Guest judge Mark Schroeder tells us about Parfit and what matters
22nd January 2017
On January 1, 2017, Derek Parfit passed away in Oxford, just days after
approving the final page proofs and jacket design for his third book, a sequel
to his massive, two-volume 2011 work, On
What Matters. Born in Chengu, China to doctors working to teach
preventative medicine in missionary hospitals, his early ambition in life was
to become a poet, but he read Modern History at Oxford as an undergraduate, and
his personal passion was for architectural photography, particularly in Venice
and St. Petersburg. But his life’s major contributions were as a
philosopher.
Parfit’s 1984 book, Reasons
and Persons, wrapped one of his photographs of Venice around 560 pages of
brilliant arguments about the relationships between personal identity, reasons,
and how we should treat the impact our actions have on people who have not yet
been born. It inspired several generations of philosophers with the
elegance with which it raised new and obviously important questions that no one
else had realized were worth asking, before. And everyone who read it saw
with clear vision that progress in our moral thinking must be possible, because
Parfit was manifestly making it.
In contrast, Parfit himself grew to worry more and more over time about
whether moral progress is possible. Rather than regarding his earlier
work as proof positive, he turned to try to find new ways of settling the
question of whether moral progress is possible. His 2011 book, On What Matters (volumes 1 and 2),
wraps two of his photographs of St. Petersburg around 1440 pages of arguments
that it is possible to make progress in moral philosophy, in thinking about
what really matters, and why.
The theme of “on what matters†honors Parfit’s life and work, on the
occasion of his untimely death. Reflecting on his passing brings into
focus some of the things that matter. The entries that stood out to me
showed rather than told, and each, I thought, told us something interesting and
true about what really does matter. There were other entries with
structure and style that engaged me as literature, but called into question
what matters rather than affirming the answer to that question, and I imagine
that Parfit, if he could review these entries himself, would similarly
value the entries with affirmative things to say about what matters. And
in fact, in choosing as I imagine Parfit might himself have chosen, Parfit
might say that I take away from the disvalue of his death. He once wrote:
“When I believed that my
existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. 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.â€
***
About the judge
Mark Schroeder (http://www.markschroeder.net)
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California (http://dornsife.usc.edu/phil). His
books include Slaves of the Passions, Being For, Noncognitivism
in Ethics, and Explanation and Expression in Ethics, volumes 1 and 2.
He has also published many articles, including two about Derek Parfit’s famous
work of moral philosophy, On What Matters. Schroeder lives in
Glendale, California with his wife Maria and their two children, Caroline and
William.