On What Matters: Volume Three by Derek Parfit (OUP, £25)
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Some things matter. This may sound uncontroversial, but in philosophy the truth of this claim has been debated for centuries.
Derek Parfit, who died on 1st January this year, was a staunch believer that some things certainly do matter. A new posthumously published book from the acclaimed moral philosopher, On What Matters: Volume Three, shows why his arguments to this effect are taken so seriously. It comes with an accompanying collection of responses to his earlier work, Does Anything Really Matter? Essays on Parfit on Objectivity, edited by Peter Singer.
In this book, Parfit continues to argue for the objective ethics championed in volumes one and two. Moral questions, he says, have true or false answers which hold independently of whether we agree with them.
Following on from where he left off, he aims to show that certain seemingly disparate moral theories are in fact reconcilable, and after teasing them apart, he painstakingly puts them back together. The unifying theory he ends up with is, he says, likely to be true, having been sought by so many thinkers of different stripes.
This means that Parfit’s position is an amalgam of other people’s. He focuses on reconciling a form of consequentialism—the view that the rightness or wrongness of an act can be determined entirely by its expected consequences—with everyday commonsense morality, on the way to bolstering his belief that moral obligations exist. His arguments are rigorous, his writing lucid.
But while this book makes a good case that some things matter, it provides few examples of specific things that do. Parfit’s plan was to include them in a projected fourth volume. That we will not have a chance to read it now is a great shame; that we can read him at all is a great privilege. He will be missed.
Buy this book on Amazon
Some things matter. This may sound uncontroversial, but in philosophy the truth of this claim has been debated for centuries.
Derek Parfit, who died on 1st January this year, was a staunch believer that some things certainly do matter. A new posthumously published book from the acclaimed moral philosopher, On What Matters: Volume Three, shows why his arguments to this effect are taken so seriously. It comes with an accompanying collection of responses to his earlier work, Does Anything Really Matter? Essays on Parfit on Objectivity, edited by Peter Singer.
In this book, Parfit continues to argue for the objective ethics championed in volumes one and two. Moral questions, he says, have true or false answers which hold independently of whether we agree with them.
Following on from where he left off, he aims to show that certain seemingly disparate moral theories are in fact reconcilable, and after teasing them apart, he painstakingly puts them back together. The unifying theory he ends up with is, he says, likely to be true, having been sought by so many thinkers of different stripes.
This means that Parfit’s position is an amalgam of other people’s. He focuses on reconciling a form of consequentialism—the view that the rightness or wrongness of an act can be determined entirely by its expected consequences—with everyday commonsense morality, on the way to bolstering his belief that moral obligations exist. His arguments are rigorous, his writing lucid.
But while this book makes a good case that some things matter, it provides few examples of specific things that do. Parfit’s plan was to include them in a projected fourth volume. That we will not have a chance to read it now is a great shame; that we can read him at all is a great privilege. He will be missed.
