When I last looked at Parfit's 2002 Tanner Lectures, the "Ur-text" of On What Matters, it was to discuss the first of those lectures, and, not least, to examine how there Parfit interpreted Kant's Formula of Humanity. In this posting I'm going to look at Parfit's second 2002 lecture where he turns, by contrast, to the discussion of Kant's Formula(s) of Universal Law.
Parfit opens the second of his lectures with a discussion of the nature of Kant's references to "maxims" in his account of the rightness of acts. Parfit lists some statements that are described by Kant as "maxims" and then proceeds to describe what he terms Kant's "stated criterion of strict duties" which is: "it is wrong to act on maxims that could not be universal laws" though this seems to be based on Ak. 4: 424 where Kant in fact, by referring to at least two types of contradiction, refers to notions of "conception" and "willing" to distinguish them, a distinction that Parfit appears to make nothing of. Parfit looks instead at the notion that what is tested by the reference to universal laws is the "permissibility" of certain maxims (not their "possibility" of being experienced which is what Kant discusses). The notion of "permissibility" is not, in any case, taken by Parfit to be a very helpful way of understanding Kant's notion of universalisation and he raises questions about maxim-formation that have been circulating in the literature for some time in terms of the "test" of universality being either under-determined or over-determined.
In the process of raising these points Parfit criticises ways of understanding universal laws that have been made by Onora O'Neill which culminates in a switch from the initial "stated criterion of strict duties" to a different "actual criterion of strict duties" which latter states that: "it is wrong to act on maxims whose being universally accepted, or believed to be permissible, would make it impossible for anyone successfully to act upon them". This criteria has the advantage that it appears to make questions of publicity emerge as key to the way universal laws are meant to work. However, it is not this, but instead the notion of "success" that Parfit fixes on, arguing, as he does, that the alleged maxim of coercing others wherever this would benefit me, even if adopted universally, would not be universally impossible to successfully achieve. This objection strikes me as a pretty odd one since such a situation would, if it was the basis of all known and avowed maxims, make rather a large number of actions impossible of success and is the basic reason why, in the Doctrine of Right, Kant can provide an argument for the need for a sovereign power.
Parfit does not consider such a case, however, preferring instead to look at Kant's arguments against lying and stealing which are, however, themselves interpreted by Parfit in ways that are pretty eccentric since he focuses primarily on the question of the egoist, which was not obviously on Kant's agenda at all here. Parfit makes a better point with regard to lying promises since it is here that he sees that the practice of promising is conditional on the notion that keeping them is the general rule to be observed. This leads Parfit to begin to consider the reference to universality in a different way to previously as based not merely on an account of maxims in relation to acts but also in relation to beliefs concerning acts. However Parfit still has difficulties with the kind of criteria that the reference to universal laws seems to involve since, as he can easily point out, there are cases where lying promises might seem to be required.
The first lesson derived from the discussion by Parfit emerges at this point which is to the effect that relating maxims permissibility to a standard of universal successful accomplishment appears to make the universality criteria either much too weak or much too strong. It is only after this point has been stated that Parfit actually states Kant's Formula of Universal Law which is, however, given in a form that Kant never explicitly gives. The Formula in Parfit's telling emerges as follows: "It is wrong to act on some maxim unless we could also rationally will it to be true that this maxim is a universal law". Shortly after giving this formula Parfit also adds the "law of nature formula" and what he terms "the Permissibility Formula" which latter is said to state: "It is wrong to act on some maxim unless we could also rationally will it to be true that everyone is morally permitted to act in this way". This latter notion is said to be derived from Thomas Scanlon and is freely admitted by Parfit to be one that is not generally recognised.
Nor does Parfit stop here, however, since after giving the "permissibility formula" he adds that Kant's basic assumption in this alleged formula refers to effects of beliefs people hold and thus depends on what Parfit calls a "Moral Belief Formula", something that he implicitly appealed to earlier in the lecture but which is now explicitly presented as stating: "It is wrong to act on some maxim unless we could also rationally will it to be true that everyone believes such acts to be permissible". This formula is, however, implicitly conservative since it appears to require recognition of actual beliefs and thus not to test them.
As often, however, Parfit moves on to a different question than the one that seems obvious since his question about the alleged formulas given does not turn on any particular type of objection to their coherence but instead he goes back again to the question of the status of "maxims" for Kant. Here Parfit makes the point that when Kant speaks of "maxims" it seems that different types of things can be at issue. Thus, on some occasions it appears that Kant is using "maxim" to indicate the "policy" on which someone is acting, on others to the relationship between "policy" and "aim". Having made this point Parfit returns to the general problem of having a view of maxims that provides a serious wrong-making criteria and indicates that many maxims have a "mixed" status in the sense that it is not always bad to act on them nor always good. This is termed by Parfit the "mixed maxims objection" to the accounts of maxims that have been discussed by him up to this point. In response to it Parfit suggests a revision of Kant's Formula(s). The point of the revision is, however, a rather odd one. Having indicated that his basic problem is with "mixed maxims" Parfit suggests that the way that maxims are referred to should not be by means of policies or aims but instead by what persons are "intentionally doing". In fact, in stating this, Parfit seems unusually poorly informed since making the understanding of maxims refer to "intentions" is a proposal that has been widely considered and it has provoked serious objections from a range of philosophers.
Nor, in any case, is it obvious that what Parfit goes on to do is to discuss a revision that is really based on this notion of "intentions". It is instead Parfit's move to begin discussing rational willing and this appears to involve some sense of instrumental coherence, a notion that requires no explicit reference to "intentions" at all.
Parfit states that Kant's Formula(s) of universal law work best when 3 conditions are satisfied, namely, that it would be (a) possible to act on the maxim; (b) the effects of the maxim would be much the same however many people acted on it; (c) these effects could be randomly or equally distributed between people. Understanding Kant's formulas in this way brings them close to considerations that are at work in standard decision theories and in games theories (much as Parfit invokes in Reasons and Persons). Parfit's claim is that the problems that arise for the Kantian formulas are related to failure of one of these conditions. The only failure Parfit explicitly considers is (c) which leads to burdens being imposed only on select groups. In raising this point Parfit gets to the notion of "impartiality" and indicates that there is no guarantee of impartial consideration in weighing universal acceptability. The example of this given is one that I find extremely unpersuasive though and appears to me to be a prime example of what is often termed "maxim-fiddling".
The example is of a racist who takes it that there would be no problem of universalising maxims of segregation and unequal treatment. But in allowing the racist this claim Parfit neglects to conceive of the world that would therefore be being willed which would be a world in which there would therefore be no problem with the racist himself suffering the same treatment whenever they were in the minority. In failing to conceive of the general test in this way Parfit has simply fiddled the maxim in the racist's favour.
Parfit eventually gets to a version of this response when he considers Thomas Nagel's account of the maxims concerning benevolence which is the classic counterpart of the problem with contradiction of the will that I have transposed here to the case of the racist. Nagel appears to view the benevolence example as requiring us to be placed in "everyone else's position" but this is too strong and all that is needed is precisely what Parfit agrees is found in the discussion of benevolence in the Groundwork which is the failure of rational willing even in the case of the one willing non-beneficence. It is due to such failure that Rawls, as Parfit cites, invokes his idea of the "veil of ignorance" as a way of seeing the problem here. It is not that Kant has to have directly supposed that we do need to invoke this veil, as Parfit wrongly assumes. It is rather that the veil is an alternative way to make the same point in the same spirit.
