Derek Parfit

Derek Parfit (born December 11, 1942, Chengdu, China—died January 1, 2017, London, England) was an English philosopher whose work in normative ethics and metaethics, personal identity, and the theory of practical reason was widely influential in the English-speaking world from the 1980s. Many of his peers considered him the most important moral philosopher of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

(Read Peter Singer’s Britannica entry on ethics.)

Both of Parfit’s parents were medical doctors. After obtaining their degrees in 1935, they moved from England to China to teach preventive medicine. They returned to England in 1943, one year after Parfit’s birth. Parfit attended Eton College before entering the University of Oxford in 1961 to study modern history (B.A. 1964). While he was at Columbia University and Harvard University on a Harkness fellowship in 1964–67, his interests shifted to philosophy, and in 1967 he won a prize fellowship in philosophy at Oxford’s All Souls College. He was a research fellow at All Souls from 1974 to 2010, when he became an emeritus fellow. He also held visiting professorships at several American universities, including Rutgers, New York University, and Harvard. In 2014 he received the Rolf Schock Prize in logic and philosophy, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

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Philosophy 101

The publication of Parfit’s first book, Reasons and Persons (1984), created a sensation among English-speaking academic philosophers, who were impressed by its originality, its intricate and ingenious argument, its immense fertility, and its panoramic scope. Parfit held that conventional philosophical notions regarding the nature of persons and their presumed identity over time are mistaken. Following David Hume (1711–76), he argued that there is no unique entity, a “self,” that underlies the mental experiences and dispositions that may be attributed to a single individual at a given time. Nor is there any necessary connection between personal identity and personal survival, according to Parfit, because it is possible to have the latter without the former (that is, it is possible for an individual to survive into a future time without being the same person as anyone existing at that time). Personal identity, therefore, “is not what matters.” Parfit explored the implications of that view for various broad classes of theory in ethics and practical rationality (both of which are concerned with what an individual has reasons to do) and for the question of what moral obligations (if any) people bear to future generations.

Parfit spent some 15 years writing his second major work, On What Matters, two volumes of which were published in 2011 and a third in 2017. The book was almost as well known to its academic audience before its publication as after: Parfit had circulated sections in draft form to hundreds of colleagues in order to address potential criticisms in the final version (the second volume includes lengthy commentaries by four other philosophers and Parfit’s extensive replies). The most important thesis of On What Matters is that the three main theoretical traditions in normative ethics—consequentialism, Kantianism, and contractualism (based on the notion of a social contract)—are ultimately not in conflict with one another. Given certain independently justified improvements, they can be incorporated into a single view, which he called the Triple Theory, that retains what is insightful about each and discards what is problematic. Parfit described that convergence by saying that the three traditions had been “climbing the same mountain on different sides.” Other sections of the book defended sophisticated views of the nature of reasons and normativity that were presupposed in all three elements of the Triple Theory.