Reasons and persons : Parfit, Derek : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive (original) (raw)

Reviewer: C J Mramer -favoritefavoritefavorite - October 11, 2020 (edited)
Subject: Counting Blades of Grass

There are two and only two types of ethical systems in the world: the ethics of reason and the ethics of love. The ethics of reason is based on the belief that human reason can figure out what it means to be a good person and how to act in particular circumstances to achieve that goal. The ethics of love doesn’t ask its followers to figure out anything; it simply tells them to love God and to love their neighbor as they love themselves. And if they don’t believe in God, then to just love their neighbor and let the God thing take care of itself.
The ethics of reason founders on two key concepts: ‘good’ and ‘person’. It founders on the concept of the good because nobody has figured out yet how to define what ‘good’ is for every person on earth without excluding some individual or group of individuals now or in the future who might have an unconventional idea of what makes them happy. It also founders on the concept of happiness before it even gets to the concept of a person which, by the way, it either completely ignores or tries to eliminate altogether. Derek Parfit’s ethical system in “Reasons and Persons” is, as you might expect, an ethics of reason, and it is guilty on all counts. Defining the ‘good’, the best that Parfit can offer on this score is “a life worth living” and “a better quality of life.” ‘Happiness’ is the fulfillment of one’s most basic desires so long as that doesn’t interfere with another person’s happiness, and a ‘person’ is reducible to its brain and body united by the psychological continuity and connectedness of its experiences. In other words, something completely different from what we would ordinarily think of as a person. The serial killer Ted Bundy might well argue that before he was caught and convicted of multiple murders he had “a life worth living” and “a [good] quality of life,” that by fulfilling his own sadistic desires he was fulfilling the secret desires of his victims as well, and that these were the only sort of interpersonal relationships that he was capable of.
I will focus the remainder of this review on Parfit’s concept of a person since it is in my opinion the most wrongheaded and pernicious part of the book. Parfit’s concept of a person depends entirely on what he means by the word ‘entity’. Parfit says:
“On the Reductionist View that I defend, persons are not separately existing entities. The existence of a person just involves the existence of his brain and body, and the doing of his deeds, and the occurrence of his mental states and events. But though they are not separately existing entities, persons [do] exist. And a person is an entity that is distinct from his brain or body, and his various experiences. A person is an entity that has a brain and body, and has different experiences. My use of the word [‘I’] refers to myself, a particular person, or subject of experiences. And I am not my brain.” Appendix D, p. 534. (I have substituted the letter ‘I’ for the letter ‘T’ which occurs in the actual text because I believe the letter ‘T’ is a misprint.)
So an entity isn’t necessarily a physical thing like a brain or body but something more abstract, perhaps something like an idea or a universal such as, for example, justice or the number 3.
In trying to get a handle on Parfit’s concept of a person, it is useful to consider those passages where (following Hume) he compares the concept of a person to the concept of a nation. Thus on page 323 he says “But my main claim is that persons are like nations, not Cartesian Egos.” Parfit does not deny that persons exist, just as it would be foolish to deny that France or England exists. But their mode of existence is as human intellectual constructs that take their physical manifestation in the people, language, traditions, culture, and geographical boundaries of the imagined state. So, too, persons are human intellectual constructs whose actual existence “just consists in the existence of his brain and body, and the thinking of his thoughts, and the doing of his deeds, and the occurrence of many other physical and mental events.” In other words, the concept of a person is to be distinguished from the actual physical and psychological material and events that constitute the life of a normal human being. The person is not the concept, and the person is nothing more than the imaginary sum of his brain, body, and mental states and events that he performs and experiences.