In response to the discussion at this point Parfit invokes another way of understanding Kant's formulas of universal law in terms that recognises the question about impartiality in an explicit form. This leads Parfit to give what he terms the "Formula of Universally Willed Acts" which is as follows: "An act is wrong unless it could be rationally willed by everyone". This formula is an extension of the Consent Principle that Parfit found to be the first part of Kant's Formula of Humanity. It faces at least the problem Parfit himself mentions which is that Kant does not refer in this way to "what everyone could rationally will" though it is evident he does require some sense of rational willing to be understood. However Parfit concludes the second lecture with 2 final formulas. The first is meant to build in a reference to beliefs and produces what Parfit terms "Kant's Contractualist Formula" which is: "We ought to act on the principles whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will". This version brings Kant into the vicinity of Thomas Scanlon though this point is not explored in this lecture.
Finally Parfit concludes with a formula that explicitly brings in a reference to Rawls' notion of the "veil of ignorance" and is stated simply as "Rawls's Formula" and is given as follows: "We ought to act on the principles that it would be rational for everyone to choose, as the principles that we would all accept, if no one knew anything about themselves or their circumstances".
Parfit concludes the second 2002 lecture with the claim that the third lecture will be devoted to consideration of the contractualist formula though it surely also considers its relationship to Rawls's Formula and indicates a resolution of some sort of the two formulas. However, before looking at the third and final 2002 lecture I will first consider the ways in which the discussion of the second 2002 lecture becomes transformed and reworked in Climbing the Mountain and the pre-publication version of On What Matters to become, eventually, Chapters 12 to 14 of the published book.
Showing posts with label Reasons and Persons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reasons and Persons. Show all posts
Monday, 5 March 2012
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
Philip Kitcher's review of Parfit
Philip Kitcher has published a review of On What Matters in the New Republic and it is available here. The review is unusually long, as is fitting given the length of Parfit's book and it is divided into four parts. In the first part Kitcher responds to the popular conception of ethics as based, in some way, on religion which he uses to bring out the general reasons why philosophers tend to resist this assimilation. As Kitcher states, Plato was already suspicious of such a connection and posed some clear problems for anyone who wished to take religion as the basis of ethics. Not only is there such a rich tradition of philosophy seeking to set ethics apart from religion but, even given the reign of specialisation in contemporary intellectual life, ethics seems to be one area where philosophy contributes to the general cultural conversation.
Having opened with these general comments Kitcher introduces Parfit to New Republic's readers as the author of Reasons and Persons and points out that the new book will be intensively studied given the status that the earlier book gave Parfit. The second section of the review turns to some of the distinctive elements of On What Matters introducing, for example, Parfit's discussion of "reasons" and his search for a "supreme principle" of morality. After mentioning the formulation of the "supreme principle" that Parfit eventually reaches, Kitcher mentions that Parfit does not take this principle to be capable of deciding all ethical questions (which is hardly surprising). Parfit's search for the supreme principle takes place by means of assessing and bringing together the rival claims of consequentialism, contractualism and something called "Kantianism" though there would be rather a lot to say about the ways Parfit characterises the latter (and in this blog I have discussed in some detail a number of elements of Parfit's account).
Since the first volume seems to present the manner that Parfit sees the problem and already to invoke the tools by which he aims to resolve it, the question of the status of the second volume of his work is a pertinent one that Kitcher raises. It appears to have two central points, one of which is to state and respond to the views of a number of critics of the views espoused in the first volume, and the other of which is to explore the nature of Parfit's problem with naturalistic views of ethics.
The third section of Kitcher's review is where he begins to lay out reservations concerning the positions adopted in On What Matters. Whilst one central question concerns the success of Parfit's convergence between the three theories he takes seriously, Kitcher raises two other questions as ones he is more concerned with than this one. Kitcher's first question concerns the goal Parfit has adopted, in terms of assuming that the convergence between the three theories would have important practical consequences if established. The reason Kitcher appears to be sceptical about this does not strike me, however, as a good one. Kitcher's scepticism concerns whether the formulation of a successful theory of convergence with regard to the major traditions of ethical theory would really matter given that we would still have the messy task of making ethical judgments. But this seems to me to rest on a misunderstanding of the import of ethical theory. Surely no one would seriously contend that a successful ethical theory would remove the need for judgment? Anyone who thought this would have a very odd view not merely of ethics but of the relationship between general formulations and particular circumstances in relation to theoretical models. No theoretical model can "saturate" the terrain it describes which is why there are levels of generality within such models and one of the ways these levels are marked precisely concerns the need for judgments of application. So it strikes me as odd to think that the point of Parfit's endeavour would be the removal of the appeal to judgment (though if it is successful it should presumably guide the process by which we form judgments, it could not tell us exhaustively when and where we need to apply them).
The reason why Kitcher appears to think that this appeal to judgment is somehow an objection to Parfit concerns the way in which he understands the formulation of a "supreme principle". Kitcher, in appealing in a pluralist way, to the notion that many principles might be needed, appears to take the invocation of a "supreme principle" to be something that leaves behind diversity of considerations though this can hardly be held to be true of others, like Kant, who have searched for such supreme principles. Kant takes the "supreme principle" of morality to be the principle of autonomy but anyone reading about the categorical imperative would be aware that distinct formulations of it exist and that these formulations appear to pick out different ways in which action can be assessed. This point, like the one about judgment, appears to be based on an odd view of Kitcher's.
Kitcher's second objection concerns the nature of Parfit's appeal to thought experiments. Again Kitcher points to the need for readers, when reviewing Parfit's thought experiments to come to views about whether the experiments in question have been formulated well by Parfit and whether they support his conclusions. Kitcher argues that Parfit possesses "no standard of objectivity for provoking reliable responses" which appears again to mistake what Parfit is up to. The suggestion of a standard of objectivity that is separate or distinct from Parfit's conception of "reasons" strikes me as otiose but, further, the assessment of thought experiments, whilst difficult given how far they take us from our ordinary use of concepts, is very standard in a lot of contemporary ethical theory and it appears odd to strike at Parfit in particular for favouring it. Some of Parfit's critics on this score, such as Allen Wood, have resorted on occasion to such experiments themselves and it is hard to imagine moral theory proceeding without some version of them.
The real thrust of Kitcher's problem with thought experiments is, however, posed in a sharper way when he suggests that the experiments are "rigged" and that questions of life and death appear to rest upon them. In fact it is not obvious to me that Parfit's theories rest as solidly upon the appeal to thought experiments as this suggests as he usually uses them in order not to decide an issue but rather to sharpen the precision of a formula. Secondly, in taking them to be "rigged" Kitcher appears to have recourse to a distinct way of describing ethical dilemmas that does not involve important presuppositions and I find this hard to comprehend.
In his response to Parfit's criticism of naturalism Kitcher fastens on an apparent admission of the role of intuition by Parfit and appears to take Parfit to view intuition in an especially mysterious way, something again that seems to require us to think that the appeal Parfit makes to intuition is different in kind or more suspect than the appeal others have made to it. Again, this is difficult to comprehend. The sum of the problems raised in the third part of Kitcher's review is meant to lead one to the conclusion that Parfit's work lacks the potential to contribute to the broader cultural discussion of ethics with which Kitcher began but it is hard for me to see that he has succeeded in making this point.
The fourth and final part of Kitcher's review presents an alternative to the conception of ethical theory that Kitcher views Parfit as having presented. This alternative is presented initially on epistemic grounds with Kitcher again picturing Parfit's method in question-begging terms as apparently being an heroic attempt to generate ethical obligations ab initio (a view for which I find no support in my reading of On What Matters). In response Kitcher appeals to a kind of Aristotelian picture of beginning in the middle of things, by which he means not in the middle of common sense morality but rather from the morass of detail provided about human beings within the human, natural and social sciences. In other words, Kitcher, like Blackburn, adopts an essentially Humean picture of moral theory that sees philosophy as offering no more than a generalization of the results of investigations into "human nature".
