James Aitchison

My Favourite Philosophical Passage

My favourite philosophical passage is the final section from Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons.  The section is just six paragraphs long and I include it below.

This section is quite remarkable in its context. Reasons and Persons is a great book but for most of us it is not an easy read.  It has 450 pages of brilliant but dense arguments, but then suddenly this final section, number 154, is an accessible gem.  More extraordinary, Section 154 raises two profoundly important new points, not really covered previously in the book.

When I first read the passage soon after publication in 1984 I thought – wow, this is so important, why aren’t others thinking like this?  But Parfit was ahead of his time and now the two ideas in section 154 are widely adopted, particularly in the Effective Altruism movement.

Two profound points

Parfit’s first point is that humanity’s future may be long and therefore that ‘the destruction of humanity would be by far the greatest of all conceivable crimes.’  He illustrates this with a much-referenced thought experiment: in his view the difference between a nuclear war that kills 99% of the existing population and one that kills 100% is ‘very much greater’ than the difference between peace and killing 99%.  He says that extinction would be bad from a Classical Utilitarian perspective, because of ‘the vast reduction of the possible sum of happiness’ and also in terms of ideal goods, from the potential progress to new heights that would be lost.

His second point is that ethics is only just beginning and has great potential.  He points out that ‘few people have made Non-Religious Ethics their life’s work.’  ‘Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since the 1960s.  Compared with the other sciences, Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.’ ‘Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage.  We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement.  Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.’      

Towards The Precipice

Our understanding of extinction risk and longtermism have advanced substantially since 1984.  That philosophy progresses, and that it collaborates with other disciplines, is nicely illustrated by comparing the few lines in Parfit with the broad and detailed treatment in Toby Ord’s The Precipice: Existential Risk and The Future of Humanity (2020) – which includes Parfit’s 99%/100% thought experiment on page 43.   Ord was a pupil of Parfit and he spoke about Section 154 at EA Global 2016 – see from 35 to 37 minutes.  

Stunted ethics

My main interest is in Parfit’s view that ethics is only just beginning. He notes that until recently ethics was largely tied to religion.  Although he does not state this explicitly, I presume he thought religious ethics less valuable as it takes religious texts and signs as authoritative and concentrated on interpreting these rather than directly trying to work out how to act.  I could broaden Parfit’s view that religion stunts ethics to say that regarding morality as having an independent existence, or being purely discoverable by conscience, also make it hard to apply reason to ethics.

Parfit then points out that when secular moral philosophy was first professionalised in the early 20th Century, most of the philosophers ‘did not do Ethics.  They did Meta-Ethics. They did not ask which outcomes would be good or bad, or which acts would be right or wrong. They asked, and wrote about, only the meaning of moral language, and the question of objectivity.’

I would argue that the problem was not that moral philosophers did meta-ethics, but that they got the answers wrong, and in a damaging way.  Many philosophers thought for example that ethical statements were expression of attitudes and not capable of being true.  These ideas dominated the academy and made it difficult to work constructively on ethics until the 1960s.  

My perspective on meta-ethical obstacles 

My perspective largely accords with Parfit’s.  For me, ethics, as making good practical judgements, is a fundamental aspect of life, with good choices mattering greatly to our welfare. Despite the importance of the subject, historically, we have not systematically studied ethics largely as it was thought religion was authoritative.  More recently, a dominant view was that ethics was unimportant as it could not be a matter of truth.  We are now moving past the twin traps of religion and non-cognitivism and have started to focus squarely on a view of ethics as being about making good choices to promote welfare and other ends.  And we need to advance our ethical understanding rapidly to deal with issues such as extinction risk. 

Against Parfit, I think there is work to be done in meta-ethics.  I fear that most people believe that ethics is either heavenly (independently existing,  or from God, or delivered by conscience) or meaningless (non-cognitivism, emotivism or error-theory). I am trying to contribute to demonstrating that these ideas are wrong and that ethics has a simple nature as human judgements about achieving ends that matter.  The aim is to clear the field of the metaphysical confusions so that normative ethics can progress without distractions.

More on Parfit

To read some more about Parfit, see this delightful blog post by SJBeard.