Derek Parfit

1942-2017 · British · Personal Identity, Ethics, Metaethics, Population Ethics, Practical Reason

What am I more than elaborate sentience?

Derek Parfit spent nearly five decades as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, working with monastic intensity on three questions he found genuinely urgent: what are we, what do we owe the future, and whether morality rests on secure foundations.

Topics Derek Parfit addresses

• reductionism about personal identity
• psychological continuity and connectedness
• identity is not what matters
• the teletransporter case
• the combined spectrum
• the non-identity problem
• the repugnant conclusion
• the triple theory
• convergence of Kantian, consequentialist, and contractualist ethics
• non-naturalist normative realism
• the priority view
• prioritarianism
• the levelling down objection
• indirectly self-defeating theories
• the self-interest theory
• consequentialism
• person-affecting principles
• future generations ethics
• population ethics
• the present-aim theory
• critical present-aim theory
• stance-independence of normative truths
• theory X
• the dualism of practical reason

Converse with Derek Parfit on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Derek Parfit's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.