this man’s desires are irrational: “That some ordeal would be much more painful is a strong reason not to prefer it. That this ordeal would be on a future Tuesday is no reason to prefer it.” It is difficult to deny that such a man would be irrational, and the only possible source of this irrationality is his desires. But Hume’s approach leaves no room for desires to be rational or irrational. Hume’s followers may say that this a very odd set of desires to have, and that as far as we know no one has ever had this set of desires, but it remains conceivable that someone could have them, and that is enough to pose a problem for Hume’s view. Moreover, many people have attitudes that are somewhat like future-Tuesday indifference. Many people put off going to the dentist, for instance, even though they are well aware that doing so will mean more pain overall than if they were to go to the dentist now. At least in extreme cases, these desires also seem to be irrational. But subjectivists about reason cannot, it seems, say that they are. ### Nietzsche and the Hope of Normative Convergence, Huddlestone - Parfit really wants convergence because he is committed to moral intuitionism in the tradition of Sidgwick. On this picture, epistemic peers in ideal conditions should converge on a cluster of "self-evident" normative axioms—on pain of intractable disagreement about whose intuitions to trust. - Parfit takes Nietzsche seriously, thinks of him as an epistemic peer on par with (e.g. Kant). So he needs to either dissolve merely apparent disagreement, or to explain Nietzsche's disagreement in terms of non-ideal epistemic conditions or mistakes that Nietzsche would have recognised as such, if they were pointed out. - Parfit tries to paint Nietzsche as a mixture of (a) more in agreement than he seems and (b) making a couple of basic mistakes. To do this, he strawmans Nietzsche rather badly, making oddly heavy use of unpublished fragments. - Parfit doesn't give a plausible account of either Nietzsche's normative views (anti-egalitarianism; suffering sometimes non-instrumentally good) or his meta-axiological views (they're underdetermined by the text, but N definitely didn't hold the "normativity requires God" thesis which Parfit attributes to him). - Values (sociological) vs values (axiological). Nietzsche talks about both, but doesn't always flag this clearly. #### Highlights Nietzsche,” Parfit writes, “was a brilliant thinker, who made many claims that are original, important, and true. We should ask whether our disagreements with Nietzsche give us reasons to doubt our own views” (OWM, II, 579). Parfit worries that philosophical giants, such as Nietzsche or Kant, seem to disagree with him on important normative issues, because, I take it, he thinks that they (unlike the random crank) are as epistemically well-placed as he is to intuit the normative reasons. In fact, their brilliance and historical stature amounts to a kind of meta-evidence, giving us further reason to take seriously views they in particular held, as opposed simply to coherent views that someone could potentially hold. Truly ideal conditions are no doubt beyond our ken, and we thus can’t say with certainty whether there would be agreement or disagreement in these conditions (OWM, II, 570). But disagreement among those we take to be epistemic peers (maybe even epistemic superiors) in very good, but less-than-ideal conditions should at the very least shake our confidence not only about whether there would be agreement in ideal conditions, but also about what particular normative claims this agreement would encompass. _Ugh, it sounds like Parfit did some pretty selective and problematic reading of Nietzsche's unpublished notes. Potentially in a very biased or perhaps even explicitly underhand way. Was his behaviour actually really quite bad, on this point?_ #todo Parfit, by contrast, most often draws on the notebooks with the negative aim of casting doubt on Nietzsche and his positions. To this end, he cites passages from the notebooks as evidence that Nietzsche is saddled with implausible commitments and moreover as evidence that Nietzsche contradicts himself. But it seems to me quite unfair to establish either point, and especially the latter, by drawing on material that Nietzsche never chose to publish. After all, Nietzsche may not have published this material precisely because ultimately he did not agree with it. Many of the ideas from the notebooks are ill-considered or overreaching; they are, after all, notebooks where Nietzsche was trying out ideas, not setting them down for perpetuity. We don’t moreover know his purposes in writing down a given idea: it could well be an idea he endorses, either fully or tentatively. Or it could be a view he doesn’t agree with at all and wants to subject to further scrutiny. But putting aside the fairness to the historical Nietzsche of this interpretive practice, Parfit, in drawing on