Now all analogies limp to some extent, but this one has no legs. In the first place, the fundamental idea in the concept of a nation is that it consists of persons, not imaginary persons but actual, living persons. Thus our Constitution necessarily begins “We the people.” But that’s where the symmetry between nations and persons ends. For if nations are reducible to persons, what are persons reducible to? Parfit offers what he calls Relation R: we are reducible to the existence of our brains and bodies, the thinking of our thoughts, the doing of our deeds, and the psychological connectedness and psychological continuity of our memories over time. But is this a true reduction? Normally in both science and analytic philosophy itself we move from one conceptual level to another where our definitions are more precise, our observations more testable, and our understanding of causal relations enhanced. Does Parfit’s Relation R do any of this? Are the concepts of thought, deed, and memory any clearer or more scientific when Parfit is done with them, let alone the concepts of psychological connectedness and continuity? In his famous Physics Exam thought experiment he moves from talk of bifurcating brains to talk of divided minds with the ease of a magician and with just as much credibility. I am not arguing that psychological concepts like mind and consciousness have no place in the analysis of the concept of personhood, far from it, but they certainly have no place in a Reductionist View like the one Parfit is espousing. To paraphrase the famous television commercial, “Where’s the reduction?!”
In the second place—and this brings us to the heart of the matter—while it may have been instructive at one time to speculate about how our tribal ancestors invented the notion of a nation, it would certainly be far more illuminating to know why and how our linguistic ancestors invented the concept of a person, since it appears to have no evolutionary value whatsoever. The closest Parfit comes to tipping his hand about the real motivation behind “Reasons and Persons” is on page 234 where he says:
“Most of these people [traditional Biblical and Buddhist moralists] assumed that, because we shall have an after-life or be reincarnated, morality and self-interest always coincide. BECAUSE THEY HAD THIS FALSE BELIEF, these people overlooked one of the objections to S [the Self-Interest Theory].” (my caps)
Now one would expect that Parfit has several or at least one strong argument in “Reasons and Persons” demonstrating the falsity of the millennias-old belief in an after-life or reincarnation, but one would be sorely disappointed. I find nothing in the entire book, Appendices and End Notes included, that even touches upon it. It is simply stated as an obvious fact.
The same is true of Parfit’s dismissal of the Cartesian doctrine of an independently existing transcendental ego as the ground of personhood. On page 264 Parfit says:
“Is each of us aware that he is a persistent subject of experiences, a separately existing entity that is not his brain and body? Is each of us aware, for example, that he is a Cartesian Ego?
THIS IS NOT A POINT THAT CAN BE ARGUED. I do not believe that I am directly aware that I am such an entity. And I assume that I am not unusual. I believe that no one is directly aware of such a fact.” (my caps)
Now I am quite sure that Parfit is thoroughly familiar with Descartes’ “Discourse on Method” and “Meditations on First Philosophy”, and that Descartes came to his discovery of the transcendental ego by phenomenological—not philosophical—reflection. That is why the point cannot be argued. The “cogito” is an exercise in self-discovery only because it reveals that the ‘I’ that says “I think, therefore I am” cannot be the same ‘I’ that thinks and is. It is, in fact, the ‘I’ that says “therefore”; the ‘I’ of logically connected discourse. The fact that this just happened to coincide with over two millennia of Graeco-Roman-Hebraic-Christian tradition is Parfit’s real target. And the fact that Parfit doesn’t feel obligated to produce any sort of counter argument shows that we’re dealing with some very deep-seated, British public school prejudices here.
Parfit concludes the first part of his book on the ethics of reason by advocating for what he calls CP: the Critical Present-Aim Theory which says “. . . what I have most reason to do is what would best fulfill those of my present desires that are not irrational.” When I referred earlier to the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, I had Parfit’s CP in mind. By what logic would one persuade Mr. Bundy that his burning desire to kidnap, rape, and murder innocent young women was irrational? By the same token, Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s most passionate desire was to love and serve the poorest and most wretched human beings in the city, one person at a time. Since there were literally millions of such persons and only a normal lifetime to give, CP would seem to indicate that Mother Teresa was not only behaving irrationally but perhaps immorally as well.
Reading Parfit’s book was, for the most part, pure torture. In Appendix I, page 566 Parfit refers to an imaginary example from Rawls of a gifted mathematician who would rather spend his life counting the blades of grass on his neighbors’ lawns than making significant contributions to Applied Mathematics. I can sympathize with Rawls when it comes to Parfit, whose moral theorizing resembles nothing so much as counting blades of grass, and is even less rewarding.