David Edmonds is a writer and philosopher and the author of several books, the most recent being Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. In this episode, we talk about Parfit's work on identity, time bias, the non-identity problem which he actually discovered, population ethics and the so-called repugnant conclusion, the ethical importance of future people, and other topics. We also discuss whether or not Parfit had dementia, and whether he was a person who was peculiar throughout his life. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter. You'll get access to our private RSS feed, where you'll be able to subscribe to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. Thanks for listening to the Making Sense Podcast! Sam Harris This is a podcast I do not normally do, but I really enjoyed this episode and it was fascinating to talk about Derek Parfit and his work with someone who knew him. So I thought it would be fun to make a podcast about a philosopher who I had a good friend who is also a good human being. So here you can do just that. I hope you enjoy the podcast! - Sam's Note: If you're not currently on our subscriber feed, you'll need to become a supporter of the podcast - you'll get to listen to the first part of this podcast, making sense of the second part of the making sense podcast, which will be out soon! - Thank you, I'll be listening to that in the podcast by me soon. - Timestamps: 0:00 - 5:30 - 6:00) 7:00 8:30 9:30) 11:40 12:30s 13:40s 15:00s 16:40 s 17:20s 17, 14) 15) 16) 17 + 17 18) And so on and so on & so on & so forth... + And so forth? ) 5) ) ) ) & v=f=1f etc. + + + cz=1s=1p So do you think so? ) +
00:05:16.320And you did extremely well to even sort of get him to engage with you because, as we might go on to discuss, by this stage, he was very unwilling to be interviewed.
00:05:29.040And to kind of, as it were, he would have seen it as a kind of a slight waste of his time because he wanted to focus on research and writing.
00:05:36.420And I tried to get a podcast interview with him as well.
00:05:49.680So if he had a chance to revise and edit his answers, that would make him happier, I think, than doing a verbal interview where he might fear that he would say the wrong thing.
00:06:02.160And, yeah, yeah, I mean, I really consider it one of the great missed opportunities for me because I just love his work.
00:06:09.520Although, like many who love his work, I can't say that I have read all of his last book, which is 1,500 pages long.
00:06:16.220And for some reason, I, you know, it may just be due to length, but I also just got sidetracked while reading it, even though I'm quite sympathetic with what he was attempting there.
00:06:26.180I aspire to get back to it and finish it.
00:06:28.300But his first book, Reasons and Persons, you know, many of us, I think, appreciate as some kind of masterpiece.
00:06:36.220It's not a—it's structured strangely, and it seems like it probably could have become an even better book based on some form of editing.
00:06:46.820I don't know who would have forced Parfit to edit it, but there's something really otherworldly about the book.
00:06:53.880It's like, you know, it strikes one as written from a, you know, the point of view of someone coming from outer space and just manufacturing thought experiments by which to understand human morality.
00:07:12.080Did you know Parfit before he published that, or you came to him after he—?
00:07:16.880No, so the book is published in 84, and I study with him in 87.
00:07:23.660I think I bought Reasons and Persons in 1986, which is when the paperback came out.
00:07:28.820So he gobbles—I gobble that book up.
00:07:31.260I think, like you, it's a work of genius.
00:07:33.880And in fact, that's widely acknowledged.
00:07:35.980I mean, even the people who are his philosophical enemies—he had very few actual enemies—but his philosophical opponents, even they acknowledge that this is an extraordinary work of philosophy.
00:07:47.520And what I didn't realize until I was writing the book was that it wasn't supposed to be one book.
00:07:52.160He was working on lots of books at the same time.
00:07:55.660And then he had this crisis when, in 1981, the college that was his home, which was All Souls College, which is this college where there were no undergraduates, there's no teaching at all.
00:08:08.300The people who are based there are purely there for research.
00:08:12.340They were threatening to throw him out because he hadn't managed to produce one book in 14 years.
00:08:18.140And so they say they'll give him an extension to his fellowship, but they say he's got to produce a book by 1984.
00:08:26.800And what he does is he throws everything together.
00:08:30.280And what was potentially going to be several books turns out to be this strange mishmash.
00:08:36.260And it covers a whole variety of things.