Ethics is thus seen on Kitcher's picture as a form of social technology that developed by trial and error in humanity's natural history, an approach that he fails to see as having substantial problems in accounting for the apparently necessarily binding character of ethical obligation. This appears to be the basis of Kitcher's rather misguided resistance to searches for the "supreme principle of morality". Kitcher's review strikes me as misguided in the types of objections and problems it poses to Parfit and the way in which it is so misguided reflects a real divide within ethical theory, a divide between those who take the point of such theory to have a distinctive philosophical basis and those, instead, who would follow Hume in advocating a drastic diminution of the role of philosophy in intellectual life. Whilst I have voiced, and will continue to voice, many criticisms of Parfit's work, it seems to me that in relation to this divide, Parfit is on the right side.
Having opened with these general comments Kitcher introduces Parfit to New Republic's readers as the author of Reasons and Persons and points out that the new book will be intensively studied given the status that the earlier book gave Parfit. The second section of the review turns to some of the distinctive elements of On What Matters introducing, for example, Parfit's discussion of "reasons" and his search for a "supreme principle" of morality. After mentioning the formulation of the "supreme principle" that Parfit eventually reaches, Kitcher mentions that Parfit does not take this principle to be capable of deciding all ethical questions (which is hardly surprising). Parfit's search for the supreme principle takes place by means of assessing and bringing together the rival claims of consequentialism, contractualism and something called "Kantianism" though there would be rather a lot to say about the ways Parfit characterises the latter (and in this blog I have discussed in some detail a number of elements of Parfit's account).
Since the first volume seems to present the manner that Parfit sees the problem and already to invoke the tools by which he aims to resolve it, the question of the status of the second volume of his work is a pertinent one that Kitcher raises. It appears to have two central points, one of which is to state and respond to the views of a number of critics of the views espoused in the first volume, and the other of which is to explore the nature of Parfit's problem with naturalistic views of ethics.
The third section of Kitcher's review is where he begins to lay out reservations concerning the positions adopted in On What Matters. Whilst one central question concerns the success of Parfit's convergence between the three theories he takes seriously, Kitcher raises two other questions as ones he is more concerned with than this one. Kitcher's first question concerns the goal Parfit has adopted, in terms of assuming that the convergence between the three theories would have important practical consequences if established. The reason Kitcher appears to be sceptical about this does not strike me, however, as a good one. Kitcher's scepticism concerns whether the formulation of a successful theory of convergence with regard to the major traditions of ethical theory would really matter given that we would still have the messy task of making ethical judgments. But this seems to me to rest on a misunderstanding of the import of ethical theory. Surely no one would seriously contend that a successful ethical theory would remove the need for judgment? Anyone who thought this would have a very odd view not merely of ethics but of the relationship between general formulations and particular circumstances in relation to theoretical models. No theoretical model can "saturate" the terrain it describes which is why there are levels of generality within such models and one of the ways these levels are marked precisely concerns the need for judgments of application. So it strikes me as odd to think that the point of Parfit's endeavour would be the removal of the appeal to judgment (though if it is successful it should presumably guide the process by which we form judgments, it could not tell us exhaustively when and where we need to apply them).
The reason why Kitcher appears to think that this appeal to judgment is somehow an objection to Parfit concerns the way in which he understands the formulation of a "supreme principle". Kitcher, in appealing in a pluralist way, to the notion that many principles might be needed, appears to take the invocation of a "supreme principle" to be something that leaves behind diversity of considerations though this can hardly be held to be true of others, like Kant, who have searched for such supreme principles. Kant takes the "supreme principle" of morality to be the principle of autonomy but anyone reading about the categorical imperative would be aware that distinct formulations of it exist and that these formulations appear to pick out different ways in which action can be assessed. This point, like the one about judgment, appears to be based on an odd view of Kitcher's.
Kitcher's second objection concerns the nature of Parfit's appeal to thought experiments. Again Kitcher points to the need for readers, when reviewing Parfit's thought experiments to come to views about whether the experiments in question have been formulated well by Parfit and whether they support his conclusions. Kitcher argues that Parfit possesses "no standard of objectivity for provoking reliable responses" which appears again to mistake what Parfit is up to. The suggestion of a standard of objectivity that is separate or distinct from Parfit's conception of "reasons" strikes me as otiose but, further, the assessment of thought experiments, whilst difficult given how far they take us from our ordinary use of concepts, is very standard in a lot of contemporary ethical theory and it appears odd to strike at Parfit in particular for favouring it. Some of Parfit's critics on this score, such as Allen Wood, have resorted on occasion to such experiments themselves and it is hard to imagine moral theory proceeding without some version of them.
The real thrust of Kitcher's problem with thought experiments is, however, posed in a sharper way when he suggests that the experiments are "rigged" and that questions of life and death appear to rest upon them. In fact it is not obvious to me that Parfit's theories rest as solidly upon the appeal to thought experiments as this suggests as he usually uses them in order not to decide an issue but rather to sharpen the precision of a formula. Secondly, in taking them to be "rigged" Kitcher appears to have recourse to a distinct way of describing ethical dilemmas that does not involve important presuppositions and I find this hard to comprehend.
In his response to Parfit's criticism of naturalism Kitcher fastens on an apparent admission of the role of intuition by Parfit and appears to take Parfit to view intuition in an especially mysterious way, something again that seems to require us to think that the appeal Parfit makes to intuition is different in kind or more suspect than the appeal others have made to it. Again, this is difficult to comprehend. The sum of the problems raised in the third part of Kitcher's review is meant to lead one to the conclusion that Parfit's work lacks the potential to contribute to the broader cultural discussion of ethics with which Kitcher began but it is hard for me to see that he has succeeded in making this point.
The fourth and final part of Kitcher's review presents an alternative to the conception of ethical theory that Kitcher views Parfit as having presented. This alternative is presented initially on epistemic grounds with Kitcher again picturing Parfit's method in question-begging terms as apparently being an heroic attempt to generate ethical obligations ab initio (a view for which I find no support in my reading of On What Matters). In response Kitcher appeals to a kind of Aristotelian picture of beginning in the middle of things, by which he means not in the middle of common sense morality but rather from the morass of detail provided about human beings within the human, natural and social sciences. In other words, Kitcher, like Blackburn, adopts an essentially Humean picture of moral theory that sees philosophy as offering no more than a generalization of the results of investigations into "human nature".
Ethics is thus seen on Kitcher's picture as a form of social technology that developed by trial and error in humanity's natural history, an approach that he fails to see as having substantial problems in accounting for the apparently necessarily binding character of ethical obligation. This appears to be the basis of Kitcher's rather misguided resistance to searches for the "supreme principle of morality". Kitcher's review strikes me as misguided in the types of objections and problems it poses to Parfit and the way in which it is so misguided reflects a real divide within ethical theory, a divide between those who take the point of such theory to have a distinctive philosophical basis and those, instead, who would follow Hume in advocating a drastic diminution of the role of philosophy in intellectual life. Whilst I have voiced, and will continue to voice, many criticisms of Parfit's work, it seems to me that in relation to this divide, Parfit is on the right side.
Monday, 21 November 2011
Rawls and Alternative Views of Justice
In my last posting on Rawls I looked at his response to "common sense" precepts of justice. There we discovered some reasons why "common sense" precepts are at the wrong level of generality to serve as primary principles of justice. However, Rawls concludes Chapter V of A Theory of Justice by considering two other alternatives to his argument for the two principles as the right ones to be adopted in the original position. In section 49 he addresses "mixed" conceptions of justice and in section 50 concludes with a response to the arguments that have been presented for a principle of political perfectionism. In this posting I will look at these arguments in turn.
