I’m almost done with David Edmonds’s excellent biography of Derek Parfit. Edmonds is a master in telling good and entertaining stories mixing philosophical considerations and personal background – I had already enjoyed his book on the Vienna circle. Compared to the lives of most of the members of the Vienna Circle, Parfit’s has been relatively uneventful. He spent all his adult life in the same institution – All Souls College in Oxford, and for the most part dedicated all his time to philosophy and photography. The biography is nonetheless fascinating for at least three related reasons. First, even if Parfit’s life has been essentially uneventful, it has not been a “normal” life. This is largely due to Parfit’s idiosyncratic personality which most unconventional traits kept on reinforcing as he aged. Second, Parfit was arguably one of the most important philosophers of the last fifty years and has been exchanging ideas with a long list of brilliant minds over the same period. Reading a biography of Parfit is also the opportunity to hear about these – not necessarily extremely well-known – individuals. Third, Parfit’s philosophy, though difficult and demanding, is the home of many brilliant and controversial ideas that have shaped and continue to shape philosophical discussions.
Edmonds’s story singles out two patterns in Parfit’s personal and intellectual life that seem somehow to be parallel without being obviously related. The first pattern is that Parfit has progressively transformed from a relatively sociable person to a hermit reducing his social interactions to a strict minimum. While progressive, this change accelerated in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s. If one only reads the chapter dedicated to the writing of On What Matters and where Parfit’s social behavior during this period is largely discussed, one could easily have the impression that Parfit was inhumane, especially in the face of his demonstrated lack of empathy.
The second pattern is a progressive transformation in Parfit’s approach to philosophy – again with some kind of break in the 1990s. His 1984 book Reasons and Persons has shaken planet Philosophy because of its profoundly revisionary nature. Reading the book, you find controversial and counterintuitive ideas almost on each page. This is obviously the case with the part on personal identity that, as far as I’m concerned, I consider to be the most fascinating pages of philosophy I have ever read (and looking at my exemplar of R&P, I’ve read them many times!). Parfit’s approach to philosophy in On What Matters (published more than 25 years after R&P) is different. Rather than demolishing received views, Parfit’s obsession in the making of this almost never-ending has been to reconcile what has generally been viewed as antagonistic moral views. Edmonds’s narrative suggests that Parfit was literally distressed by the fact that people he highly estimated, like Bernard Williams, were rejecting ideas that he took as evident – such as the fact that there are objective moral truths. The obsession to reconcile the irreconcilable motivates the two major claims made in OWM: the metaethical claim that there are normative facts that can be referred to by true propositions on the one hand, the moral claim that rule-consequentialism and some forms of contractualism (Kantian and Scanlonian) converge toward the same propositions about what we have reasons to do.
From the 1990s onward, Parfit’s whole (not only academic) life has been virtually dedicated to this project of normative reconciliation, driven by the belief that there must be normative truths, for otherwise, nothing would matter. If there are such normative truths, then it is highly unlikely that deeply ingrained moral beliefs and principles actually disagree; they must have identified the same set of truths. At least, a philosophical work refining these beliefs and principles should be able to make them converge. This was, it seems, Parfit’s deep conviction.
This purely philosophical approach to moral reconciliation deeply contrasts with other views in moral and political philosophy. Consider Rawls’s (about whom we learn in Edmonds’s book that Parfit was not impressed by his theory of justice) account of pluralism for instance. Rawls too was worried by sustained and pervading disagreement in liberal societies. His concerns had however different roots than Parfit’s. They were not grounded in metaethical considerations but rather related to worries about the stability of pluralistic societies. Rather than looking for reconciliation on purely moral grounds, Rawls rather looked for a partition of the normative space, looking for reconciliation only in an area of this space. The partition follows from two distinctions. On the one hand, the distinction between the “comprehensive” and the “political”. On the other hand, the distinction between constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice on one side, non-constitutional aspects on the other.
The comprehensive/political distinction remains a problematic feature of Rawls’s conceptual framework but was basically meant to make sure that non-political moral beliefs would not have to be part of the justificatory endeavor of principles of justice.[1] Rawls was thus making sure that the moral pluralism related to the burdens of judgments would not an agreement over political principles of justice impossible. The second distinction keeps the scope of public justification relatively narrow. Public justification is not requested for all laws, only for a subset of them. Rawls's strategy for dealing with moral disagreement was therefore to isolate the subset of the normative space for which he considered that agreement was more likely to be established and to argue that disagreement in the rest of the space was not problematic – at least to live together in a well-ordered society.
An even more radical strategy is defended by post-Rawlsian scholars like Gerald Gaus. Like Parfit and Rawls, these post-Rawlsians are also looking for reconciliation. But for them, Rawls and even more Parfit would count as sectarians who want to impose their moral views on others. Reconciliation is not something that you can achieve by armchair reasoning, even if this reasoning emanates from the most brilliant minds on the planet. To think that one single mind is able to reconcile the diversity of moral views is to commit the same constructivist fallacy as the one Hayek identifies with respect to planners who believe in being able to organize the economy and allocate resources based on necessarily partial knowledge. Moral reconciliation is not an individual achievement, it’s a social product.
Compared to Rawls, post-Rawlsians do not assume that reconciliation necessarily takes place within the “political” domain of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. As it happens, people fiercely disagree about justice. They do not restrict the kinds of reasons allowed for finding an agreement. They even do not demand that people be moved by the desire (or the duty) to reconcile their contradicting views. Morality is a self-organizing system that can take many different paths and there is no point in searching for a rational basis for reconciliation.
It is obvious that the whole Parfitian project pursued in OWM is alien to this last approach. Ultimately, most will agree that Parfit has failed in his reconciliation project, which is not to mean that nothing can be learned from it, quite the contrary. Nor does it mean that pure moral philosophizing is useless. Moral philosophy is an input that feeds the diversity of moral views that coexist in society. Ultimately however, I think the post-Rawlsians are right: what matters is that we are able to live together based on self-organized moral systems that meet minimal justificatory criteria of decency, respect, freedom, and well-being.
[1] More exactly, they would not have to be part of the pro tanto justification of justice principles. Moral beliefs are authorized in the stage of full justification, corresponding to the establishment of the overlapping consensus.