David Edmonds.  Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality (2023)

Review

This is a delightful biography. It will be a treat for those interested in either philosophy or Oxford, but also deserves a wider audience.

The pairing of the subject and the biographer makes the book special. The subject, Derek Parfit (1942 – 2017), is perhaps the most important philosopher of the last fifty years, legendary for both his ideas and for his eccentricity.  The biographer, David Edmonds, is an elegant and engaging writer, who was supervised as a philosophy student by Parfit. 

The biography tells the story of how Parfit evolved from star student to become an eccentric, obsessively focused recluse.  Parfit was the top scholar at Eton, and the top history undergraduate at Oxford.  He then switched to philosophy and won a prize fellowship to the exclusive All Souls College, Oxford, where he remained for 43 years.

Over this time, Parfit developed many original ideas in personal identity, population ethics, rationality, normative ethics and metaethics, which he eventually set out in two seminal books, ‘Reasons and Persons’ in 1984 and ‘On What Matters’ in 2011.  But while at All Souls Parfit increasingly narrowed his life to focus exclusively on philosophy, in the process becoming more and more intense and idiosyncratic. 

Edmonds ’was inundated with anecdotes’:

He wore the same outfit every day — grey suit, white shirt, red tie — so that there was no time-wasting and energy-sapping decision to be made each morning. He drank coffee, but boiling a kettle became an unnecessary luxury; so, he would throw a dollop of instant coffee into a mug and fill it with hot water from the tap.

He was so obsessed with Bernard Williams, that he had to get it out. When we’d meet up to talk, I knew within five minutes we’d be talking about why Williams didn’t have the concept of a normative reason.

Why did Parfit change?

Did All Souls allow him to be the person he always was — to give expression to his authentic self? Or did it warp him, slowly transforming him into the monomaniac he became?

Edmonds thinks that a partial explanation is that Parfit was autistic, and no longer made the effort to conform to societal norms once he had tenure.  But another reason was Parfit’s conviction that he needed to show that morality is objective, his higher calling to rescue ethics from non-cognitivism and prove that life matters.  

Throughout, the biography is both entertaining and informative.  Edmonds is clear, thorough and engaging in setting out the events of Parfit’s life, explaining Parfit’s ideas and painting the institutional and intellectual background.  The quality of the writing makes this book an easy read – and I would also recommend the excellent audible recording.  This biography gets my vote for the most enjoyable philosophy-related book.

Links

David Edmonds.  Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality (2023) Amazon UK

Derek Parfit.  Reasons and Persons (1984). Amazon UK.

Derek Parfit.  On What Matters (2011).  Amazon UK

How Both Human History and The History of Ethics May be Just Beginning.  My blog post about my favourite passage from Reasons and Persons.

EXTRACTS

Preface: What Matters

This book is in part a portrait of university life and academic philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, as well as a depiction of the unique institution, All Souls, in which Parfit spent almost all his adult years. But it is essentially a book about one man.

For a biographer, he is both a nightmare and a dream. His life was, from one perspective, entirely uneventful. It was a cloistered existence — literally cloistered, from the cloisters of Eton to the cloisters of Balliol, Oxford, of Harvard, of All Souls, Oxford. It involved reading, discussing, and writing philosophy papers and books. That makes for unexciting copy. On the other hand, he was, at least in the second half of his life, a highly eccentric man — loveable but idiosyncratic. I was inundated with anecdotes.

The first half of his life contains a lot of life, the second half a lot of philosophy.

Beyond the details of his philosophy, one of my fascinations with Derek is that he represents an extreme example of how it is possible to prioritize certain values above all others — in his case, the urge to solve important philosophical questions.

He grew increasingly upset that many serious philosophers believed that there was no objective basis for morality. He felt that he had to demonstrate that secular morality — morality without God — was objective, and that it had rational foundations.

He genuinely believed that if he failed to show this, his existence would have been futile. And not just his existence. If morality was not objective, all our lives were meaningless. The need to refute this, the need to save morality, was a heavy emotional as well as an intellectual burden. How he came to bear this burden, and how it shaped him from being a precocious and outgoing history student into a monastically inclined philosopher obsessed with solving the toughest moral questions, is the subject of this book.

I must declare a personal connection to Derek Parfit. I did not know him well, but he was my dissertation co-supervisor in 1987, when I was studying for the Oxford BPhil degree. Although I took a job with the BBC, I still had a philosophical itch that I felt compelled to scratch, and so I began a part-time PhD. This time my topic was the philosophy of discrimination, and my supervisor was Janet Radcliffe Richards, Derek’s partner.