At the opening of section 49 Rawls makes clear that the "mixed" conceptions considered are ones that require the adoption of the first principle of justice and, concomitantly with this, also agree to its lexical priority over the preferred second principle where this second principle is thought to have replaced the complicated conjunction of fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle that Rawls has advocated as required. So essentially the "mixed" conceptions supplement the liberty principle with something different than the directly egalitarian concerns Rawls has presented them with. An obvious example of a "mixed" conception would be a combination of the liberty principle with the principle of utility where, however, given lexical priority, the principle of utility would be subordinate to the liberty principle.
Such "mixed" conceptions would be in the classic position of intuitionist positions generally on Rawls' view which is that they would lack precision in application. You could, for example, view the second principle as a combination of "average" utility with some chosen minimum level of agreed income but it would still be an open question how to govern the relations between these elements. Effectively it might well be the case, Rawls suggests, that the difference principle would be being covertly appealed to in such a case. The difficulty here is much as with the appeal to "common sense" precepts which is that the intuitive nature of the combination in question leaves much undecided and without evident mechanisms available for decisions to be made. The difference principle, by contrast, allows for a direct form of appeal to be made in evaluation of decisions and this is a clear advantage of it.
Appeal to utility, even in a combined or "mixed" conception, constantly creates the problem of how the utility functions are to be measured. Maximisation has to include some measurement function and perhaps the most obvious one is the zero-one claim (everyone's preferences to count for one and no more than one). However this leaves a lot undecided between positive and negative outcomes and could lead, for example, to a preference for a large population that was relatively uneducated on the grounds that greater net utility was more easily achieved given greater numbers and fewer wants, an outcome that is, to say the least about it, not intuitive. (To see that Rawls' argument here is far from implausible it suffices only to consider what Parfit, in Reasons and Persons, termed the Repugnant Conclusion.) Generally speaking "mixed" conceptions that involve the principle of utility can be objected to both on grounds that they involve unacceptable uncertainty given their intuitionist basis and unacceptable risks given their utilitarian element.
In section 50 Rawls gives the principle of political perfectionism his attention and distinguishes between an absolute and a moderate variant of the principle. The "absolute" variant places a premium on the production of excellence above all else whilst the moderate version is a "mixed" conception that places the weight of excellence alongside other considerations. Essentially principles of perfection involve selection of certain types of lives as those which are given preference over others given their greater intrinsic value. Rawls terms this an "ideal-regarding" principle rather than a "want-regarding" principle. In one sense such a principle as that of perfection is close to Rawls' own endeavour since the principles of justice themselves are taken to have ideal requirements and to encourage certain types of character. But the principles of justice do not require reference to standards of excellence.
Principles of perfection would not be adopted in the original position on Rawls' view as there is no shared standard of perfection given in the original position. There is only an index of primary goods, which are assumed to be something all would want, not a standard of excellence which only some would aspire to incarnating or aiming towards. Only if a natural duty was assumed in the original position that was accepted as culturally viable could there be space within it for the choice of the principle of perfection. This does not mean that all activities will be taken to be of equal value but that there is not an assumption that the attainment of particular types of excellence will shape the basic structure.
The principle of perfection, if combined with another in the moderate "mixed" version, faces the familiar problems Rawls always poses to intuitionist views. Generally Rawls also considers the appeal to "excellence" to involve considerations that are distinct from those of justice. So, for example, appeals for certain kinds of prohibitions on behaviour (as with sodomy statutes) often require that particular ways of life be given special privilege but this consideration, given as such, has no obvious claim to be a just one. As Rawls puts it, "subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety" shape standards of excellence and these types of preference are not obvious bases for just evaluations.
With the rejection of the principle of perfection in both absolute and moderate forms Rawls concludes Chapter V, a conclusion that effectively closes his consideration of how the principles of justice relate to institutions in a general sense although, as we shall see, in due course, one very important question of institutional type is left for discussion in Chapter VI.
At the opening of section 49 Rawls makes clear that the "mixed" conceptions considered are ones that require the adoption of the first principle of justice and, concomitantly with this, also agree to its lexical priority over the preferred second principle where this second principle is thought to have replaced the complicated conjunction of fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle that Rawls has advocated as required. So essentially the "mixed" conceptions supplement the liberty principle with something different than the directly egalitarian concerns Rawls has presented them with. An obvious example of a "mixed" conception would be a combination of the liberty principle with the principle of utility where, however, given lexical priority, the principle of utility would be subordinate to the liberty principle.
Such "mixed" conceptions would be in the classic position of intuitionist positions generally on Rawls' view which is that they would lack precision in application. You could, for example, view the second principle as a combination of "average" utility with some chosen minimum level of agreed income but it would still be an open question how to govern the relations between these elements. Effectively it might well be the case, Rawls suggests, that the difference principle would be being covertly appealed to in such a case. The difficulty here is much as with the appeal to "common sense" precepts which is that the intuitive nature of the combination in question leaves much undecided and without evident mechanisms available for decisions to be made. The difference principle, by contrast, allows for a direct form of appeal to be made in evaluation of decisions and this is a clear advantage of it.
Appeal to utility, even in a combined or "mixed" conception, constantly creates the problem of how the utility functions are to be measured. Maximisation has to include some measurement function and perhaps the most obvious one is the zero-one claim (everyone's preferences to count for one and no more than one). However this leaves a lot undecided between positive and negative outcomes and could lead, for example, to a preference for a large population that was relatively uneducated on the grounds that greater net utility was more easily achieved given greater numbers and fewer wants, an outcome that is, to say the least about it, not intuitive. (To see that Rawls' argument here is far from implausible it suffices only to consider what Parfit, in Reasons and Persons, termed the Repugnant Conclusion.) Generally speaking "mixed" conceptions that involve the principle of utility can be objected to both on grounds that they involve unacceptable uncertainty given their intuitionist basis and unacceptable risks given their utilitarian element.
In section 50 Rawls gives the principle of political perfectionism his attention and distinguishes between an absolute and a moderate variant of the principle. The "absolute" variant places a premium on the production of excellence above all else whilst the moderate version is a "mixed" conception that places the weight of excellence alongside other considerations. Essentially principles of perfection involve selection of certain types of lives as those which are given preference over others given their greater intrinsic value. Rawls terms this an "ideal-regarding" principle rather than a "want-regarding" principle. In one sense such a principle as that of perfection is close to Rawls' own endeavour since the principles of justice themselves are taken to have ideal requirements and to encourage certain types of character. But the principles of justice do not require reference to standards of excellence.
Principles of perfection would not be adopted in the original position on Rawls' view as there is no shared standard of perfection given in the original position. There is only an index of primary goods, which are assumed to be something all would want, not a standard of excellence which only some would aspire to incarnating or aiming towards. Only if a natural duty was assumed in the original position that was accepted as culturally viable could there be space within it for the choice of the principle of perfection. This does not mean that all activities will be taken to be of equal value but that there is not an assumption that the attainment of particular types of excellence will shape the basic structure.
The principle of perfection, if combined with another in the moderate "mixed" version, faces the familiar problems Rawls always poses to intuitionist views. Generally Rawls also considers the appeal to "excellence" to involve considerations that are distinct from those of justice. So, for example, appeals for certain kinds of prohibitions on behaviour (as with sodomy statutes) often require that particular ways of life be given special privilege but this consideration, given as such, has no obvious claim to be a just one. As Rawls puts it, "subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety" shape standards of excellence and these types of preference are not obvious bases for just evaluations.
With the rejection of the principle of perfection in both absolute and moderate forms Rawls concludes Chapter V, a conclusion that effectively closes his consideration of how the principles of justice relate to institutions in a general sense although, as we shall see, in due course, one very important question of institutional type is left for discussion in Chapter VI.