this often dubious material from the notebooks in the way he does, ends up making Nietzsche out to be a less threatening philosophical opponent than he might otherwise be. The Nietzsche that we should care about here is not the man scribbling half-baked ideas, some inspired and some ridiculous, in his notebooks, but the more formidable philosopher who comes into view when we interpret his polished—and published—corpus of work with an eye to a charitable reconstruction. --- According to one important recent interpretation suggested by Bernard Reginster, Nietzsche’s main objection to the moral tradition (including Christianity) is that its ideal of life is of one that is free from suffering.8 Whereas, on Nietzsche’s view, Christians, Schopenhauerians, utilitarians and others think that suffering with no instrumental payoff is thereby always objectionable, Nietzsche, by contrast, thinks that suffering is itself part of what makes this life and world good. [...] Notice that this claim is far more modest than the radical one Parfit has attributed to Nietzsche. It is not saying that all instances of suffering are good, or even more absurdly that everything whatsoever is good. It is simply saying that suffering itself, apart from what it makes possible, is sometimes a good-making feature of a life. Now what grounds could Nietzsche possibly have for thinking this, other than the ones mentioned by Parfit? 9 It seems to me that the best Nietzschean argument in support of this point is one that draws on his rich analogy between lives and works of art (BT, 5; GS, 290). Part of what makes one’s life a better life, judged by this distinctively aesthetic metric, may be precisely the suffering it contains, especially when the suffering is an aspect of a compelling narrative of adversity and achievement. Other philosophical perspectives, Nietzsche thinks, fail to notice the fact that suffering can be valuable in this way, because they assume that once isolated from that which it instrumentally makes possible, suffering can be judged, and a negative verdict on it rendered, on account of its unpleasant phenomenal character alone. But this is an assumption that Nietzsche rejects: “Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism—all these ways of thinking that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naïvetés on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision, nor without pity” (BGE, 225). If we just subtracted the suffering from the life of Odysseus in those long years of journeying, imagining him a person alike in all other respects, but who couldn’t feel the suffering as suffering, that would not render his life better even for him. **It is better to be a suffering hero than an anesthetized one**. Notice that the suffering is not here instrumental to making the lifequa-artwork good, as typically would be, say, drinking enough water to be able to do the interesting and important things that would make one’s life good as a work of art. The suffering is instead partly constitutive of the life’s goodness, being itself a good-making element of the life considered in this aesthetic way. These features come as part of a holistic package, and accordingly, they cannot be adequately judged in isolation from other elements of the life. But just because some element (a beautiful patch of color in a painting or an instance of suffering in a life) is extrinsically valuable in this way, it doesn’t follow that its value is merely instrumental. Nor is the suffering valuable simply on account of affording others aesthetic pleasure. It may well do that. But the aesthetic value inheres in one’s life itself, insofar as it has the aesthetically commendable features it does—the features which would warrant the aesthetic response others might have to it. # OWM Volume 3 ## Summary When we claim that some things matter, we might mean only that these things matter to people. Suffering matters, for example, in the sense that **people care about suffering. No one doubts that some things matter in this psychological sense**. Some things also matter, I believe, in the different, **normative sense that we have reasons to care about these things**. ## 37 How Things Might Matter ### §128 Caring and Having Reasons to Care We might mean that some things matter to people. These things matter in the **psychological sense that we and others care about these things**. We might instead mean that some things matter in the sense that **we have reasons to care about these things**. I call this the purely normative, reason-implying sense. Gibbard writes: > in saying that suffering matters, I am saying to care whether there is suffering, and if you believe what I say, you tell yourself to care whether there is suffering. We can call this Gibbard’s expressivist sense. Though I claimed that some things matter in the normative, reason-implying sense, I didn’t claim this normative sense to be the ordinary sense.