Derek Parfit Quotes on Virtue
Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) and the two-volume On What Matters (2011) supply two of the most ambitious works of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century moral philosophy. Reasons and Persons defends a reductionist account of personal identity (we are not the separately existing entities the ordinary view supposes) and uses the result to argue against the rational egoism that takes the self-interested viewpoint to be authoritative for practical reason; the same book inaugurated contemporary population ethics through the analysis of the Non-Identity Problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. On What Matters develops the constructive convergence thesis that Kantian, contractualist, and consequentialist moral theories, properly formulated, climb the same mountain on different sides and converge at the summit.
Quotes
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“We are climbing the same mountain on different sides.”
p. 419 -
Attributed to Derek Parfit:
“Non-identity makes a tremendous difference to the morality of policy.”
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Attributed to Derek Parfit:
“What we ought to want is what we would want if we cared equally about everyone.”
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“the part of our moral theory... that covers how we affect future generations... is the most important part of our moral theory, since the next few centuries will be the most important in human history.”
p. 351