Principles and persons: The legacy of Derek Parfit

Abstract

This book is a collection of essays, most of which appear here for the first time, that were written in honour of the legendary moral philosopher, Derek Parfit. The essays are mainly concerned with issues that Parfit addressed in his book, Reasons and Persons . They include the relevance of personal identity to ethics, the rationality of different attitudes to time, the nature of well-being, the varieties of consequentialism, reasons for action, aggregation in ethics, causal overdetermination, egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and supererogation.