In 2010, and with a reference from Janet, I joined the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.  Each time I went into my shared office I would glance at the four printed names on the door and receive a mini–dopamine kick. For, alongside my name and Janet’s, was that of D. Parfit. He never actually showed up — preferring to work from home.

He never sought fame. He remains, therefore, virtually unknown beyond philosophy. I hope this book goes some way towards remedying this injustice. I hope it also shows that his response to the New Jersey nurse was true. He did indeed work on what matters.

Acknowledgements

Like Derek, I have perfectionist instincts, though not quite to his excessive degree.

I wanted the book to be accessible to civilians, a.k.a. non-philosophers.

I wrote a long article for Prospect magazine about Derek and Janet’s relationship: ‘Reason and Romance: The World’s Most Cerebral Marriage’.

1. Made in China

All his life Derek Parfit had a missionary zeal. A zeal to solve the philosophical problems that matter and then persuade people that he was right. Not only were both of Derek’s parents’ missionaries; remarkably, all four of his grandparents were, too. He grew up in a household that had shed its faith but retained its missionary spirit.

2. Prepping for Life

The Parfits settled at 5 Northmoor Road in North Oxford.

At the age of seven, after ditching ambitions to become a steam-engine driver, Derek decided his future lay in becoming a monk. Distraught that his parents had abandoned Christianity, he would pray for them at night. But within a year or so, he too had ditched his faith. He found it impossible to believe that a Christian God, a good God, would punish people, and send them to hell, as doctrine stipulated.

Visitors to the Northmoor Road home recall its chaotic atmosphere. From the condition in which the property was maintained, one might not have guessed that the two grown-ups who occupied it were specialists in hygiene. Norman and Jessie did not get along and home life was often tense — perhaps one reason why all his life Derek was averse to conflict. 

He collected an almost embarrassing array of prizes in his final year at The Dragon School. 

3. Eton Titan

Derek was not only a King’s Scholar, but the top King’s Scholar of the fourteen in his year.

President of the debating society.

He took nine O-Levels in December 1958, and then A levels in modern history, ancient history and English literature.

When he broached the idea that he might study philosophy, politics, and economics — Oxford’s famous ‘PPE’ degree — Parry replied, ‘Nonsense boy, you’ll do history.’ What made Derek easy to dissuade was the mathematical component of economics — he feared, rightly, that it would involve equations and symbols.

Derek’s schooling had been happy. He was already thoroughly institutionalized; and in institutions such as Eton, he thrived.

4. History Boy

In the second term of his first academic year, he contemplated a switch to ‘PPE.’ The economics component still deterred him; he was anxious that the mathematics involved was beyond him. In order to test himself, he began to read an economics textbook. 

Labour Club,  Canning Club. His Eton debating partner Jonathan Aitken.

5. Oxford Words

He became Isis’s editor.

Mary Clemmey

Parfit’s preferred route was via a drainpipe on the Magdalen Street side. 

Harkness Fellowship, which would fund two years at a university in the US. 

Day one of the exams provided a moment of high drama. His parents, both doctors, had given him two lots of drugs that had contrary effects. 

The only All Souls Prize Fellowship that year was awarded to his tutorial partner, Robin Briggs.

6. An American Dream

The car conversations with Wiggins must have reinforced Parfit’s growing interest in philosophy.

Parfit was clearly captivated by Rawls. He showed him his act-utilitarianism paper, and, in a letter dated Halloween, he wrote that the two of them had had ‘particularly good talks’

7. Soul Man

For Parfit, Sidgwick provided the template for how philosophy should be done.

 Elected to a Prize Fellowship,

‘It was my con-man performance in the general papers that helped me I’m afraid — it will still be some time before I make the grade as a professional (rather than amateur) philosopher. (Not a move I wholly want to make anyway.)’

 Parfit was allocated Room 4 on Staircase XI in the North Quad — designed in the early eighteenth century by Nicholas Hawksmoor,

 Did All Souls allow him to be the person he always was — to give expression to his authentic self? Or did it warp him, slowly transforming him into the monomaniac he became?

 He decided to switch from the BPhil to a doctorate, or, in Oxford vernacular, a DPhil. His supervisor was Alan Montefiore and Parfit’s proposed thesis title was ‘The Philosophical Concept of Personal Identity’. But he would never complete that, either. As a result, the sum of Parfit’s higher-education qualifications for philosophy remained for ever an undergraduate degree — in history.

He had a narrower philosophical range than his peers.