00:08:38.760Most famously, there's a huge chapter on personal identity, what it is that makes me the same person I am now to the person I will be at the end of the interview and the same person I am now to the person I was when I was five years old and the person I will be when I'm 85 years old, inshallah.
00:08:56.220And then there's a huge section, which was the section that at the time most interested me, which was on future people.
00:09:02.200And he basically invents this whole sub-genre of moral philosophy.
00:09:06.960Until then, there was nothing that we now call population ethics.
00:09:11.660And it's an area of philosophy that looks at our obligations to future people and puzzles about how many people we want in the world, whether we care about total well-being or average well-being.
00:09:25.220And he comes up with these ingenious puzzles.
00:09:27.220And even, whatever are we, we're sort of 40 years on at least, 40 years on roughly, even now, when people write about this area of philosophy, basically Parfit is the template.
00:09:39.720I mean, people are responding to Parfit.
00:09:41.820So I want to get into many of those specific problems.
00:09:46.460But generally, what would you say his place in philosophy is now?
00:09:53.180I mean, how would you describe him as a member of the pantheon of recent great philosophers?
00:10:05.900And I share the view of lots of very many philosophers and very many top philosophers, which is that he's one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century.
00:10:15.560I wouldn't necessarily go as far as some and say he's the greatest moral philosopher since John Stuart Mill, but some very serious philosophers make that claim.
00:10:22.680But he's not like Wittgenstein in the sense that people who don't like Wittgenstein's philosophy, nobody dismisses Wittgenstein.
00:10:29.840But there are philosophers who think that he does moral philosophy in completely the wrong way.
00:10:36.000And especially the later work was going down a cul-de-sac when he tries to prove that morality is objective.
00:10:43.220He's desperate to prove that there are moral facts.
00:10:45.800So he divides people, but there are many people like me who think he's definitely one of the greats in moral philosophy of the past hundred years.
00:10:54.500Yeah, well, I'm very sympathetic with trying to prove that there are such things as moral facts.
00:10:59.020And I know what sort of pushback one gets when one goes down that path.
00:11:03.580And as he focused on that more in his last book, which is really three large volumes on what matters, and perhaps we'll get there as well.
00:11:13.820I guess just one more general question about him before we get into his areas of philosophical focus.
00:11:21.040What do you think the significance of his psychology was for his philosophy?
00:11:26.920I mean, he really did strike me, even just without knowing anything about him personally.
00:11:32.100And there's a lot in your book that is revelatory as to what sort of person he was.
00:11:36.600But just reading Reasons and Persons, I felt I was in the presence of a neuroatypical philosopher.
00:11:44.220And many of the advantages of that book seemed to me born of a truly atypical angle of attack on all the questions he was touching there.
00:11:56.020And, you know, so I always, without having any evidence for it, I always thought he was someone who must be, you know, on the autism spectrum to some degree.
00:12:07.100I know you entertain that hypothesis in the book and are uncertain as to where you come down.
00:12:15.180Maybe it's true of, we could bring in Wittgenstein here too, because he's, he also struck me, insofar as I think I know anything about him, from reading Ray Monk's biography and some other secondary work.
00:12:29.200He struck me as neuroatypical as well.
00:12:32.840And so much of what is interesting about his thought could be born of that.
00:12:39.840I think both Wittgenstein and Parfit were neuroatypical.
00:12:46.000There are lots of interesting similarities between them, and there are lots of interesting differences between them.
00:12:50.580And one is, Derek Parfit was just a lot more of a benign character.
00:12:56.320So Wittgenstein went around trying to persuade everybody to give up philosophy.
00:13:00.000And I think he damaged quite a few lives, because there were people who were potentially good philosophers and would have had an interesting, successful academic life, who he persuaded to give up the academic life and go and work with their hands, go and do manual work.
00:13:15.280And as I say, I think that was very damaging to them.
00:13:17.780Whereas Parfit was quite the opposite.
00:13:19.220Parfit tried to persuade everybody to give up anything and move to philosophy, because he thought philosophy was basically really what mattered.
00:13:26.000But they were very, you know, atypical, I think.
