Nothing Personal: How ideas made Derek Parfit

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/nothing-personal

by jseliger • 3 years ago

43 26 3 years ago

nxobject• 3 years ago

If you're interested in a more in-depth article about the intersection between Parfitt's thinking and how he lived his life, Larissa MacFarquhar has a very fantastic profile on Derek Parfitt as well - fantastic as in not lurid and oh-look-at-the-savant, but genuinely sympathetic and illuminating about his work [1].

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good

allturtles• 3 years ago

What are the long block quotes in that story? They seem to be written by Parfit but switch between speaking of him in 1st and 3rd person.

johngossman3• 3 years ago

Key graph:

"Ordinarily, I believe that the order of influence is from character to ideas. But surely, what we think can affect how we act. Especially when, as in Parfit’s case, an intellectual project persists for decades and grows from fascination into monomania."

Good observation.

It doesn't explain all his eccentricities and it certainly doesn't excuse the EA movement from canonizing the monomania.

pdonis4• 3 years ago

When I see cases like this, I always think of the saying that charity begins at home. If a person treats those close to them callously, I am highly skeptical of their ability to reach correct ethical conclusions on a broader scale.

dhsosbsjdo• 3 years ago

That's probably a fair assessment at some level, but I think treating kith and kin kindly is a different skill than drawing ethical conclusions about society.

The latter leans on complex reasoning, understanding of interconnected systems, and rational empathy for a faceless stranger. The former requires emotional intelligence, understanding the inner lives of yourself and others, and emotional empathy for a loved one standing in front of you.

Some people can make 'good' large-scale ethical conclusions when in a calm room by themselves, and can also be unkind to ones they love when in emotional situations.

sharadov2• 3 years ago

Some individuals see saving society as a bigger calling than family. Most great people's family members pay the price.

dang• 3 years ago

Related. Others?

Derek Parfit: The Perfectionist at All Souls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688300 - April 2023 (21 comments)

How to Be Good: The Philosopher Derek Parfit (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037240 - Jan 2020 (6 comments)

Why anything? Why this? (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315746 - Jan 2017 (77 comments)

Derek Parfit has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13304873 - Jan 2017 (38 comments)

How to Be Good: Derek Parfit's Moral Philosophy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273495 - March 2016 (16 comments)

maroonblazer• 3 years ago

From TFA, on Parfit's book "Reasons and Persons":

> The book runs about 500 pages and presents an eclectic variety of arguments, many of them destructive in intent. Parfit seeks to undermine—among other things—the preeminence of special duties to those close to us, the rational basis for the fear of death, the existence of the soul, that each person is a separate individual, that people exist independently of social conventions, and that people deserve praise or blame for their actions.

Reasons & Persons was life-changing for me, esp Part II, that deals with the above, personal identity. Ultimately his philosophy is very consistent with Theravada Buddhism. Much of pre-20th century western philosophy pre-Parfit seems like a category error when compared to Buddhism. I say that as an armchair philosopher recognizing it's likely a gross over-simplification.

cubefox4• 3 years ago

You can tell this wasn't written by a philosopher. Philosophers are people who are uninterested in philosophers. They are only interested in philosophy, in the works those philosophers produce.

yoaviram• 3 years ago

You might like this better. I wrote this a few years back, mostly about Parfit's personal identity philosophy: https://www.thoughtexperiments.net/people-who-divide-like-an...

cubefox4• 3 years ago

I think the right solution is to replace the relation of personal identity across time (=) with the notion of "becoming" or "having been" (>, <). Instead of saying "Baby Peter is adult Peter" (BP = AP) we can say "Baby Peter will become adult Peter" (BP < AP) or "Adult Peter was Baby Peter" (AP > BP). Unlike =, < and > are not equivalence relations. They are transitive, but they are neither reflexive nor symmetric. This way branching persons (forks or fusions) do not lead to paradoxes. If X branches into Y and Z, it is perfectly possible that X < Y, X < Z, and Y ≠ Z. The person that is about to enter the duplicator (X) becomes, one moment later, both the person that comes out on the left (Y) and the person that comes out on the right (Z). That doesn't mean that Y and Z are the same person, they just both have been X a moment ago.

This means that when we go to bed in the evening, there is a different person that comes out of the bed in the morning. But that's not so counterintuitive, since the evening person still became the morning person.

This weaker relation of "becoming" (rather than the stronger relation of "being identical to") can also serve as the notion of "survival". The evening person "survived as" the morning person.

Unfortunately Parfit didn't discuss this solution.

clbrmbr• 3 years ago

Is there a philosopher who defends proximity?

I see robust communities as built upon “Common-Sense Morality”, with some limited amount of broader charity through the government and religious organizations. Local communities are suffering due to tech disruption, and these anti-social ideas from Parfit are like nails in the coffin (should they become part of received morality).

dlkf• 3 years ago

Hume wrote morality is better felt than reasoned. There is a large tradition in virtue ethics following Hume (eg Bernard Williams) who defend our moral intuitions, our prioritization of family, etc.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

Rousseau probably embodies that more than anyone else, from Emile:

“Every particular society, when it is narrow and unified, is estranged from the all-encompassing society. Every patriot is harsh to foreigners. They arc only men. They arc nothing in his eyes - This is a drawback, inevitable but not compelling. The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives. Abroad, the Spartan was ambitious, avaricious. iniquitous. But disinterestedness, equity, and concord reigned within his walls. Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.”

impendia• 3 years ago

Is there a philosopher who defends proximity?

Larry Temkin did, when I took two of his ethics undergraduate courses in the 90s. It was a brief side point he was making, to contrast with arguments of the form "Do you believe you'd have an obligation to jump in a lake, and ruin your clothes, to save someone from drowning? If so, the same reasoning implies you have to give all your money to charity."

He described it as "participating in a morality" where one has a heightened sense of obligation to one's immediate community.

Temkin was a PhD student of Parfit, and is well known in his own right. We read Parfit's Reasons and Persons in his class, and he also invited Parfit to campus so we could hear him give a guest lecture. The questions afterwards, coming from Temkin's faculty colleagues, were quite feisty.

A wonderful and deeply memorable experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Temkin

johngossman3• 3 years ago

Thank you. It appears Larry Temkin was the philosopher I didn't know I was looking for

Good interview here:

https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2022/7/24/larry-temkin-tra...

Nothing Personal: How ideas made Derek Parfit

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