Friday, 9 September 2011
Profile of Parfit in the New Yorker
The New Yorker recently published a lengthy profile of Derek Parfit though, unfortunately, only the abstract of this is available on-line unless you are a subscriber. On a train journey recently I had the time to read through it and thought I would share both some indication of what the profile states and some reactions I had on reading it.
The profile is written by Larissa MacFarquhar who is advertised as preparing a book on the topic of "extreme virtue" and is clearly prompted by the recent publication of On What Matters. The piece opens with a question about personal identity that refers back, however, to the third part of Reasons and Persons and it sets the tone for the general way the profile is constructed. This is not in terms of a continuing philosophical enquiry as set off by the third part of Reasons and Persons, although the piece does include much more philosophy than one might expect. Rather, it is through the focus of the profile on Parfit the man and uses this focus in order to throw some light upon Parfit the thinker. Whilst one may have some reservations about this technique it is the case that much emerges from the outline of Parfit the man that is of undoubted interest.
The opening account of personal identity repeats the general thrust of the argument of Reasons and Persons that, whatever it is "that matters", it is not "personal identity" that does so. The seminal point repeated here is that selves are not, despite the view of "common sense morality", something that are an all-or-nothing affair. This is linked to the claim that Parfit himself made that it may be "liberating" to be released from the "glass tunnel" of the self as it ensures that other people become thereby closer. One of the ways this alleged "liberation" is meant to occur is through the sense that Parfit is less a continuing character and more the source of more or less influential "memes" to use the ugly expression of Richard Dawkins. However, one of the effects of the view Parfit set out in Reasons and Persons is not merely the revision of "common sense morality" but, along with this revision, a kind of challenge to the sense of what it is "that matters". After all, as Bernard Williams and John Rawls argued in their attacks on utilitarianism, if an "impartialist" view of morality abstracts from the separateness of persons this has the general result of making morality something in which we have less obvious interest. Whilst MacFarquhar does not make this point it is noticeable that the shift in the profile from the consideration of personal identity in Reasons and Persons to the discussion of "objective" theories of reasons in On What Matters is presented in terms of the latter responding to an alleged general scepticism concerning moral truth. One of the grounds for such scepticism is precisely the problem of how morality can connect to what we might, following Thomas Nagel, call the experience of "what it is like" to be us. If we are told that there is no fundamental "us" we might come to the view that there is all the less reason to care about "moral truth". This was certainly not the intention of the argument of Reasons and Persons which had, rather, the focus of undermining egoist views of morality in a way that Henry Sidgwick had been unable to do. But responses to egoism need not be impartialist in the way the consequentialist views of Parfit have been and, furthermore, such impartialism may well itself reinforce not only scepticism about morality but a broader focus on precisely only being concerned with self-interest.
MacFarquhar presents the context of On What Matters very well bringing out how the formation of it has been a cooperative venture in which Parfit himself shaped the argument through interaction with other philosophers. She also focuses well on the extreme danger Parfit seems to feel subjective theories of reason pose to a sound sense of objective moral truth though in agreeing to set his view against nihilist pragmatism she allows him the benefit of the doubt here concerning the need for the kind of objectivism he argues for. However, the focus on the question of the contrast between subjective and objective theories of reason that marks the first part of On What Matters takes up only a very small part of MacFarquhar's profile and she soon returns to the concentration on Parfit the man, albeit doing so in a way that certainly subtly reflects back on the denial that personal identity is "what matters" as made in Reasons and Persons.
The return to Parfit the man occurs through reflecting on certain peculiarities of his which are clearly given wider significance in the profile. So, for example, Parfit's habit of wearing the same outfit everyday and of eating in a similarly routinised manner are emphasised. This element of routine is revealed gradually to be part of Parfit's way of dealing with the problem of how to economise on time but is also part of a reaction to the problem of how to avoid emotional entanglement with the everyday. Oddly, however, this element of Parfit the man is presented as part of the way his everyday practice includes a lack of sense of "boundaries" of personal identity whereas it appears to me to mark a clear way in which the boundary of Parfit is maintained since it ensures he remains at an important distance from others. Other elements that mark him as a rather singular person include the information that he lacks the capacity to form images of the past so that memories appear to him only as propositional contents rather as pictures with emotional significance. MacFarquhar points out to Parfit that absence of images need not imply lack of emotional connection and Parfit is indicated as conceding this though the real question is less whether there is any connection between these points than rather "what it is like" (to use Nagel's expression again) not to feel such emotional relation to the past. The lack of it is implied, as with the general presentation of Parfit the man, to be part of his emotional involvement with the denial of the sense of personal identity that common sense morality appears to validate. In other words, it is implied (without being stated) that part of what makes the view of personal identity articulated in Reasons and Persons appealing to Parfit is a certain kind of experience (or set of experiences) of his that set him apart from an understanding of how personal identity is constructed for most of us. As I indicated above, with the example of routinised behaviours, however, I am less convinced than MacFarquhar appears to be, that the evidence she has uncovered points in the direction her profile implies.
Just as routinisation of habits has a very clear individualising function in helping to separate one from others so, similarly, the relation to the past that Parfit describes is also an indication of a singular temperament and its singularity is not evidently one that should point in the direction of an "emotional" commitment to a view of personal identity of the type Parfit has professed.
After these opening sallies have been ventured the profile becomes more conventional, focusing, as is common, on some elements of Parfit's past that might be thought to have formative force for him. This includes information about Parfit's parents and their commitments (to a Christian movement called the Oxford Group) that led them to settle in China. The reference to this group has a further reinforcing effect in the profile since the group that his parents belonged to had a clearly ascetic and purist character expressed in a set of absolutes. This reference, despite the later information of how Parfit's parents later left the movement contributes to the sense that there are environmental backgrounds that led Parfit himself to a view of morality that is more demanding than would be easily accepted by "common sense". However, as with many of the other insinuations in the profile, so also with this one, there is something rather neat about it. After all, why wouldn't Parfit as easily rebel against such a background as conform to its temper, its "spirit" (if not its "letter")? No explanation is attempted here precisely because the art of the profile consists less in argument than intimation.
The movement of Parfit's parents away from the early commitment to the "Oxford Group" is further presented with the effect indicated as having a terrible undermining of his father's self-confidence. This is, however, as shown in the profile, an indication of a serious emotional difference between Parfit's father and Parfit himself since Parfit junior convinced himself by a flawed philosophical argument at an early age that there couldn't be a God and seems never to have been bothered by the question since. This early indication of such independence is itself not probed, just mentioned. In Parfit's infancy the family moved back to England where it would appear he grew up with his mother working as a psychiatrist and his father "a low level public-health job" (unspecified). Since both his parents worked in careers to do with health one might wonder again about the relation of this to Parfit's concern with mental hygiene if we were to take the trope of the profile seriously but this is not ventured into.
Parfit's up-bringing was largely through boarding schools with the result that he has never developed close relationships with his siblings. Parfit is indicated as having had a "successful childhood" in the sense that he did well at school though little else is said. Aged 18, Parfit went for the first time to the US and worked for a while at the New Yorker itself. Here some incidentals are thrown in about Parfit's inability to write poetry before we bring him back to Oxford, later the same year, as a student of history before being told he subsequently returned to the US on a Harkness Fellowship. It appears from the profile that it was during the latter period that he began to study philosophy and that he opted for analytic philosophy since he could "understand" it even though he thought it trivial, leading him to return to Oxford on a Prize Fellowship that took him to All Souls.