00:13:30.020The big puzzle in my book, the puzzle I really wanted to resolve was that I thought I knew Derek when I started, but then I started researching his early life.
00:14:31.500And he photographs the same buildings every single year.
00:14:34.600And what puzzled me was how Derek turns from this sort of from early Derek to later Derek.
00:14:43.080And also, which was the real Derek, which was the authentic Derek, as it were.
00:14:47.120And it's an ironic question, of course, given that he spends much of his life worrying about what it is that makes us the same person.
00:14:53.800And I was puzzling about what it was, which was the, as it were, essence of Derek.
00:14:57.980And he rejects the idea that we have an essence.
00:14:59.840But I came to believe that the later Derek was really the more natural Derek, that once he got into this strange institution, all souls, and he didn't have to socialize, he could just focus on his work.
00:15:44.380So, for example, he would often burst into tears when he read or heard about the suffering of distant strangers.
00:15:53.400If you told him about what happened in the trenches of the First World War, he would stop and he would cry and be unable to carry on.
00:16:03.740And yet he felt very weak obligations to his nearest and dearest.
00:16:08.380And that's evident when later on, you know, his friends invite him to weddings and he says he hasn't got time because he's got to work.
00:16:16.580And again, that's sort of in line with a consequentialist mentality that sort of everybody matters equally.
00:16:23.180We don't necessarily have strong special interests with any particular people.
00:16:27.200And I think consequentialism came extremely naturally to him.
00:16:31.400And that is one link with his neural atypicality.
00:16:37.100Yeah, there's one story to touch on the mania for photography for a moment.
00:16:43.040There's one story in the book which I think exemplifies what a peculiar person he was.
00:16:50.700It's because perhaps you can tell the story where there's some photo, I forget of which building, that he took enormous pains to get exactly right.
00:17:01.220And then one of his students comes and admires it.
00:17:04.800And perhaps you can take it from there.
00:17:07.100But where this story lands is, again, it's so strange.
00:17:11.820I mean, I can't imagine behaving in this way.
00:17:15.540The philosopher is, I think, his first PhD student, a very good philosopher, called Larry Temkin.
00:17:21.900And Larry is in his, Derek's office in, or Derek's set of rooms in All Souls in Oxford.
00:17:28.880And he's admiring this photo that Derek has taken of, I think it's the Radcliffe camera, sort of outside Derek's room.
00:32:04.880The main thing is that his big claim that identity is not what matters persists throughout his life,
00:32:12.460and he continues to believe that it's psychological continuity that matters.
00:32:17.020And that has implications for how we should regard the past, how we should regard the future.
00:32:22.660So, it has implications, for example, about whether we should hold somebody guilty for something they committed a long time ago and don't remember.
00:32:31.900It has implications for thinking about whether we should save for the future,
00:32:37.620because, you know, people do save for their pensions.
00:32:40.080They worry about what their lives are going to be like in 25, 30 years.
00:32:43.840They want to make sure that they're going to have a comfortable retirement.
00:32:49.260And if Parfit's arguments are right, then the gap between us and our future and our past becomes greater,
00:32:59.440and the gap between us and other people narrows.
00:33:04.180So, we're more connected to other people and less connected to our past selves and our future selves.
00:39:45.380What's wrong is when you harm a particular individual.
00:39:48.360That seems to be the basis of morality.
00:39:50.600But Parfit spotted that there are lots of areas where it looks like we've done something wrong,
00:39:57.380and in this case, the 14-year-old girl having a child, where nobody is harmed.
00:40:02.100And he then extrapolates that to a whole series of policies.
00:40:07.200So, for example, think about climate change.
00:40:09.620If we did nothing about climate change, then several generations – well, in fact, probably not several generations,
00:40:16.020probably only two generations down the line – we're already feeding the effects of climate change –
00:40:19.740but two or three generations down the line, people are going to have very bad lives.
00:40:23.340There's going to be hurricanes, there's going to be typhoons, there's going to be droughts, there's going to be mass migration.
00:40:29.440The world is not going to be a happy place.
00:40:31.900But let's assume that, although it's not a very happy place, those lives are still better than nothing.
