This is a biography of Derek Parfit, written by Edmonds, who studied philosophy under Parfit’s wife, Janet Radcliffe Richards. Renowned as an intellectual giant from his days at Eton and Oxford, there seemed to be little academically that Parfit could not do with ease. His pivot to devote his life to philosophy as a fellow at All Souls College seemed natural, even though he had never studied philosophy formally before applying. Parfit explained, “I remember wondering whether it was more likely that the continental philosophers would change, by discussing their important subjects in a clearer and better argued way, or that the analytical philosophers would change, by applying their clarity and logic to important subjects. I decided that the second seemed more likely, and I think I was right.” Parfit never finished beyond his undergraduate degree in history. But he saw this as a plus, “Because I never took a degree in philosophy, I have only read those books and articles that I wanted to read. That has helped me to love the subject.”
Parfit’s eccentric personality actually meshed well with his philosophy. His most famous book, only one of two he published, was Reasons and Persons. “Parfit once summed up the entire history of ethics in four neat steps: 1. Forbidden by God. 2. Forbidden by God, therefore wrong. 3. Wrong, therefore forbidden by God. 4. Wrong.” Parfit thought that humanity was relatively new in working out the implications for step 4, a secular morality that was objective. “Reasons and Persons would apply reason and logic to ethics without the distorting influence of God.” Parfit was very hard on himself and his intellect. As he aged, he maniacally focussed more and more on meta-ethics, because he felt that was all that really mattered in life. He truly believed that “everything he had written to date, every philosophical argument he had ever made, every conclusion he had ever reached, was pointless, worthless, and illusory, unless moral reasoning could be moored to solid ground. The solid ground had to be moral objectivity…. If morality was not objective, there was no reason to act in one way rather than another. He went further. If morality was not objective, life was meaningless. His own life was meaningless, and every human and animal life was meaningless.” Parfit explained, “I got increasingly disturbed and alarmed by the number of good philosophers who just assumed that there couldn’t be any normative truths.”
In the final decades of his life, Parfit was consumed by the fact that other very smart philosophers could not see his points and still disagreed with him. He revealed, “I am deeply worried by disagreements with people who seem as likely as I am to be getting things right.” Edmonds explains, “Parfit came to believe that dissent about ethics—especially dissent between leading philosophers—was evidence for its relativism. And he thought that relativism essentially collapsed into nihilism…. For Parfit, the thought that moral values might be merely something we project onto the world caused almost existential anguish. If moral values were relative, then we must conclude, he believed, that almost everything in his life was pointless…. Parfit needed his morality to be anchored in bedrock. There had to be an objective reason to relieve from suffering someone who is needlessly in pain…. It is not mere opinion. It is to do with our relationship to the world.”
Parfit also had a unique perspective on death. Upon a friend’s wife’s death, Parfit tried to console him, “When I think of someone dead whom I loved, it helps me to remember that this person isn’t less real because she isn’t real now, just as people far away aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.” Much of his philosophy was focussed on the nature of persons, the individual, and the continuity of personality. Parfit reassured himself, “I find it very comforting to think that all [death] means is that there will be no future person who is related to me in a certain way.” Finally, Parfit explained, “My life is my work. I believe I have found good reasons for believing that values aren’t just subjective and that some things really do matter. If my arguments don’t succeed, my life has been wasted.”
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