Parfit: a philosopher and his mission to save morality

As an Oxford student, he had discovered Wittgenstein after jumping out of a window at the upmarket Randolph Hotel to escape a brawl: he snatched Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus from a friend as he was being carried to the ambulance and became bewitched by the book whilst recuperating in hospital.

The convoluted electoral system, devised by philosopher Michael Dummett, involved a single transferable vote method

Kagan had originally wanted to become a rabbi, a plan that was thwarted when the seminary rejected his application. Instead, he turned to philosophy, and met Parfit while a postgraduate at Princeton.

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.

Ewald had a neat idea. This seemed like the perfect end. Sidgwick’s book had closed with the word ‘failure, so why not complete Parfit’s book with ‘hope’? It was a clever contrast. Parfit was fast asleep and could not be roused—he had disappeared for twenty-four hours—so his two friends took a bold and unilateral decision. They ditched the dull paragraph that followed this one and moved the Nietzsche quotation to an epigraph at the front. By the time Parfit emerged the following midday, Ewald had already walked to OUP with the floppy disk containing the last chapter. Ewald explained what he had done over the phone. There was a long—and nerve-racking—pause. Then Parfit agreed that they had made an improvement.

Parfit found this intensely annoying. He thought Rawls’s insight about the need for special concern for the least well-off was important, but that A Theory of Justice was spectacu- larly overrated. Rawls was one of very few philosophers whom Parfit would denigrate—not in print and not about anything personal, but because he was baffled by his prominence.

The philosopher Tom Hurka recalls a conversation along these lines with Jerry Cohen. Hurka was a visiting Fellow at All Souls in the mid- 1980s and, one evening, he invited Cohen back for supper after the semi- nar. Cohen asked him to rank the participants according to (a) how much they cared about ‘winning’ and (b) how much they cared about the truth. It was obvious, Cohen thought, that Parfit was the one who cared most about the truth and the least about victory.

The Austrian, scion of one of the richest fami- lies in Europe, had given all his money away, but to his wealthy siblings, which showed, thought Parfit, that he was concerned only with his own purity, not with doing good.

a common complaint is that since they are often ludicrously unrealistic, our intu- itions about them are unreliable and can tell us nothing about how we should make judgements in the messy, complex, real world.