 But applied ethics was not on the Oxford syllabus. Parfit, along with the young philosophers Jonathan Glover and Jim Griffin (who taught at New College and Keble College respectively) conceived the idea of holding a class on real moral issues.

Singer:  Parfit was the closest to a genius. Getting into a philosophical argument with him was like playing chess with a grandmaster:

 In January 1969, Parfit wrote to say that if his DPhil on personal identity was ‘passable’, he would be delighted to adapt it into an OUP book.

8. The Teletransporter

‘I think that no young philosopher has got as far as I did on the basis of a single article.’ The Philosophical Review in 1971. Parfit never watched Star Trek.

Parfit placed some value on readability — a quality distinct from clarity.

Parfit and Judith De Witt were together, on and off, for several years. ‘He was a lovely boyfriend. I was a pain.’

People who achieve things don’t waste time. 

One of his trifling transgressions concerned trifle.

Parfit’s body clock ran several hours behind other people.

9. A Transatlantic Affair

Certain features of Parfit’s life were cyclical. Two such patterns stand out and warrant discussion separately from the linear narrative. One was his annual photography pilgrimage to Leningrad and Venice. The other was his regular sojourn at American universities. 

Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1986) was his favourite work of contemporary ethics. 

If Parfit was right, the claim about separateness of persons rested on a metaphysical error.

10. The Parfit Scandal

Chronic publishing constipation.

There were two reasons to become a philosopher, Bernard Williams once said. The first was to discover truth, the second to have fun (which, for Parfit, was a bizarre motivation).

Nor did the two men share much intellectual common ground. Parfit’s rooms might increasingly resemble a rubbish tip, but he wanted to tidy up moral philosophy and sought definitive answers. Williams’s office was neat and ordered, but he thought moral philosophy was intrinsically messy, and that the search for ultimate truths was futile. Parfit was a builder, Williams a demolisher. Parfit’s philosophy was ahistorical — philosophical truths were immutable — while Williams’s approach was both socially and historically rooted.

He made sufficient progress on the philosophy of future people to consider bringing out a book. In the end, he became disillusioned with the idea, feeling he had to come up with solutions, not just problems. So instead, he switched to another topic: rationality and our reasons for action.

It was more important for posterity that Hare get it absolutely right, argued Parfit. No, replied Hare, perfection was not necessary. ‘I don’t hope to write an ethics-book to end ethics-books.’ What mattered was that the book set off a discussion: ‘I am afraid’, Hare wrote, ‘that we disagree fundamentally about the art of writing books.’

Parfit had helped persuade Sen to move to Oxford.

Parfit’s loathing of retribution.

The All-Souls snub in 1981 was the best thing that ever happened to him.

11. Work, Work, Work, and Janet

Parfit was not obliged to produce all three of the books he had outlined in his Fellowship application; the demand was ‘merely’ that he produce at least one. His approach was to corral his many disparate ideas into a single manuscript. This would include his material about rationality, personal identity, and future people. He would call it Reasons and Persons. There were many sceptics who believed that no book of any title would ever appear.

It was the most stressful period of his career and accelerated a growing retreat from the non-philosophical world. Of course, there were humdrum non-philosophical activities essential for health and survival. But Parfit would accommodate these by minimizing the time and effort expended on them, or by running them in parallel with philosophy. He began to develop some distinctive habits. In tooth-brushing, for example: teeth had to be cleaned, but that was no reason for philosophy to stop. Parfit was an enthusiastic and comprehensive tooth-brusher; no incisor, canine, or molar was neglected. Tooth-brushing took up more of his time than eating. He would buy toothbrushes in bulk with a brush attrition rate of roughly three per week. And during one tooth-brushing session he could read fifty pages.

Likewise, staying fit. The exercise bike was philosophy-compliant; it was perfectly possible to combine cycling and reading. Sometimes he would brush his teeth while cycling. Clothes, food, and drink were more problematic, but Parfit devoted as little time to them as possible. He wore the same outfit every day — grey suit, white shirt, red tie — so that there was no time-wasting and energy-sapping decision to be made each morning. He drank coffee, but boiling a kettle became an unnecessary luxury; so, he would throw a dollop of instant coffee into a mug and fill it with hot water from the tap.

The White’s Professor replied, ‘I am not sure that you are right, from the point of view of your future, to turn yourself into a recluse.’

In the end, the Tuesday Group ossified, with many of the youngest members, such as John Campbell, Bill Child, Quassim Cassam, Adrian Moore, and Tim Williamson, preferring separate gatherings with more intellectual spark and less booze.

