Дерек Парфит: Жизнь и философские взгляды

British philosopher (1942–2017)

Derek Antony Parfit ('/p//ɑr//f//ɪ//t/; 11 December 1942 – 2 January 2017) was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Parfit was born in 1942 in Chengdu, China, the son of Jessie (née Browne) and Norman Parfit, medical doctors who had moved to Western China to teach preventive medicine in missionary hospitals. The family returned to the United Kingdom about a year after Parfit was born, settling in Oxford. Parfit was educated at the Dragon School and Eton College, where he was nearly always at the top of the regular rankings in every subject except maths. From an early age, he endeavoured to become a poet, but he gave up poetry towards the end of his adolescence. He then studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1964. In 1965–66, he was a Harkness Fellow at Columbia University and Harvard University. He abandoned historical studies for philosophy during the fellowship.

Parfit returned to Oxford to become a fellow of All Souls College, where he remained until he was 67, when the university’s mandatory retirement policy required him to leave both the college and the faculty of philosophy. He retained his appointments as regular Visiting Professor at Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers until his death.

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit suggested that nonreligious ethics is a young and fertile field of inquiry. He asked questions about which actions are right or wrong and shied away from meta ethics, which focuses more on logic and language. In Part I of Reasons and Persons Parfit discussed self defeating moral theories, namely the self interest theory of rationality ("S") and two ethical frameworks: common sense morality and consequentialism. He posited that self interest has been dominant in Western culture for over two millennia, often making bedfellows with religious doctrine, which united self interest and morality. Because self interest demands that we always make self interest our supreme rational concern and instructs us to ensure that our whole life goes as well as possible, self interest makes temporally neutral requirements. Thus it would be irrational to act in ways that we know we would prefer later to undo. As an example, it would be irrational for fourteen year olds to listen to loud music or get arrested for vandalism if they knew such actions would detract significantly from their future well being and goals (such as having good hearing, a good job, or an academic career in philosophy). Most notably, the self interest theory holds that it is irrational to commit any acts of self denial or to act on desires that negatively affect our well being. One may consider an aspiring author whose strongest desire is to write a masterpiece, but who, in doing so, suffers depression and lack of sleep. Parfit argues that it is plausible that we have such desires which conflict with our own well being, and that it is not necessarily irrational to act to fulfill these desires. Aside from the initial appeal to plausibility of desires that do not directly contribute to one's life going well, Parfit contrived situations where self interest is indirectly self defeating—that is, it makes demands that it initially posits as irrational. It does not fail on its own terms, but it does recommend adoption of an alternative framework of rationality. For instance, it might be in my self interest to become trustworthy to participate in mutually beneficial agreements, even though in maintaining the agreement I will be doing what will, other things being equal, be worse for me. In many cases self interest instructs us precisely not to follow self interest, thus fitting the definition of an indirectly self defeating theory. Parfit contended that to be indirectly individually self defeating and directly collectively self defeating is not fatally damaging for S. To further bury self interest, he exploited its partial relativity, juxtaposing temporally neutral demands against agent centred demands. The appeal to full relativity raises the question whether a theory can be consistently neutral in one sphere of actualisation but entirely partial in another. Stripped of its commonly accepted shrouds of plausibility that can be shown to be inconsistent, self interest can be judged on its own merits. While Parfit did not offer an argument to dismiss S outright, his exposition lays self interest bare and allows its own failings to show through. It is defensible, but the defender must bite so many bullets that they might lose their credibility in the process. Thus a new theory of rationality is necessary. Parfit offered the "critical present aim theory", a broad catch all that can be formulated to accommodate any competing theory. He constructed critical present aim to exclude self interest as our overriding rational concern and to allow the time of action to become critically important. But he left open whether it should include "to avoid acting wrongly" as our highest concern. Such an inclusion would pave the way for ethics. Henry Sidgwick longed for the fusion of ethics and rationality, and while Parfit admitted that many would avoid acting irrationally more ardently than acting immorally, he could not construct an argument that adequately united the two. Where self interest puts too much emphasis on the separateness of persons, consequentialism fails to recognise the importance of bonds and emotional responses that come from allowing some people privileged positions in one's life. If we were all pure do gooders, perhaps following Sidgwick, that would not constitute the outcome that would maximise happiness. It would be better if a small percentage of the population were pure do gooders, but others acted out of love, etc. Thus consequentialism too makes demands of agents that it initially deemed immoral; it fails not on its own terms, for it still demands the outcome that maximises total happiness, but does demand that each agent not always act as an impartial happiness promoter. Consequentialism thus needs to be revised as well. Self interest and consequentialism fail indirectly, while common sense morality is directly collectively self defeating. (So is self interest, but self interest is an individual theory.) Parfit showed, using interesting examples and borrowing from Nashian games, that it would often be better for us all if we did not put the welfare of our loved ones before all else. For example, we should care not only about our kids, but everyone's kids.