00:40:37.680Now let's assume that we did something about climate change.
00:40:42.040For example, let's say we did something drastic.
00:40:44.640Let's say we said people could only drive on Mondays and Wednesdays and Saturdays, or people couldn't fly planes.
00:40:52.460Now, if we did something drastic like that, that would affect who was born.
00:40:58.220Each of us is a product of a unique sperm and a unique egg.
00:41:04.540And if my mother had come home late on a particular day, or my father had been delayed for some reason,
00:41:11.540I wouldn't be here to talk to you today.
00:41:14.820I'm the product of a kind of unique union of sperm and egg at a unique time.
00:41:20.480If you did something drastic like you stop cars, then you would change who exists.
00:41:26.240I mean, and the way Derek puts it is, imagine that trains had never existed.
00:41:31.640Which of us would still be alive today?
00:41:33.240None of us would still be alive today, because our lives have all been changed by the invention of the train.
00:41:40.820I can't remember if you do this in the book or not, but I feel like you or someone imagined whether we would all exist if Hitler hadn't existed.
00:41:50.060How fully can we regret Hitler if half the world would be people by different people?
00:41:57.660Yeah, I had a very annoying review of the book where the reviewer just didn't understand the point.
00:42:29.700So you wouldn't exist if Hitler hadn't existed.
00:42:32.240Nobody would exist if Hitler hadn't existed, because he changes the world.
00:42:35.900And actually, that raises interesting questions, which maybe we shouldn't go into, but it raises interesting questions about reparations and so on.
00:42:44.340Because, you know, Hitler did obviously very bad things, but I owe Hitler my life, as it were.
00:42:52.800So one has a complicated relationship with the past when one begins to think of it like that.
00:42:57.840Yeah, so, but back to the case Parfit's making here.
00:43:02.820So what is inscrutable about this, as you said, we have this intuition that for something to be wrong, there has to be a victim.
00:43:13.160And the idea that there's a category of crime called a victimless crime has seemed to many of us to be just a logical contradiction.
00:43:23.080And yet, here, Parfit is exposing these cases where something, there are better and worse options, and yet they're better and worse for no existing people, because the people are different.
00:43:40.320Exactly. There is no one person for whom they are better or worse.
00:43:44.460But nonetheless, we can still make the judgment that if we do nothing about climate change, we've done something very bad.
00:43:51.140We can still make the judgment that the 14-year-old girl has made a mistake by having a child at 14 rather than delaying becoming a mother.
00:44:00.640So the way he does that, and it's very easy with same number, what he calls same number cases,
00:44:05.980if you've got a choice between a person born at X time and a different person Y, then the way to judge whether you should bring X or Y into the world is, well, who has the better life?
00:44:22.180So the reason why we should do something about climate change, let's assume that if we got rid of cars and planes, it would help a great deal.
00:44:33.400But let's assume, let's make the absurd assumption that it wouldn't affect the numbers of people being born.
00:44:38.000On that absurd assumption, the reason why it would be a good thing to do is because two or three generations down the line,
00:44:46.140the people who would exist will be better off than the people who otherwise would have existed had we done nothing about climate change.
00:44:54.260And that's how he solves the conundrum.
00:44:55.880Yeah. In some ways, you can capture this by putting the phrase, identity is not what matters, to slightly different use here.
00:45:05.140It's just that the identities of the people isn't what is relevant for the moral calculus.
00:45:10.400It's just the fact that there are people in each case, and in one case, the people are much better off.
00:45:17.400Yeah. Yeah. And I think both in his arguments about personal identity and his arguments about future people,
00:45:23.740he converges on a kind of consequentialist conclusion, which is, it's the consequences that matter.
00:45:30.440We should prefer the better consequences rather than the less bad consequences.
00:45:35.260In the case of personal identity, because my future self has become less like me, as it were, than we thought,
00:45:42.760we should be more interested in the lives of others. That's a consequentialist conclusion.
00:45:47.360When it comes to future people, we should prefer the outcome in which the people are better off.
00:45:53.100That's another consequentialist conclusion. So lots of his arguments, although he comes at them from very different angles,