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On What Matters, Vol. 2
On What Matters is a major work in moral philosophy. It is the long-awaited follow-up to Derek Parfit's 1984 book Reasons and Persons , one of the landmarks of twentieth-century philosophy. In this first volume Parfit presents a powerful new treatment of reasons and rationality, and a critical examination of three systematic moral theories -- Kant's ethics, contractualism, and consequentialism -- leading to his own ground-breaking synthetic conclusion. Along the way he discusses a wide range of moral issues, such as the significance of consent, treating people as a means rather than an end, and free will and responsibility. On What Matters is already the most-discussed work in moral its publication is likely to establish it as a modern classic which everyone working on moral philosophy will have to read, and which many others will turn to for stimulation and illumination.
825 pages, Hardcover
First published May 26, 2011
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About the author
Derek Parfit
29 books303 followersDerek Parfit was a British Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University specializing in personal identity, rationality, ethics, and the relations between them.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 18, 2024
A bit of a delay in finishing this one, in part due to a floundering book club that started early in the year and struggled to stay on schedule with meetings, with not the least fault being my own. However, I finally sat down and read the last 1/3 of the book in a short 1.5 weeks, and found myself looking back at some of the previous sections with a new appreciation of some of the earlier content.
My core disagreements with Parfit and his views on population (and normative) ethics are concretized quite clearly by the end of the book, but that did not detract from the quality of the writing and thinking that was displayed throughout. Probably just going to leave a few notable passages below so I can come back to easily reference and reengage with in the future :)
In his section on Rediscovering Reasons (N) "anyone's pain is impersonally bad in the sense that everyone has impartial reasons to try and prevent anyone's pain, if they can.", and quote Nagel "the pain can be detached in thought from the fact that it is mine without losing any of its dreadfulness...suffering is a bad thing, period, and not just for the sufferer...This experience ought not to go on, whoever is having it." -p. 461
In replying to J.L. Mackie's "moral approval and disapproval seem to reflect objective features in a way that the feeling of pain does not." --> "There is no such distinction here. Though pain is subjective in the sense of being a mental state, it is an objective fact what it is like for someone to be in great pain, by having sensation that this person..."
(Q) The nature of agony gives us a reason to want to avoid future agony. --> "This claim is not, I believe, a conceptual truth. It does not follow from the meaning of the word 'agony' and the phrase 'a reason' that we have such an object-given reason to want to avoid agony. (Q) is another example of an intuitively recognizable normative truth. I believe that, as Nagel claims, (Q) is intrinsically more plausible than any argument that we might give in (Q)'s defense. Many people either do not have the concept of a purely normative, object-given reason, or believe that there could not be any such reasons, or normative truths. But if we set aside such meta-ethical disagreements, and another distorting influence to which I shall return, few people who understood (q) would..." -p.551
"There is one concern of which we can easily make sense. We can try to prevent or relieve suffering, and that is enough to give our lives some meaning. As Nagel writes 'There is a great deal of misery in the world, and many of us could easily spend our lives trying to eradicate it...one advantage of living in a world as bad as this one is that it offers the opportunity for many activities whose importance can't be questioned."
"Return next to the question of what we rich people ought to give to those who are very poor. If we assume that wrongness is still all-or-nothing, we shall be most unlikely to agree on how much we ought to give. And it is hard to believe that there could be a definite answer here, so that what is wrong might be giving less than a tenth, or less than a fifth, or less than half. For most of us, the truth is rather that we shall be acting less wrongly the more we give. When people have conflicting moral beliefs because they mistakenly assume the wrongness cannot be a matter of degree, these disagreements..." -p. 555
"Such indeterminacy may also partly solve another problem. Return to the question of how much we rich people ought to give to those who are very poor. Now that each of us can so easily save so many other people from death, disablement and painful diseases, all plausible moral views require us to give a great deal. These views may seem too demanding. If I am regularly giving substantial amounts to som aid agency, I may think that I am doing well enough. *But I could save some young mother's life, at very little cost to myself. And save another's, and save another's.* We can be knocked over or pulled apart by such thoughts. For most readers of this book, this will be their greatest moral challenge. Most of us will not give enough, and will fail in one of two ways. We may have defensible moral beliefs, but only at the cost of breaking the link between our moral beliefs and our intentions. We must then admit that we intend to act wrongly. Or we may keep this link, intending never to act wrongly, but only at the cost of having indefensible moral beliefs. There is, however, another possibility. If we give the world's poorest people one hundredth of our income, that is too little and we are acting wrongly. But this question may sometimes have no answer. If we give certain proportions of our income, such as one tenth, or one quarter, it may not be true that we are *not* acting wrongly. But it may also not be true that we *are* acting wrongly." -p. 562
"Suppose that I wrongly steal some wallet from some woman dressed in white who is eating strawberries while reading the last page of Spinoza's Ethics." -- Anyone who has read enough Parfit can appreciate the length he will go to pinpoint the utility of a given thought experiment, lol
My core disagreements with Parfit and his views on population (and normative) ethics are concretized quite clearly by the end of the book, but that did not detract from the quality of the writing and thinking that was displayed throughout. Probably just going to leave a few notable passages below so I can come back to easily reference and reengage with in the future :)
In his section on Rediscovering Reasons (N) "anyone's pain is impersonally bad in the sense that everyone has impartial reasons to try and prevent anyone's pain, if they can.", and quote Nagel "the pain can be detached in thought from the fact that it is mine without losing any of its dreadfulness...suffering is a bad thing, period, and not just for the sufferer...This experience ought not to go on, whoever is having it." -p. 461
In replying to J.L. Mackie's "moral approval and disapproval seem to reflect objective features in a way that the feeling of pain does not." --> "There is no such distinction here. Though pain is subjective in the sense of being a mental state, it is an objective fact what it is like for someone to be in great pain, by having sensation that this person..."
