'Parfit' by David Edmonds
I’ll admit that half my interest in reading Parfit comes from my love of that Oxford murder mystery trifecta—“Morse,” “Lewis” and “Endeavor”—plus Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Oxford don C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands. But the other half comes from my interest in a contemporary philosopher who can write well and plainly, shrugging off the screwy bullshit of the post-this-and-that gang in favor of addressing real (rather than theoretical) problems.
Although Derek Parfit (1942-2017) came from the English middle class, he dwelled from adolescence through death in the most exclusive confines of Britain’s elite academies. He was a scholarship kid, a King’s Scholar at Eton where high marks earned him a royally endowed education. From there, on to Oxford—and he never left except for fellowships and visiting lectureships at Harvard, Princeton and other prestigious American institutions.
Parfit author David Edmonds’ interest in modern philosophy previously led him to coauthor a bestseller on an earlier giant in the field, Wittgenstein’s Poker. Parfit was Edmonds dissertation co-supervisor at Oxford in the ‘80s, and while he knew Parfit’s work as a student, “I remember little of our meetings back then,” he confesses. “I recall my nervousness as I walked up the stone stairs of staircase XI in the back quad of All Souls. For some reason, I recall the sofa I sat upon. I remember his red tie. And his long, wavy, already whitish hair, though he was then only in his forties.”
It's almost the storyboard for an episode of “Lewis” with an eccentric academic holding forth from the archaic comfort of the world’s most storied university (sorry Cambridge). Unlike several distinguished professors from the “Morse”-“Lewis”-“Endeavor” universe, Parfit never killed anyone, albeit murder may have been one of his thought experiments. Should you kill one person to save five from certain death?
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Two generations of Anglican missionaries were in his family tree, but his parents lost their faith in Christianity from the behavior of Christians. Parvit was especially flummoxed by the Western Christian theology of hell. And yet, even if there is no God, he intuited that morality should not—could not—rest on cultural constructions, herd-mentality social norms or ideological imperatives. The train of that thought had already arrived at Auschwitz.
Parfit’s magnum opus, Reasons and Persons (1984), dissects the dogma of self-interest embraced over the past century by every greedy bastard, sociopath, egomaniac and ethically unstable philosopher. Parfit called self-interest a “self-defeating theory.” How could human life persist if everyone acted only in self-interest at all times? He also took to task the utilitarian doctrine, which holds that one should always act to produce the most happiness or wellbeing, as if quantification was the sole measure of virtue. As Edmonds puts it, if there is “a child currently suffering in the world more than my child, utilitarianism seems to demand that I neglect my own child to help this more needy child.” Parfit insisted that we think of ourselves as individuals within a larger whole, understanding our actions “not in terms of what they alone achieve, but rather in terms of what they achieve given the acts of others.”
The best example is carbon emission. I can say that my choice to run the AC less often contributes virtually nothing to halting climate change and I’d be right—yet if everyone abstained from doing the right thing because of its limited result, the icecaps would melt even faster. “You can do something wrong, even if the wrongness is not felt,” Edmonds writes, paraphrasing Parfit, “It is wrong to pollute, even if one’s contribution to overall pollution is negligible.”
