Parfit begins his second volume by giving ample space to his critics. In fact, he publishes four response commentaries to the philosophical system he outlined in Volume 1, by Susan Wolf, Allen Wood, Barbara Herman, and T.M. Scanlon. Parfit comments on each essay in detail before proceeding with his own intellectual project, two hundred and fifty odd pages in. His project was to unite the moral frameworks of deontology, contractualism, and consequentialism in an overarching objective moral system. He comments, “If there is no single supreme principle, that, I agree, would not be a tragedy. But it would be a tragedy if there was no single true morality. And conflicting moralities could not all be true. In trying to combine these different kinds of moral theory, my main aim was not to find a supreme principle, but to find out whether we can resolve some deep disagreements…. If we cannot resolve our disagreements, that would give us reasons to doubt that there are any true principles.”
In the rest of the volume, Parfit fleshes out and wrestles with various aspects of his moral system. He discusses the distribution of the pie. “In assessing the goodness of outcomes, I have claimed, we can plausibly give weight to some distributive principles. We can believe that one of two outcomes would be better, despite giving people a smaller sum of total benefits, if these benefits would be more equally shared, or if more of the benefits would come to people who were worse off. We can also believe that it would be better if people were given equal chances to receive some benefit.” Further on, Parfit discusses retributional justice. “Though there are some normative truths, some of which are moral truths, no punishment could ever be deserved in the retributive sense, or be retributively unjust.”
Most of this book deals with morality and norms within an objective lens. “As realist Objectivists, our maxim isn’t to satisfy our desires. We respond to the facts that give us reasons to have our desires. Our maxim might be: I will make it my end to achieve whatever I have most reason to try to achieve, because these are the ends that are most worth achieving.” Parfit titled these volumes “On What Matters” so one might suspect that Parfit does care deeply that things do, in fact, matter. He is fighting nihilism at every turn of the page. “It matters whether people believe that some things matter.” Parfit believes we must reorient philosophy. “It was philosophers who first claimed that reasons are given only by desires, that all rationality is instrumental, and that no values are facts, because there are no normative truths. Given our increasing powers to destroy or damage the conditions of life on Earth, we need to lose these beliefs. It is not wealth that matters, or mere preference-fulfillment, but happiness, justice, and the other things that can make our lives worth living.”
Parfit passionately believes that there are some objective normative truths that humans can eventually come to agree on. “There are some claims that are irreducibly normative in the reason-involving sense, and are in the strongest sense true. But these truths have no ontological implications. For such claims to be true, these reason-involving properties need not exist either as natural properties in the spatio-temporal world, or in some non-spatio-temporal part of reality…. On our view, since these beliefs are irreducibly normative, they are not about entities or properties that are a part of the causal fabric of the world. Since such normative truths could not have any observable effects, or help to explain what we can observe, we could not have any empirical evidence supporting our belief in these truths…. Since our fundamental normative beliefs are not about contingent features of the world, we don’t need to have empirical evidence for their truths. Nor do we need to be causally affected by these normative truths…. These various beliefs are about what must be true, in the strong sense that applies to every possible world…. I shall call these our modal beliefs…. There cannot be any non-normative facts, such as physical or psychological facts, that directly conflict with our beliefs about practical and moral reasons.”
Parfit settles on his Convergence Claim (CC): “If everyone knew all of the relevant non-normative facts, used the same normative concepts, understood and carefully reflected on the relevant arguments, and was not affected by any distorting influence, we and others would have similar normative beliefs…. CC is an empirical claim…. When we think about cases that involve imprecise cardinal comparisons, we should deliberately avoid thinking in either spatial or numerical terms—except as a form of shorthand that we should remember to be seriously misleading…. The truth would often be that (1) neither of two outcomes would be better, and that (2) these outcomes would be very far from being precisely equally good. Though we can call such outcomes equally good, it is clearer to say that neither would be better…. Similar claims apply to questions about the wrongness of acts, and about what we ought to do, or have most reason to do…. When different people have conflicting beliefs about which of two outcomes would be better, or which of two acts would be wrong, that is often because these people mistakenly assume that such normative truths are more precise than they really are. If these people realized that many such truths are very imprecise, they would often cease to disagree.” Parfit realizes that we are nowhere close to such a reconciliation. “Our normative thinking is still in its childhood.”
Parfit, once again, concludes this volume with a look towards humanity’s future. “After many thousands of years of responding to reasons in ways that helped them survive and reproduce, human beings can now respond to other reasons. We are a part of the Universe that is starting to understand itself…. What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history. If there are no rational beings elsewhere, it may depend on us and our successors whether it will all be worth it, because the existence of the Universe will have been on the whole good.”
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