McMahan had arrived in the UK as an American Rhodes Scholar; Oxford was far from his roots in rural South Carolina. Like most boys where he was raised, he had been a keen hunter; his father owned several guns and was a Republican Party activist who wanted his son to become ‘a young athlete who would go into the military. What he got instead was a weedy hippie.’ McMahan Senior was unimpressed when a teenage Jeff announced, after seeing a shot and wounded dove, that he was turning vegetarian.

David Edmonds, Parfit: a philosopher and his mission to save morality, Princeton, 2023, p. 182