Weekly Parfit – Dworkin – Sen seminars 

It dawned on him that if he dribbled in the manuscript, chapter by chapter, OUP could be carrying on with the production process — including copyediting — whilst he continued to work on the later chapters, buying him precious extra days and weeks. The book could still be revealed to the world in January 1984, as planned. Meanwhile, he was sending off draft after draft to scores of philosophers in the UK and around the world, requesting feedback. In those pre-email days, that necessitated having to spend hours in the college office, photocopying piles of paper and then mailing them out.

Truth be told, this process did not always improve the text. The early versions of Reasons and Persons were more streamlined than the published book. The forest was being lost among the trees, and trees would be unnecessarily sacrificed for the ever-expanding manuscript; Parfit was dealing with objections that were not fundamental and need not have detained him. The arguments in the early versions were those he had ruminated over for years. As the deadline approached, he was introducing ideas that he had reflected upon for barely thirty minutes.

 Jeff McMahan. Susan Hurley and Bill Ewald. Ewald had a neat idea. Sidgwick’s book had closed with the word ‘failure’, so why not complete Parfit’s book with ‘hope’? It was a clever contrast. Parfit was fast asleep and could not be roused — he had disappeared for twenty – four hours — so his two friends took a bold and unilateral decision.

 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

 The Nietzsche quotation about the open sea provided a rationale for the cover picture.

 Parfit was an evangelist for, but no expert in, the emerging computer technology, and he wanted — and insistently requested — that the book be typeset straight from his word-processing files. That was no easy task in the early 1980s; it was fiddly and time-consuming, and in the end required hours and hours of overtime to be put in by Catherine Griffin (the wife of philosopher Jim Griffin), who was employed at the Oxford University Computing Service.

 As usual, Parfit prevailed. They knew he could be infinitely patient in his stubbornness.

Three thousand books were pulped. Nevertheless, many errors remained.

 In a happy moment, Susan Hurley snapped a photograph of Parfit, handsome, smiling.

 In 1983, after one of the Parfit – Dworkin – Sen seminars, Parfit saw Amartya Sen talking to a tall and beautiful dark-haired woman. After she left, he went up to Sen: ‘Who was that?’ ‘She’s a philosopher, Janet Radcliffe Richards’ Sen explained.

 His first step, which she later described as a sort of audition for herself, was to purchase a copy of Radcliffe Richards’s book The Sceptical Feminist. ‘It was an indication of the strangeness of what was going on that when Derek suggested he come round at midnight to deal with the computer, I thought he meant it.’ He didn’t.

12. Moral Mathematics

‘Like my cat, I simply do what I want to do,’ begins the introduction. One can see why Parfit believed this to be a strong and arresting start. So, a nice, slightly wacky, opening. The only drawback with it was that it was misleading. Parfit did not have a cat. At this stage in his life, a cat would have been as needless a distraction as a child. For a leading moral philosopher to begin a major work of moral philosophy with a half-lie was obviously short of ideal.

 It took a visit to his sister Theodora, in Bethesda, Maryland, for the problem to be pointed out. He had presented her with a copy of the book. ‘But Derek,’ she said, after turning the cover, ‘you do not own a cat!’ A solution lay in a deal struck with her son, who drew up a pseudo-contract regarding their aged cat, Diamond:

I, C. Alexander Ooms do hereby declare that Derek A. Parfit is the new owner of Diamond, male, feline, born July 1972. This said feline exhibits some of the characteristics of personhood as you so felicitously acknowledge in the first line of your book, Reasons and Persons. A portrait of your cat, Diamond, is enclosed for you to display prominently in your abode thereby maintaining your moral credibility if anyone should inquire: ‘I didn’t know you owned a cat?!’

 In the contract, Tamara, Alex’s elder sister, was appointed Diamond’s guardian, thus releasing Parfit from any onerous duty of cat care. In exchange for acquiring a pet, he had to agree to visit the Ooms household on every future US trip, a codicil that he singularly failed to honour, technically putting him in breach of contract. Another condition was ‘that you make no reference to “my” dog, parrot, or any other animals in future writing [ …] as we would not be able to help you out of another moral lapse’.

 The first of the four sections in Reasons and Persons, and arguably the most challenging, is on what Parfit calls self-defeating theories. Indirectly and directly self-defeating. Game Theory. Moral mathematics.  Harmless Torturers.

 Part II of Reasons and Persons is about our reasons for actions.  He drew a distinction between three approaches. ‘P’ was the theory that we only have reason to do what satisfies our current goals and desires. What I want now is what I have most reason to do. Then there’s ‘morality’, the view that I have reason to do what will be best for everyone affected by my actions overall. And then there’s ‘S’, which is the theory that I have reason to do what is best for me overall (not just what is best for me now, but what is best for my life considered as a whole). The argument is complex, but what Parfit shows is that S is caught in a pincer movement; it can defend itself against P, but only in a way that means it is defeated by morality.

 Parfit questions whether the bias against future pain is justified. He imagines a character, Timeless. Timeless is as distressed at being reminded about a painful event in the past as when he learns about a painful event to come.

 Section IV — future people. Parfit fashioned a sub-genre of moral philosophy and triggered a mini-industry of journal articles. One of Parfit’s most important achievements was to identify a new problem: the Non-Identity Problem. The Asymmetry Problem: the asymmetry between what Parfit called the Wretched Child and the Happy Child. He tried desperately to find what he called ‘Theory X’.

13. The Mind’s Eye in Mist and Snow

The photograph Temkin had so admired was completely ruined. He’d crumpled it up.

 Simon Blackburn was invited along to Leningrad in 1981.

 The perfectionist urges propelled both pursuits in a way that few others could match or comprehend.

 The significance Parfit attributed to beauty and aesthetics is evinced by one of the lesser – known aspects of his life: his two-decade-long involvement with Oxford’s streetlamps.

 Poor visual memory and face recognition.

14. Glory! Promotion!

Parfit had uncovered deep questions, Williams wrote. It was a ‘very original’ and ‘imaginative’ book, ‘brilliantly clever’, ‘strange and excitingly intense’.

Reasons and Persons sold tens of thousands and became OUP’s best-selling academic philosophy title.

 The Warnocks must have spluttered about Reasons and Persons over their breakfast cereal. Geoffrey Warnock’s criticisms were similar to but even more scathing than his wife’s.  ‘Parfit,’ wrote Warnock, ‘had spent so long fiddling with the text and responding to comments from dozens of correspondents that he had forgotten the reader. The book’s extreme oddity resulted from ‘a rather rigid simplicity of purpose, remorselessly pursued. The purpose is to consider certain questions about the nature of persons and about the reasons persons have for acting, and to decide by argument, counterargument, rebuttal of counter-argument etc., what answers to those questions are and are not rationally sustainable. This is what the reader is offered — and nothing else at all.’

15. The Blues and the Bluebell Woods

As well as his intellectual fatigue, the period following publication of Reasons and Persons was one of personal trauma and upheaval.

Parfit’s emotions about his family ran deep. Not many people knew that he had a younger sister who had died in an accident, but if ever the subject was raised, he was quickly moved to tears. 

West Kennett House was like falling for a pretty face.  Janet allowed herself to be convinced.

But it turned out that he was more interested in bluebell woods of the abstract than the real kind. The purchase of West Kennett was the biggest mistake he had made.

Rawls was one of very few philosophers whom Parfit would denigrate — not in print and not about anything personal, but because he was baffled by his prominence.

 ‘Would it be all right’, Parfit wanted to check, ‘if I call you, my friend?’ Parfit put the question because he was unsure how to use the word ‘friend’, but Jerry Cohen was profoundly touched.

Outside the animated and fertile Star Wars seminars, these were relatively fallow years for him, intellectually.

Janet always advised passengers that if they wanted to stay alive when Derek was driving, they were not to talk philosophy.

On Giving Priority to the Worse Off was never completed.

16. The Priority View

Often in life, Ruth Chang thought, our options are on a par — really different without one being the correct choice. You have to make one of them correct for you, through your commitment to it.

 If Parfit is right about the force of the Levelling Down Objection, then nobody should endorse equality as a value with intrinsic significance.

 The collaboration between the two men turned out to be remarkably hassle-free. Tyler Cowen wrote the initial draft, of around fifty pages; Parfit made many points of clarification.

 Joint class with Quassim Cassam on personal identity. ‘It was my most gruelling experience ever.’  The Too-Many-Thinkers Problem forced a temporary shift in his position on personal identity and, for a brief period, he was enticed by animalism.

Editor for an ‘Oxford Ethics’ series.

His assistance to students was remarkable — made more remarkable by the fact that he dedicated similar help to many other scholars. His comments were constructive, brilliant, wise, encouraging, and contained many original and compelling arguments. I felt that I was reading significant philosophical work prepared just for me.’

 ‘I said, “Derek, I don’t want your comments! Enough’s enough!” He said, “But Larry, don’t you want your book to be as good as it could be?” I said, “No, I want my book to be done!”’

17. Derekarnia

Parfit believed Wittgenstein had had a pernicious effect on philosophy. ‘I am strongly against his influence partly for the common reason that he was so against philosophy.’

He had given all his money away, but to his wealthy siblings, which showed, thought Parfit, that he was concerned only with his own purity, not with doing good.

He was an early convert to the desktop computer and would tell All Souls colleagues how sitting at the screen with the keyboard in front of him made him feel ‘like the pilot of a jet plane’. But later he was often defeated by technology and didn’t upgrade an old Windows programme, so that he sometimes had difficulties reading certain files. He became comically evangelical about the autocorrect function in Word. It never occurred to him that typing speed might not be a factor limiting the productivity of others.

‘The perfect is the enemy of the good’ Voltaire.

Parfit had a phobia of logical notation.

18. Alpha Gamma Kant

Reading Parfit eventually appeared in print in 1997 — ten years after the initiation of the project. But it did so without Parfit’s promised replies to the thirteen essays. The patience of the editor had finally been exhausted. In his acknowledgements, Jonathan Dancy could only thinly disguise his frustration.

Derek’s original view of metaethics: “I don’t do metaethics. I find it much too hard.”

The thought was this. 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, then it was a waste of time debating it. 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 were meaningless.

Indeed, he came to realize that most philosophers, including many philosophers that he admired, believed that morality was not objective, at least in the strong sense that he believed it to be. ‘I got increasingly disturbed and alarmed’, he later explained, ‘by the number of good philosophers who just assumed that there couldn’t be any normative truths.’

Values were excluded in Quine’s ontology, and statements such as ‘Torturing innocent children is wrong’ did not capture anything that existed in the world.

In 1977, John Mackie, one of Parfit’s referees, published Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. There were no objective moral values, Mackie concluded.

But, argued Parfit, if numbers could exist — and if we could acknowledge the truth of ‘2 + 2 = 4’, even if it is not a truth ‘in the world’ in the same way as books are in the world — then, surely, we could also concede the possibility that moral truths exist?

One would expect some disagreements, he argued. It is precisely because some issues are controversial that they dominate ethical discussion. But we overlook how much agreement there is. On most basic areas, in fact, there is agreement.

A cognitive non-naturalist holds that there really are normative facts,

Within the Humean intellectual tradition, the contemporary article that most disturbed Parfit was Bernard Williams’s ‘Internal and External Reasons’.

One of Williams’s own examples was of a man who treats his wife terribly.

In his relationship with Williams there was a sharp asymmetry.

The latter stage of Parfit’s academic career was essentially a prolonged assault on Williams and a defence of the claim that the man who treats his wife badly, in Williams’s example, does have a moral reason to improve his behaviour, whether he wants to or not. The fact that he could not convince Williams on this point literally made Parfit cry.

Kant was a true genius, even more brilliant than Sidgwick, Parfit came to believe, though he found him exasperating. One reason for annoyance was that Kant ‘made really bad writing philosophically acceptable.’  If he were an examiner marking Kant’s work, he would award him an ‘Alpha Gamma’.

Beaumont Buildings and Tufnell Park homes

I had returned to philosophy and begun a PhD at the Open University; Janet became my PhD supervisor. Every couple of months, I would visit her to discuss my thesis (on the philosophy of discrimination).  In 1999, Janet became the director of the Centre for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine at University College, London — cementing London as her base. A year later, she published Human Nature after Darwin, on the implications of evolution for psychology. And not long after that, she began a two-year stint as a panellist on ‘The Moral Maze’,

The lodgers were young philosophers including Nick Bostrom.  A tiny closet room at the top was left empty for Parfit.

Parfit’s withdrawal from social life was now almost complete.

He had a rule, he told Theodora Parfit. ‘I only attend funerals; I do not attend weddings.’ But his big sister pulled rank. ‘I don’t care whether or not you come to my funeral,’ she said, ‘but I do care that you turn up at Alexander’s wedding.’ Although browbeaten into going, once there he was his usual benign self.

19. Climbing the Mountain

The Tanner lectures were delivered, uneventfully, from 4 to 6 November 2002, at Berkeley.

Temkin put a counter-proposal. How about a conference on his unpublished manuscripts? Here was a far more appealing prospect. Parfit relished the idea of receiving comments from serious philosophers on his work in progress. The conference took place over the weekend from 10 to 12 April 2003, and was a memorable event. 

Versions of his manuscripts travelled around the globe like migratory birds. ‘I stopped commenting because I thought I’m not doing him, or the profession, a favour by delaying it.’

A book on the conference papers was published as Essays on Parfit’s ‘On What Matters’. This was in 2009; it was still another two years before On What Matters actually appeared. 