(Q) The nature of agony gives us a reason to want to avoid future agony. --> "This claim is not, I believe, a conceptual truth. It does not follow from the meaning of the word 'agony' and the phrase 'a reason' that we have such an object-given reason to want to avoid agony. (Q) is another example of an intuitively recognizable normative truth. I believe that, as Nagel claims, (Q) is intrinsically more plausible than any argument that we might give in (Q)'s defense. Many people either do not have the concept of a purely normative, object-given reason, or believe that there could not be any such reasons, or normative truths. But if we set aside such meta-ethical disagreements, and another distorting influence to which I shall return, few people who understood (q) would..." -p.551
"There is one concern of which we can easily make sense. We can try to prevent or relieve suffering, and that is enough to give our lives some meaning. As Nagel writes 'There is a great deal of misery in the world, and many of us could easily spend our lives trying to eradicate it...one advantage of living in a world as bad as this one is that it offers the opportunity for many activities whose importance can't be questioned."
"Return next to the question of what we rich people ought to give to those who are very poor. If we assume that wrongness is still all-or-nothing, we shall be most unlikely to agree on how much we ought to give. And it is hard to believe that there could be a definite answer here, so that what is wrong might be giving less than a tenth, or less than a fifth, or less than half. For most of us, the truth is rather that we shall be acting less wrongly the more we give. When people have conflicting moral beliefs because they mistakenly assume the wrongness cannot be a matter of degree, these disagreements..." -p. 555
"Such indeterminacy may also partly solve another problem. Return to the question of how much we rich people ought to give to those who are very poor. Now that each of us can so easily save so many other people from death, disablement and painful diseases, all plausible moral views require us to give a great deal. These views may seem too demanding. If I am regularly giving substantial amounts to som aid agency, I may think that I am doing well enough. *But I could save some young mother's life, at very little cost to myself. And save another's, and save another's.* We can be knocked over or pulled apart by such thoughts. For most readers of this book, this will be their greatest moral challenge. Most of us will not give enough, and will fail in one of two ways. We may have defensible moral beliefs, but only at the cost of breaking the link between our moral beliefs and our intentions. We must then admit that we intend to act wrongly. Or we may keep this link, intending never to act wrongly, but only at the cost of having indefensible moral beliefs. There is, however, another possibility. If we give the world's poorest people one hundredth of our income, that is too little and we are acting wrongly. But this question may sometimes have no answer. If we give certain proportions of our income, such as one tenth, or one quarter, it may not be true that we are *not* acting wrongly. But it may also not be true that we *are* acting wrongly." -p. 562
"Suppose that I wrongly steal some wallet from some woman dressed in white who is eating strawberries while reading the last page of Spinoza's Ethics." -- Anyone who has read enough Parfit can appreciate the length he will go to pinpoint the utility of a given thought experiment, lol
July 22, 2017
First time through
One read was not enough. Compelling material. I'm not ready to agree or disagree yet, if I ever will be, but I have appreciated On What Matters vol 1 and 2.
One read was not enough. Compelling material. I'm not ready to agree or disagree yet, if I ever will be, but I have appreciated On What Matters vol 1 and 2.
November 14, 2019
Parfit helps you to navigate carefully the landscape of normative truths in meta-ethics while he defends the view of there being irreducibly normative reason involving truths. Penetrating discussions as you would expect from him. For anyone interested in cosmology and modality, don't miss Appendix D: Why anything? Why this and Appendix J: On what there is.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews