Derek Parfit

Dzieła

• 1984Reasons and Persons (Racje i osoby)

  Teleportacja, rozszczepienie – tożsamość osobowa nie jest tym, co się liczy.

• 2011On What Matters (O tym, co się liczy)

  Kantyści, konsekwencjaliści i kontraktualiści „wspinający się na tę samą górę”.

Stanowisko

In Reasons and Persons Parfit used thought experiments involving teleportation and brain division to argue that personal identity is not a deep further fact. A person is nothing over and above a body, a brain and psychological connections such as memory and character. What matters is this psychological continuity, which comes in degrees – and Parfit found this liberating, as the wall between himself and others became thinner. Its last part became a starting point of population ethics. There Parfit showed that principles which seem plausible imply the “Repugnant Conclusion”: for any population of people who all live very good lives, a much larger population whose lives are barely worth living would be better. The conclusion follows from premises that are hard to reject, yet it strikes most people, Parfit included, as unacceptable; he spent decades looking for a way out. His late work On What Matters argued that Kantians, consequentialists and contractualists are “climbing the same mountain on different sides.”

Życie i kontekst

Parfit was born in 1942 in Chengdu, China, to British medical missionaries and grew up in Oxford. He first studied history before turning to philosophy. Almost his entire career was spent at All Souls College, Oxford, with regular visiting positions at Harvard, New York University and Rutgers. He was famous for working on his books with extreme perfectionism for many years.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Personal Identity (1971)

Pojawia się w

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