Reasons and Persons

Introduction

Parfit’s first book, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, has four parts. Part one shows that some moral theories, including common-sense morality, are in certain cases self-defeating; part two deals with rationality and time. Part three, the best known, uses thought experiments such as teleportation and the division of a brain to argue that personal identity is not a deep further fact, and that what matters in survival is psychological connectedness and continuity. Part four, on future generations, introduces the “non-identity problem” and the “repugnant conclusion” of population ethics. Parfit found the reductionist view liberating: the “glass tunnel” in which he had seemed to live, he wrote, disappeared.

Connections

Builds on

• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding1689 · John Locke
• A Treatise of Human Nature1739 · David Hume
• The Methods of Ethics1874 · Henry Sidgwick

Taken up in

• On What Matters2011 · Derek Parfit

Criticized in

• Oneself as Another1990 · Paul Ricœur

More works by Derek Parfit

• 2011On What Matters