The arrival at All Souls, in some respects, closes the biographical interlude that the profile has been led into since there is little left of a chronological sort to include after this, given that, after arriving at All Souls, Parfit was fixed for the rest of his life (until his recent retirement). This gives rise to the usual topos of the "monk-like" life of an academic in such a place though in this case there is more than usual truth in it. Parfit has, after all, had few relationships in his life and the setting of All Souls is such as to seal off his departure from the everyday and make his routinised habits sustainable. Here MacFarquhar also steps back from her posture of generally "intimating" a response to Parfit by frankly describing him (with his permission) as "institutionalised" by his relationship to All Souls (something that supports the dismissive attitude to him indicated by Simon Blackburn in the concluding paragraph of the original version of the review of On What Matters subsequently published in the Financial Times). This again suggests, however, how important in fact certain very specific experiences and structures are and have been for Parfit, hardly supporting therefore the suggestion that his biography is the basis of his philosophical stance on personal identity.
The foray into Parfit's interest in photography is fascinating given the way both Reasons and Persons and On What Matters have appeared with photographs of places to which Parfit is particularly attached and the remarks he adds here about architecture indicate the reasons why these pictures are of buildings and places to which he has an attachment. However it is also part of a further display of obsessiveness since Parfit's photographic practice consisted in hours-long waits for exactly the right kind of light before he would take his pictures. Further the process of selection and development of them included a refined sense of selection that was, as would be expected, not to a sense of fidelity to the scene (which he presumably lacked a mental image of) as to the sense he wished the scene to make. It is, however, humanly interesting to see how much Parfit loves Venice and St Petersburg.
From here we move to a description of Parfit's interactions with other philosophers and the discouraging difficulty he encountered of changing other people's views. Little, interestingly, is said about how easy others may have found it to change his views! In connection with this the commitment Parfit has had to the life of the mind becomes more developed since we learn here of his hours-long conversations with students and the meticulous care he would take commenting on the views of others, both admirable traits.
Afterwards we venture back into family history and learn of the early death of one of Parfit's siblings and his subsequent struggle to have her children placed with an appropriate family. Nothing is here said of why these children could not be taken on by remaining members of the family, an odd omission from the profile's biographical element. One of the rare moments of personal insight that are seriously illuminating concerns the odd relationship Parfit has had with Janet Radcliffe Richards, another philosopher, who he pursued after completing Reasons and Persons but with whom his relations largely don't seem to have been that intimate though he recently, after relating to her for nearly thirty years, married her. Again the lack of emotional connection suggested here does indicate a singular character in Parfit, though it is less clear how to evaluate this (particularly in conjunction with the suggestion that he nonetheless suffers at the sight of the suffering of others). For some reason snatches of argument between Parfit and Richards are subsequently interspersed in the profile though it is less than clear what the reader is supposed to make of them.
Philosophy is explicitly returned to with the suggestion that Parfit only began seriously reading Kant after having written Reasons and Persons. From this we learn Parfit's antipathy to Kant's conception of autonomy (which he appears here to confuse with the notion of transcendental freedom) and some of the obtuse remarks that appear also in the preface to volume 1 of On What Matters are repeated including the sense that Parfit has that Kant is, apparently like himself, an "emotional extremist". The rationale for this remark appears to reside in the sense that Kant's appeals to a method in philosophy that would have lasting results is less likely than Sidgwick's more modest self-assessment. This is coupled with a contrast between Sidgwick's allegedly flatter temperament and his achievement resting on a kind of non-genius mentality. All of this is pretty hack cod psychology and Parfit appears to find it sufficient as a way of contrasting the Methods of Ethics with the Groundwork. Disappointing and paltry as such observations are they do appear to tell us a fair few things about Parfit the man (and underline, again, the sense in which he is certainly a definite individual even if not always one that one can affirm a liking for).
The "emotional extremism" Parfit alleges in Kant is part of the temperamental reason he gives for coming to appreciate Kant. However the introduction of the relationship to Kant is not itself explored in serious detail in the profile since the point is rather to have this encounter as a preface to the general methodology of On What Matters, the methodology of reconciliation between the main substantive moral theories of our time that it wishes to achieve. So at this point the profile repeats the familiar story of how, in 2002, Parfit began the project of laying out his general theory of such reconcilation by means of the Tanner Lectures and subsequent versions of the work that eventually became On What Matters. Here philosophers are unlikely to learn much since the suggestion that the traditions can be reconciled clearly requires a lot of work in On What Matters and the quick rendition of how the formula of universal law can, for example, be reformed, is presented in an offensive short-hand here.
The profile moves on from Parfit's "triple theory" to an account of Parfit's personal relations with Bernard Williams and the contrast between the two brings out well the sociable character of Williams in contrast to Parfit's solitary habits and also shows clearly how Parfit did have the potential for a kind of homoerotic admiration for Williams although the profile is careful not to state the relation was so conceived by Parfit. Here also one notes a certain clear capacity for self-deception on Parfit's part as when we are told he discovered after Williams' death that it only "appeared" that Williams disagreed with him as they really didn't since Williams simply lacked the sense of the concepts that Parfit correctly grasped.
The biographical element that is most recent in the profile concerns the break-down Parfit appears to have suffered after completing On What Matters and marrying Richards. This is here put parallel with his wooing of Richards after completing Reasons and Persons since it suggests a crisis besets him whenever he is not working on a major project. Oddly, however, less time is spent probing this point than in venturing back to an account of the major problem of the fourth part of Reasons and Persons, the problem of future generations, especially as retailed in the case of the Repugnant Conclusion. The account of this at the conclusion suggests that Parfit will be returning in future to the central difficulty of the Non-Identity Problem that afflicts, on his view, the understanding of future generations (and itself parallels the problem of personal identity). Concluding with this suggests something about the legacy Parfit may have though, characteristically, the profile does not spell out what, if any, lessons, we have to learn from this.
As my summary here suggests the profile is long and goes a considerable way in introducing the work of a serious and major contemporary philosopher to the public and the New Yorker is to be commended for publishing it. However, the intimations that there is something to be learned by contrasting the philosopher with the man, whilst not without foundation, are insufficiently explored and some of the intimations given here are hardly supported by careful thinking about either the circumstances of the man or the nature of his thought. Whilst such pieces are a good way of encouraging the general public to start to take philosophers more seriously it would be even better if the construction of them was itself given greater philosophical thought.
The profile is written by Larissa MacFarquhar who is advertised as preparing a book on the topic of "extreme virtue" and is clearly prompted by the recent publication of On What Matters. The piece opens with a question about personal identity that refers back, however, to the third part of Reasons and Persons and it sets the tone for the general way the profile is constructed. This is not in terms of a continuing philosophical enquiry as set off by the third part of Reasons and Persons, although the piece does include much more philosophy than one might expect. Rather, it is through the focus of the profile on Parfit the man and uses this focus in order to throw some light upon Parfit the thinker. Whilst one may have some reservations about this technique it is the case that much emerges from the outline of Parfit the man that is of undoubted interest.
The opening account of personal identity repeats the general thrust of the argument of Reasons and Persons that, whatever it is "that matters", it is not "personal identity" that does so. The seminal point repeated here is that selves are not, despite the view of "common sense morality", something that are an all-or-nothing affair. This is linked to the claim that Parfit himself made that it may be "liberating" to be released from the "glass tunnel" of the self as it ensures that other people become thereby closer. One of the ways this alleged "liberation" is meant to occur is through the sense that Parfit is less a continuing character and more the source of more or less influential "memes" to use the ugly expression of Richard Dawkins. However, one of the effects of the view Parfit set out in Reasons and Persons is not merely the revision of "common sense morality" but, along with this revision, a kind of challenge to the sense of what it is "that matters". After all, as Bernard Williams and John Rawls argued in their attacks on utilitarianism, if an "impartialist" view of morality abstracts from the separateness of persons this has the general result of making morality something in which we have less obvious interest. Whilst MacFarquhar does not make this point it is noticeable that the shift in the profile from the consideration of personal identity in Reasons and Persons to the discussion of "objective" theories of reasons in On What Matters is presented in terms of the latter responding to an alleged general scepticism concerning moral truth. One of the grounds for such scepticism is precisely the problem of how morality can connect to what we might, following Thomas Nagel, call the experience of "what it is like" to be us. If we are told that there is no fundamental "us" we might come to the view that there is all the less reason to care about "moral truth". This was certainly not the intention of the argument of Reasons and Persons which had, rather, the focus of undermining egoist views of morality in a way that Henry Sidgwick had been unable to do. But responses to egoism need not be impartialist in the way the consequentialist views of Parfit have been and, furthermore, such impartialism may well itself reinforce not only scepticism about morality but a broader focus on precisely only being concerned with self-interest.