Even before the new millennium, Parfit’s obsession with philosophy had been running in fifth gear. He now eased into a sixth gear, all of his own. Work was his only priority. 

It was only in 2007, when Janet became a Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, that there was a resumption of part-time cohabitation. 

This growing rigidity was also revealed in a new dogmatism. Early Parfit, he says, ‘wanted to open rather than close, he wanted people to be excited rather than agree, he sought breakthrough rather than consensuses.’ 

Sidgwick remarked that ‘if I find any of my judgements, intuitive or inferential, in direct conflict with a judgement of some other mind, there must be error somewhere: and if I have no more reason to suspect error in the other mind than in my own, reflective comparison between the two judgements necessarily reduces me [ …] to a state of neutrality’. 

For Parfit, the thought that moral values might be merely something we project onto the world caused almost existential anguish. 

‘Future Tuesday Indifference’.  For much of my life as a philosopher’, writes Peter Singer, ‘I was a Humean about practical reason. This example helped to persuade me that Hume was wrong.’ 

‘He was so obsessed with Williams, that he had to get it out. When we’d meet up to talk, I knew within five minutes we’d be talking about why Williams didn’t have the concept of a normative reason.’

20. Lifeboats, Tunnels, and Bridges

On every decision about the aesthetics of the book, Parfit wanted a say, and scores of emails on these matters went back and forth. 

In Volumes 1 and 2 of On What Matters, which were finally published in 2011, Parfit aimed to demonstrate that three important moral theories converge, and that morality is objective. That is the substance of 1,400 pages, condensed into the length of a tweet.

He argued that the disciples of three core ethical traditions, Kantians, consequentialists, and contractualists, were climbing the same mountain from different sides.

According to Parfit , the ultimate principle of morality can be expressed in three ways , reflecting the three traditions : an act is wrong when it is disallowed by some principle that is either: ( 1 ) one of the principles whose being universal laws would make things go best ; or ( 2 ) one of the only principles whose being universal laws everyone could rationally will ; or ( 3 ) a principle that no one could reasonably reject .

Arguably, when he ‘improved’ the moral theories he was examining, he shed all that was distinctive about them.

Peter Singer rated it even higher than Reasons and Persons, describing it as ‘the most significant work in ethics since Sidgwick’s masterpiece was published in 1874’.

The most brutal judgement was by Simon Blackburn. ‘a long voyage down a stagnant backwater’

21. Marriage and Pizza

Derek was happy to be married, for tax and inheritance purposes. Then the six of them went punting under a cloudless sky. 

Transient global amnesia. Janet finished emptying his All-Souls rooms (it took three days). 

Parfit’s official retirement day in the UK was 30 September 2010, and the following day, 1 October, he was elected Emeritus Fellow at All Souls. 

Parfit did not do pizza, certainly not ‘recreational pizza’. He did muesli. And salad. And the odd meal out if food was washed down with philosophical discussion.

And when they expressed surprise, he looked at them and said, ‘Do you think I’m some kind of monster?’ It dawned on Temkin that perhaps he had not shut himself away, socially, because he was wholly anti-social, but rather because he felt that he had a higher calling. 

Parfit entered into an animated conversation about cryonics with Peter Singer and Anders Sandberg, near the barbecue. Sandberg found himself in the middle of a pincer attack. Singer objected to cryonics on the grounds that the money could be far better spent on helping others. Parfit pressed personal identity points.

Schock Prize

His sensibility with regard to suffering was constrained by neither time nor place.

‘Afterwards I asked my wife about the topic of conversation. She said, “Apparently, Bernard Williams doesn’t have a concept of a normative reason.”’

Peter Singer had conceived the idea of a book of essays on Parfit’s metaethics, with replies from Parfit.  His replies became so lengthy that it was no longer feasible to include them in one volume — and OUP, Parfit, and Singer together agreed that it made more sense for the essays and replies to appear in separate volumes, Does Anything Really Matter? and On What Matters, Volume 3. 

Simon Kirchin.  Reading Parfit On What Matters

Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics,

It became an in-joke among some members that anybody who came to work for GWWC had to possess a copy of Reasons and Persons — some owned two copies, one for home, one for the office.

It took Parfit until 2014 to sign the GWWC pledge — and he agreed to do so only after wrangling over the wording.

‘What really distressed him about the thought that mankind might cease was that there would be nobody anymore to listen to Mozart’.

Parfit wanted the Effective Altruism movement to swivel its orientation to the long term.