In his book On Human Nature, Roger Scruton criticised Parfit's use of moral dilemmas such as the trolley problem and lifeboat ethics to support his ethical views, writing, "These 'dilemmas' have the useful character of eliminating from the situation just about every morally relevant relationship and reducing the problem to one of arithmetic alone." Scruton believed that many of them are deceptive; for example, he does not believe one must be a consequentialist to believe that it is morally required to pull the switch in the trolley problem, as Parfit assumes. He instead suggests that more complex dilemmas, such as Anna Karenina's choice to leave her husband and child for Vronsky, are needed to fully express the differences between opposing ethical theories, and suggests that deontology is free of the problems that (in Scruton's view) beset Parfit's theory.

Parfit was singular in his meticulously rigorous and almost mathematical investigations into personal identity. In some cases, he used examples seemingly inspired by Star Trek and other science fiction, such as the teletransporter, to explore our intuitions about our identity. He was a reductionist, believing that since there is no adequate criterion of personal identity, people do not exist apart from their components. Parfit argued that reality can be fully described impersonally: there need not be a determinate answer to the question "Will I continue to exist?" We could know all the facts about a person's continued existence and not be able to say whether the person has survived. He concluded that we are mistaken in assuming that personal identity is what matters in survival; what matters is rather Relation R: psychological connectedness (namely, of memory and character) and continuity (overlapping chains of strong connectedness). On Parfit's account, individuals are nothing more than brains and bodies, but identity cannot be reduced to either. (Parfit concedes that his theories rarely conflict with rival Reductionist theories in everyday life, and that the two are only brought to blows by the introduction of extraordinary examples, but he defends the use of such examples on the grounds that they arouse strong intuitions in many of us.) Identity is not as determinate as we often suppose it is, but instead such determinacy arises mainly from the way we talk. People exist in the same way that nations or clubs exist. Following David Hume, Parfit argued that no unique entity, such as a self, unifies a person's experiences and dispositions over time. Therefore personal identity is not "what matters" in survival. A key Parfitian question is: given the choice between surviving without psychological continuity and connectedness (Relation R) and dying but preserving R through someone else's future existence, which would you choose? Parfit argues the latter is preferable. Parfit described his loss of belief in a separate self as liberating:My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

Fellow reductionist Mark Johnston of Princeton rejects Parfit's constitutive notion of identity with what he calls an "Argument from Above". Johnston maintains, "Even if the lower level facts [that make up identity] do not in themselves matter, the higher level fact may matter. If it does, the lower level facts will have derived significance. They will matter, not in themselves, but because they constitute the higher level fact." In this, Johnston moves to preserve the significance of personhood. Parfit's explanation is that it is not personhood itself that matters, but rather the facts in which personhood consists that provide it with significance. To illustrate this difference between himself and Johnston, Parfit used an illustration of a brain damaged patient who becomes irreversibly unconscious. The patient is certainly still alive even though that fact is separate from the fact that his heart is still beating and other organs are still functioning. But the fact that the patient is alive is not an independent or separately obtaining fact. The patient's being alive, even though irreversibly unconscious, simply consists in the other facts. Parfit explains that from this so called "Argument from Below" we can arbitrate the value of the heart and other organs still working without having to assign them derived significance, as Johnston's perspective would dictate.

In part four of Reasons and Persons, Parfit discusses possible futures for the world. Parfit makes a similar argument against average utilitarian standards. If all we care about is average happiness, we are forced to conclude that an extremely small population, say ten people, over the course of human history is the best outcome if we assume that these ten people (Adam and Eve et al.) had lives happier than we could ever imagine. They married in 2010. Parfit supported effective altruism. Parfit was an avid photographer who regularly traveled to Venice and St. Petersburg to photograph architecture.