MacFarquhar presents the context of On What Matters very well bringing out how the formation of it has been a cooperative venture in which Parfit himself shaped the argument through interaction with other philosophers. She also focuses well on the extreme danger Parfit seems to feel subjective theories of reason pose to a sound sense of objective moral truth though in agreeing to set his view against nihilist pragmatism she allows him the benefit of the doubt here concerning the need for the kind of objectivism he argues for. However, the focus on the question of the contrast between subjective and objective theories of reason that marks the first part of On What Matters takes up only a very small part of MacFarquhar's profile and she soon returns to the concentration on Parfit the man, albeit doing so in a way that certainly subtly reflects back on the denial that personal identity is "what matters" as made in Reasons and Persons.
The return to Parfit the man occurs through reflecting on certain peculiarities of his which are clearly given wider significance in the profile. So, for example, Parfit's habit of wearing the same outfit everyday and of eating in a similarly routinised manner are emphasised. This element of routine is revealed gradually to be part of Parfit's way of dealing with the problem of how to economise on time but is also part of a reaction to the problem of how to avoid emotional entanglement with the everyday. Oddly, however, this element of Parfit the man is presented as part of the way his everyday practice includes a lack of sense of "boundaries" of personal identity whereas it appears to me to mark a clear way in which the boundary of Parfit is maintained since it ensures he remains at an important distance from others. Other elements that mark him as a rather singular person include the information that he lacks the capacity to form images of the past so that memories appear to him only as propositional contents rather as pictures with emotional significance. MacFarquhar points out to Parfit that absence of images need not imply lack of emotional connection and Parfit is indicated as conceding this though the real question is less whether there is any connection between these points than rather "what it is like" (to use Nagel's expression again) not to feel such emotional relation to the past. The lack of it is implied, as with the general presentation of Parfit the man, to be part of his emotional involvement with the denial of the sense of personal identity that common sense morality appears to validate. In other words, it is implied (without being stated) that part of what makes the view of personal identity articulated in Reasons and Persons appealing to Parfit is a certain kind of experience (or set of experiences) of his that set him apart from an understanding of how personal identity is constructed for most of us. As I indicated above, with the example of routinised behaviours, however, I am less convinced than MacFarquhar appears to be, that the evidence she has uncovered points in the direction her profile implies.
Just as routinisation of habits has a very clear individualising function in helping to separate one from others so, similarly, the relation to the past that Parfit describes is also an indication of a singular temperament and its singularity is not evidently one that should point in the direction of an "emotional" commitment to a view of personal identity of the type Parfit has professed.
After these opening sallies have been ventured the profile becomes more conventional, focusing, as is common, on some elements of Parfit's past that might be thought to have formative force for him. This includes information about Parfit's parents and their commitments (to a Christian movement called the Oxford Group) that led them to settle in China. The reference to this group has a further reinforcing effect in the profile since the group that his parents belonged to had a clearly ascetic and purist character expressed in a set of absolutes. This reference, despite the later information of how Parfit's parents later left the movement contributes to the sense that there are environmental backgrounds that led Parfit himself to a view of morality that is more demanding than would be easily accepted by "common sense". However, as with many of the other insinuations in the profile, so also with this one, there is something rather neat about it. After all, why wouldn't Parfit as easily rebel against such a background as conform to its temper, its "spirit" (if not its "letter")? No explanation is attempted here precisely because the art of the profile consists less in argument than intimation.
The movement of Parfit's parents away from the early commitment to the "Oxford Group" is further presented with the effect indicated as having a terrible undermining of his father's self-confidence. This is, however, as shown in the profile, an indication of a serious emotional difference between Parfit's father and Parfit himself since Parfit junior convinced himself by a flawed philosophical argument at an early age that there couldn't be a God and seems never to have been bothered by the question since. This early indication of such independence is itself not probed, just mentioned. In Parfit's infancy the family moved back to England where it would appear he grew up with his mother working as a psychiatrist and his father "a low level public-health job" (unspecified). Since both his parents worked in careers to do with health one might wonder again about the relation of this to Parfit's concern with mental hygiene if we were to take the trope of the profile seriously but this is not ventured into.
Parfit's up-bringing was largely through boarding schools with the result that he has never developed close relationships with his siblings. Parfit is indicated as having had a "successful childhood" in the sense that he did well at school though little else is said. Aged 18, Parfit went for the first time to the US and worked for a while at the New Yorker itself. Here some incidentals are thrown in about Parfit's inability to write poetry before we bring him back to Oxford, later the same year, as a student of history before being told he subsequently returned to the US on a Harkness Fellowship. It appears from the profile that it was during the latter period that he began to study philosophy and that he opted for analytic philosophy since he could "understand" it even though he thought it trivial, leading him to return to Oxford on a Prize Fellowship that took him to All Souls.
The arrival at All Souls, in some respects, closes the biographical interlude that the profile has been led into since there is little left of a chronological sort to include after this, given that, after arriving at All Souls, Parfit was fixed for the rest of his life (until his recent retirement). This gives rise to the usual topos of the "monk-like" life of an academic in such a place though in this case there is more than usual truth in it. Parfit has, after all, had few relationships in his life and the setting of All Souls is such as to seal off his departure from the everyday and make his routinised habits sustainable. Here MacFarquhar also steps back from her posture of generally "intimating" a response to Parfit by frankly describing him (with his permission) as "institutionalised" by his relationship to All Souls (something that supports the dismissive attitude to him indicated by Simon Blackburn in the concluding paragraph of the original version of the review of On What Matters subsequently published in the Financial Times). This again suggests, however, how important in fact certain very specific experiences and structures are and have been for Parfit, hardly supporting therefore the suggestion that his biography is the basis of his philosophical stance on personal identity.
The foray into Parfit's interest in photography is fascinating given the way both Reasons and Persons and On What Matters have appeared with photographs of places to which Parfit is particularly attached and the remarks he adds here about architecture indicate the reasons why these pictures are of buildings and places to which he has an attachment. However it is also part of a further display of obsessiveness since Parfit's photographic practice consisted in hours-long waits for exactly the right kind of light before he would take his pictures. Further the process of selection and development of them included a refined sense of selection that was, as would be expected, not to a sense of fidelity to the scene (which he presumably lacked a mental image of) as to the sense he wished the scene to make. It is, however, humanly interesting to see how much Parfit loves Venice and St Petersburg.
From here we move to a description of Parfit's interactions with other philosophers and the discouraging difficulty he encountered of changing other people's views. Little, interestingly, is said about how easy others may have found it to change his views! In connection with this the commitment Parfit has had to the life of the mind becomes more developed since we learn here of his hours-long conversations with students and the meticulous care he would take commenting on the views of others, both admirable traits.
