This is the final volume in Parfit’s posthumously published treatise. He begins by defending the concept of objective normative moral truths. “There are some normative truths which can be plausibly claimed to be natural facts…. These truths are naturalistic facts in the sense that they might be empirically discovered…. No such claims apply, I believe, to reason-involving normative truths…. These truths cannot be explained in naturalistic terms, nor could we have empirical evidence for or against our beliefs in these truths.” Similarly to mathematical truths, Parfit believes in the reality of these moral truths. “In the meta-ethical debates of the last seventy years, few people have suggested, and then only briefly, that there are any such non-ontological non-natural truths.”
Parfit believes that these normative moral truths are what matters. “When I claim that some things matter in the purely normative reason-implying sense, I don’t claim to be describing what most people believe…. I claim that if, as I believe, we have such reasons, these are the reasons that are most important…. Non-Naturalists like me believe, some things matter in the purely normative reason-implying sense…. What matters depends in part on the sense in which things matter. It also matters in which sense things matter, since some ways of mattering matter less. Things may matter, we can add, in more than one sense.”
Finding out what objectively matters is of utmost importance. “We could not discover how it would be best to live unless there are some truths that we might discover…. On this view, epistemic reasons are facts that count in favour of having some belief…. I believe this concept of normative reason cannot be helpfully analysed in other terms. We should expect that some concepts are too fundamental to be helpfully analysed…. We have such reasons to try to do various things that are in themselves worth doing, such as discovering truths, creating or preserving beauty, and achieving several other good and worthwhile aims.”
Parfit spends a good deal of all three volumes trying to square Kantian Deontology with both Act and Rule Consequentialism. “We should not assume Consequentialists must accept some view about well-being that is either purely hedonistic, or claims that our well-being consists only in the fulfillment of some of our desires. Consequentialists can believe that there are other ways in which our lives can go better or worse for us…. On this view, if we are morally bad and act wrongly, these facts would not merely cause our lives to go worse, but would be in themselves ways in which our lives would go worse…. The goodness of outcomes can depend in part on whether our acts are right or wrong…. We are not claiming both that the wrongness of these acts makes them bad and that their badness makes them wrong. We are claiming that the deontic badness of these wrong acts makes these people’s lives go non-deontically worse.”
Parfit believes he can square Sidgwick’s Common Sense Morality with a form of Rule and Motive Consequentialism. “I believe that things would on the whole go better if, rather than always wanting and trying to act in optimific ways, we had certain other motives and tried to follow certain other rules…. When some act would affect the well-being of very many people, these effects may make this act either morally required, or wrong, even if the effects on each person would be very small and might be imperceptible…. Imperceptible amounts of pain, and other such harms, seem to most of us to be below any plausible threshold of moral significance. If we are Rule Consequentialists, however, we deny that each of these acts is made to be wrong by this act’s effects. These acts are wrong, we believe, when and because they are condemned by optimific rules. Whether some rule is optimific depends on whether things would on the whole go better if most of us, or many of us, accepted and tried to follow this rule…. We ought to act on the principles or rules that are optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable…. We could then more justifiably believe that there are some objective irreducibly normative truths, some of which are moral truths.”
Parfit concludes, “Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may only be just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine…. If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would have given us all, including those who suffered most, reasons to glad that the Universe exists.”
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