-
229Acts 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
-
675Lewis, Perry, and what mattersIn Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons, University of California Press. pp. 91-108. 1976.
-
849Equality 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
-
414
-
93Bombs 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.
-
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
-
513On 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.
-
594Innumerate ethicsPhilosophy and Public Affairs 7 (4): 285-301. 1978.Suppose that we can help either one person or many others. Is it a reason t0 help the many that We should thus be helping more people? John Taurek thinks not. We may learn from his arguments.
-
699Can We Avoid the Repugnant Conclusion?Theoria 82 (2): 110-127. 2016.According to the Repugnant Conclusion: Compared with the existence of many people who would all have some very high quality of life, there is some much larger number of people whose existence would be better, even though these people would all have lives that were barely worth living. I suggest some ways in which we might be able to avoid this conclusion. I try to defend a strong form of lexical superiority.
-
828The unimportance of identityIn H. Harris (ed.), Identity, Oxford University Press. pp. 13-45. 1997.We can start with some science fiction. Here on Earth, I enter the Teletransporter. When I press some button, a machine destroys my body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. The information is sent by radio to Mars, where another machine makes, out of organic materials, a perfect copy of my body. The person who wakes up on Mars seems to remember living my life up to the moment when I pressed the button, and he is in every other way just like me. Of those who have thought about such…Read more
Derek Parfit
(1942 - 2017)
Areas of Specialization
| Metaphysics |
| Meta-Ethics |
| Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
| Metaphysics |
| Meta-Ethics |
| Normative Ethics |