Afterwards we venture back into family history and learn of the early death of one of Parfit's siblings and his subsequent struggle to have her children placed with an appropriate family. Nothing is here said of why these children could not be taken on by remaining members of the family, an odd omission from the profile's biographical element. One of the rare moments of personal insight that are seriously illuminating concerns the odd relationship Parfit has had with Janet Radcliffe Richards, another philosopher, who he pursued after completing Reasons and Persons but with whom his relations largely don't seem to have been that intimate though he recently, after relating to her for nearly thirty years, married her. Again the lack of emotional connection suggested here does indicate a singular character in Parfit, though it is less clear how to evaluate this (particularly in conjunction with the suggestion that he nonetheless suffers at the sight of the suffering of others). For some reason snatches of argument between Parfit and Richards are subsequently interspersed in the profile though it is less than clear what the reader is supposed to make of them.
Philosophy is explicitly returned to with the suggestion that Parfit only began seriously reading Kant after having written Reasons and Persons. From this we learn Parfit's antipathy to Kant's conception of autonomy (which he appears here to confuse with the notion of transcendental freedom) and some of the obtuse remarks that appear also in the preface to volume 1 of On What Matters are repeated including the sense that Parfit has that Kant is, apparently like himself, an "emotional extremist". The rationale for this remark appears to reside in the sense that Kant's appeals to a method in philosophy that would have lasting results is less likely than Sidgwick's more modest self-assessment. This is coupled with a contrast between Sidgwick's allegedly flatter temperament and his achievement resting on a kind of non-genius mentality. All of this is pretty hack cod psychology and Parfit appears to find it sufficient as a way of contrasting the Methods of Ethics with the Groundwork. Disappointing and paltry as such observations are they do appear to tell us a fair few things about Parfit the man (and underline, again, the sense in which he is certainly a definite individual even if not always one that one can affirm a liking for).
The "emotional extremism" Parfit alleges in Kant is part of the temperamental reason he gives for coming to appreciate Kant. However the introduction of the relationship to Kant is not itself explored in serious detail in the profile since the point is rather to have this encounter as a preface to the general methodology of On What Matters, the methodology of reconciliation between the main substantive moral theories of our time that it wishes to achieve. So at this point the profile repeats the familiar story of how, in 2002, Parfit began the project of laying out his general theory of such reconcilation by means of the Tanner Lectures and subsequent versions of the work that eventually became On What Matters. Here philosophers are unlikely to learn much since the suggestion that the traditions can be reconciled clearly requires a lot of work in On What Matters and the quick rendition of how the formula of universal law can, for example, be reformed, is presented in an offensive short-hand here.
The profile moves on from Parfit's "triple theory" to an account of Parfit's personal relations with Bernard Williams and the contrast between the two brings out well the sociable character of Williams in contrast to Parfit's solitary habits and also shows clearly how Parfit did have the potential for a kind of homoerotic admiration for Williams although the profile is careful not to state the relation was so conceived by Parfit. Here also one notes a certain clear capacity for self-deception on Parfit's part as when we are told he discovered after Williams' death that it only "appeared" that Williams disagreed with him as they really didn't since Williams simply lacked the sense of the concepts that Parfit correctly grasped.
The biographical element that is most recent in the profile concerns the break-down Parfit appears to have suffered after completing On What Matters and marrying Richards. This is here put parallel with his wooing of Richards after completing Reasons and Persons since it suggests a crisis besets him whenever he is not working on a major project. Oddly, however, less time is spent probing this point than in venturing back to an account of the major problem of the fourth part of Reasons and Persons, the problem of future generations, especially as retailed in the case of the Repugnant Conclusion. The account of this at the conclusion suggests that Parfit will be returning in future to the central difficulty of the Non-Identity Problem that afflicts, on his view, the understanding of future generations (and itself parallels the problem of personal identity). Concluding with this suggests something about the legacy Parfit may have though, characteristically, the profile does not spell out what, if any, lessons, we have to learn from this.
As my summary here suggests the profile is long and goes a considerable way in introducing the work of a serious and major contemporary philosopher to the public and the New Yorker is to be commended for publishing it. However, the intimations that there is something to be learned by contrasting the philosopher with the man, whilst not without foundation, are insufficiently explored and some of the intimations given here are hardly supported by careful thinking about either the circumstances of the man or the nature of his thought. Whilst such pieces are a good way of encouraging the general public to start to take philosophers more seriously it would be even better if the construction of them was itself given greater philosophical thought.
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Mark Schroeder's Review of Parfit
Another person has managed to already review the whole of On What Matters and, unlike Simon Blackburn, has managed the considerable feat of addressing a number of its intellectual claims and, although disagreeing with the book on important matters, treated it with some considerable respect. This person, whose review is an admirable example of careful prose, is Mark Schroeder.
Schroeder's review is published in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and shows some considerable acuity in addressing the difficult question as to why Parfit chose to publish such a long and difficult to engage with book as On What Matters. Schroeder presents a compelling engagement with the "convergence thesis" in normative ethics that Parts 2 and 3 of the book are concerned with where Parfit seeks to reconcile Kantian, contractualist and consequentialist views of the terrain. Importantly, Schroeder points out that the convergence theory, whilst worth attention strictly within the limits of normative ethics itself also appears to presuppose views concerning reason that not all the normative theories in question do share and so is perhaps less convincing as a form of convergence than Parfit seems to think.
Schroeder also treats Part 6 of On What Matters to some engaged comment bringing out again why the accounts of normativity involved there are regarded by Parfit as part of the same project whilst also calling into question the commitments involved in assuming them to be part of the same project as the earlier account of normative ethics. Schroeder both expresses scepticism about the all-inclusive view of the terrain Parfit has attempted in the book whilst also showing, by deft connection back to Reasons and Persons how Parfit's view of 'moral progress' is the basis of this all-inclusive view. Schroeder also treats the comparisons that have been made between On What Matters and Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics to some careful attention indicating ways in which Sidgwick's version of a convergence thesis rests, in many respects, on different argumentative ground to Parfit's.
Unfortunately Schroeder makes little comment on the first part of On What Matters with which I have been engaged thus far in the commentary on this blog though I think implications for its treatment of reasons is pretty clear from things Schroeder does say. This review of Schroeder's is almost a model of what it means to disagree philosophically whilst indicating respect for the thinker in question. Perhaps Simon Blackburn will read it, one can only hope!
Schroeder's review is published in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and shows some considerable acuity in addressing the difficult question as to why Parfit chose to publish such a long and difficult to engage with book as On What Matters. Schroeder presents a compelling engagement with the "convergence thesis" in normative ethics that Parts 2 and 3 of the book are concerned with where Parfit seeks to reconcile Kantian, contractualist and consequentialist views of the terrain. Importantly, Schroeder points out that the convergence theory, whilst worth attention strictly within the limits of normative ethics itself also appears to presuppose views concerning reason that not all the normative theories in question do share and so is perhaps less convincing as a form of convergence than Parfit seems to think.
Schroeder also treats Part 6 of On What Matters to some engaged comment bringing out again why the accounts of normativity involved there are regarded by Parfit as part of the same project whilst also calling into question the commitments involved in assuming them to be part of the same project as the earlier account of normative ethics. Schroeder both expresses scepticism about the all-inclusive view of the terrain Parfit has attempted in the book whilst also showing, by deft connection back to Reasons and Persons how Parfit's view of 'moral progress' is the basis of this all-inclusive view. Schroeder also treats the comparisons that have been made between On What Matters and Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics to some careful attention indicating ways in which Sidgwick's version of a convergence thesis rests, in many respects, on different argumentative ground to Parfit's.
Unfortunately Schroeder makes little comment on the first part of On What Matters with which I have been engaged thus far in the commentary on this blog though I think implications for its treatment of reasons is pretty clear from things Schroeder does say. This review of Schroeder's is almost a model of what it means to disagree philosophically whilst indicating respect for the thinker in question. Perhaps Simon Blackburn will read it, one can only hope!
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