 In 2016, the movement sought Parfit’s explicit endorsement. He responded to the first email immediately, and with enthusiasm. ‘Would be happy to be involved as an adviser. With best wishes, and gladness for your activities, Derek.’

Between 7 and 9 July 2014, he took part in a conference on effective altruism at All Souls, called ‘Good Done Right’. The following year, in April 2015, he spoke on effective altruism at Harvard, and in June 2015 he delivered a well–attended talk at the student-run Oxford Union.

22. Incompatible with Life

Parfit was back at Rutgers in the autumn of 2014, when a meal out nearly killed him. 

‘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.’

Peter Singer thinks there was not one, but two motivational fears: ‘death and eviction from All Souls’.

“My life is my work. I believe I have found some 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.” This struck Glover as absurd. ‘He wrote some of the deepest and most brilliant philosophy of our time, likely to be thought about long after the rest of us are gone. In discussions that made us all think, he was a great stimulus to huge numbers of colleagues, students and friends. If his life was wasted, what hope for the rest of us philosophy teachers?’

23. Parfit’s Gamble

Sometime during the hours separating 1 and 2 January 2017, Derek Parfit stopped breathing.

Because of Parfit’s psychological need to cover every point and every objection, both Reasons and Persons and On What Matters were longer than they needed to be; they could have been cleaner and more streamlined. Parfit believed that the aesthetic value of a building could suffer if an ugly extension was added to it. Regrettably, he did not apply the same attitude to his books. Bernard Williams once praised a book because the author ‘did his best thinking off the page’. Parfit left too much on it.

Because he dedicated almost every hour to philosophy, he believed his life was uninteresting to others. But it is precisely that monomaniac dedication that makes him a figure of fascination.

In the pursuit of what he considered a higher calling, he was also capable of monstrous selfishness. His friend Bill Ewald’s verdict is that although ‘he never did anything cruel, he also never did anything that was deeply self-sacrificing’. ‘He was, I think, both entirely selfish and entirely benevolent.’

Parfit told one friend that his biggest regret was ‘not being able to be more for Janet’. It is hard not to judge his treatment of his nearest and dearest harshly.  Janet is clear-eyed about her position in the hierarchy: ‘I was a side show in his life. The real show was philosophy.’ She also wrote, ‘I can’t think of anything we did together that wasn’t what he wanted to do.’ All the concessions in the relationship were made by her.

The contrast between the young and old Parfit is glaring. The first part of Parfit’s life was full of — precisely — life; the second part was full of philosophy; and, as it turned out, life and philosophy were not wholly compatible. The young Parfit was relaxed, curious in multiple domains, relished friendship and life in general. The older Parfit was intense, shunned social interactions, and was dedicated to his work to a fanatical degree.

There are certainly character traits that were present throughout Parfit’s life — a benign gentleness; a lack of negative reactive attitudes, such as blame, envy, or hostility. But in other ways there appears to have been a rupture — and behaviour patterns that might indicate autism are far more prominent later than earlier.

Researchers have recently come round to the view that more women are on the autistic spectrum than previously believed, and that many have been able to hide their condition through ‘masking’ — mimicking the social behaviour of others in order to fit in. So, here is one possibility. Perhaps, in the first part of his life, Parfit was a male masker?

The major change in Parfit’s behaviour can be traced to the early 1980s. From this period, there was a notable intensification of his more atypical traits. There were two pivotal episodes at the time. The most stressful period for him was when he was rebuffed for promotion in 1981 — a promotion he had complacently taken for granted. That forced him to devote two manic years to Reasons and Persons. Then, in 1984, with his appointment to the position of Senior Research Fellow, he was effectively handed job security for life. He was no longer required to be who he was not.

Perhaps Parfit made a clear-headed choice. He decided that there were certain fundamental questions and that he was in the small category of people with the intellectual capacity to make progress on the answers. This was a privilege, but also a burden.

‘There was something of a religious fervour about the older Derek’s attitude to “what matters”.’ An echo of the Parfit family missionary zeal.

Accomplishment was Parfit’s most valued virtue. The accomplishment he cared most about was demonstrating that morality was objective — for if it was not, he believed, his life was useless, as were all our lives. The ambition of his last two decades was to rescue ethics.

We do not need to adopt Parfit’s narrow view about what matters in order to realize that forfeiting the things that other people find fulfilling is a risky strategy. If the work produced is of seminal value, then the life devoted to it might reasonably be judged as worthwhile, in spite of its self-sacrifice. But if it is not, then it will seem wasted and impoverished.

 Readers can turn to Parfit’s work and reach their own verdict. My own view, and the reason I wrote this book, is that his gamble paid off.