The Pitters' Place

Derek Parfit just died.

http://dailynous.com/2017/01/02/derek-parfit-1942-2017/

He was a philosopher. A very good and justly famous one. His book Reasons and Persons was extremely influential and really transformed how I think about stuff when I read it. He was a really lucid and brilliant thinker and a genuinely good person. This is probably why his death is going by pretty much unnoticed.

Here's a good New Yorker profile on him. It's long.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/ ... to-be-good

That was a fascinating read. I didn't know about Parfit until then (I don't know much about philosophers in general), so thanks for sharing the article!

Couple of quibbles with the text:

Suppose that a scientist were to begin replacing your cells, one by one, with those of Greta Garbo at the age of thirty. At the beginning of the experiment, the recipient of the cells would clearly be you, and at the end it would clearly be Garbo, but what about in the middle?

You'd be you throughout (but looking increasingly like Garbo); sense of self resides in the software of emergent consciousness, not the hardware of cells. It's why we remain the same people despite all our cells having changed every 7 years or so.

But what if the total sum of human happiness would be higher with many billions of people whose lives were barely worth living—higher, that is, than with a smaller population of well-off people? Wouldn't the first situation be, in some moral sense, better? Parfit calls this the Repugnant Conclusion. It seems absurd, but, at least for a consequentialist, its logic is difficult to counter.

In this case the net suffering (or proportion of suffering) would still be greater, so consequentialism (at least some versions of it) would still consider the first situation worse.


I really like his thoughts regarding future people.

Yeah. He would agree with you about the self.

I also don't think happiness is important when considering morality; all that matters is suffering. So a world with one suffering person and billions of happy people is worse than a world with no people. That's straightforward to me. I don't think the author quite understands what consequentialism is; there's difficult to counter about it.

You should read the book. I think you'd probably like it.

Yep, I also consider suffering the more important factor than happiness in consequentialism. It's possible that the author was referring to net happiness: e.g. if a given person experiences both happiness and suffering, but the happiness outweighs the suffering to the point they consider their overall life worth living, then it is still preferable to a world in which they do not exist. Which I guess was what Parfit was getting at in his point about future people.

I think the main counter to consequentialism is that it favours the majority: in the scenario you mention, it could be a choice between one person suffering greatly with billions happy, or billions of people (including the first) suffering moderately. Consequentialism would favour the individual person sacrificing their wellbeing for the greater good, since it would both maximise happiness as well as produce the least amount of suffering.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll see if I can get hold of the book.