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410Is common-sense morality self-defeating?Journal of Philosophy 76 (10): 533-545. 1979.When is a moral theory self-defeating? I suggest the following. There are certain things we ought to try to achieve. Call these our moral aims. Our moral theory would be self-defeating if we believed we ought to do what will cause our moral aims to be worse achieved. Is this ever true? If so, what does it show?
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32The Puzzle of Reality: Why Does the Universe Exist?In Peter van Inwagen & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Metaphysics: The Big Questions, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 418-427. 1991.
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223Acts and Outcomes: A Reply to Boonin‐VailPhilosophy and Public Affairs 25 (4): 308-316. 1996.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non—commercial use
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672Lewis, Perry, and what mattersIn Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons, University of California Press. pp. 91-108. 1976.
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832Equality or Priority?In John Harris (ed.), Bioethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 81-125. 2001.One of the central debates within contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy concerns how to formulate an egalitarian theory of distributive justice which gives coherent expression to egalitarian convictions and withstands the most powerful anti-egalitarian objections. This book brings together many of the key contributions to that debate by some of the world’s leading political philosophers: Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, John Rawls, T.M. Scanlon,…Read more
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90Bombs and coconuts, or rational irrationalityIn Christopher W. Morris & Arthur Ripstein (eds.), Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier, Cambridge University Press. pp. 81--97. 2001.
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838When Ingmar and I discuss metaphysics or morality, our views are seldom far apart. Hut on the subjects of this paper, rationality and reasons, we deeply disagree
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505On What Matters: Two-volume setOxford University Press. 2011.This is a major work in moral philosophy, the long-awaited follow-up to Parfit's 1984 classic Reasons and Persons, a landmark of twentieth-century philosophy. Parfit now presents a powerful new treatment of reasons and a critical examination of the most prominent systematic moral theories, leading to his own ground-breaking conclusion.
Derek Parfit
(1942 - 2017)
Areas of Specialization
| Metaphysics |
| Meta-Ethics |
| Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
| Metaphysics |
| Meta-Ethics |
| Normative Ethics |