Derek Parfit

(1942 - 2017)

An exchange of correspondence with Charles Fried. Parfit's section begins: "I am puzzled. Consider Case One: I could save either one stranger or five others. Both acts would involve a heroic personal sacrifice. I choose, for no reason, to save the one rather than the five. Fried argues: (i ) Since both acts would involve a heroic sacrifice, I could not be criticized if I chose to do neither. (2) If I could not be criticized for choosing to do neither, I cannot be criticized for choosing to do one rather than the other. Therefore (3) When I choose to save the one rather than the five, my choice cannot be criticized. Fried rejects (3). Though my act is heroic, he concedes that my choice is 'perverse' and 'morally deficient.'"

sonable, in this sense, if we ignore, or give too little weight to, some other people's well-being or moral claims.' Some critics have suggested that, because Scanlon appeals to this sense of 'reasonable', his formula is empty. On this objection, whenever we believe that some act is wrong, we shall believe that people have moral claims not to be treated in this way. We could therefore argue that such acts are disallowed by some principle which no one could reasonably reject, since anyone who rejected this principle would be giving too little weight to people's moral claims not to be treated in this way. Since everyone could claim that the principles which they accept could not be reasonably rejected, Scanlon's Formula would make no difference to our moral thinking. That is not so. If we reject the principles that disallow certain acts, we are denying that such acts are wrong. This denial would be unreasonable if it would give too little weight to some other people's moral claims. So Scanlon's Formula implies that..

I did not, as James Sterba writes, claim to have explained "the asymmetry view." I claimed that, since my suggested explanation makes it impossible to solve the Paradox of Future Individuals, "we must abandon" one of its essential premises (my p. i52). Sterba's main claim is that my suggested explanation "does not so much explain or justify the [asymmetry] view as simply restate it." Is this so? My explanation assumed (W) that an act cannot be wrong if it will not be bad for any of the people who ever live.' Sterba asks why we should not appeal instead to one of my Wide Principles, which are concerned with possible effects on people who might have lived. And he suggests that, since "the only ground" for preferring (W) is that it explains the asymmetry view, (W) cannot explain this view. There are other grounds for appealing to (W), such as those provided by certain theories about the nature of moral reasoning. On Scanlon's theory, for example, our fundamental moral motive is "to be able to justify one's actions to others on grounds that they could not reasonably reject.'" We may claim that, on such a theory, an act cannot be wrong unless it will affect someone in a way that cannot be justified unless there will be some complainant whose complaint cannot be answered. Similarly, Brandt suggests that, by the phrase "is morally wrong," we should mean "would be prohibited by any moral code which all fully rational persons would tend to support... for the society of the agent, if they expected to spend a lifetime in that society."> It seems likely that, on the chosen..

When we have a normative reason, and we act for that reason, it becomes our motivating reason. But we can have either kind of reason without having the other. Thus, if I jump into the canal, my motivating reason was provided by my belief; but I had no normative reason to jump. I merely thought I did. And, if I failed to notice that the canal was frozen, I had a reason not to jump that, because it was unknown to me, did not motivate me. Though we can have normative reasons without being motivated, and vice versa, such reasons are closely related to our motivation. There are, however, very different views about what this relation is. This disagreement raises wider questions about what normative reasons are, and about which reasons there are. After sketching some of these views, I shall discuss some arguments by Williams, and then say where, in my opinion, the truth lies. [...] I [will] suggest why, as I believe, we should be non-reductive normative realists, and should regard all reasons as external.

The reasoning in this anthology shows how hard it is to form acceptable theories in cases that involve different numbers of people. That's highly important. And it gives us ground for worry about our appeal to particular theories in the other two kinds of case: those which involve the same numbers, in the different outcomes, though these are not all the same people, and those which do involve all and only the same people. But there is still a clear distinction between these three kinds of case. And there may be some hope of 'quarantining' the impossibility, and the resulting scepticism, to Different Number Choices. Her's a partial analogy, which may be worth mentioning. It's very difficult to formulate acceptable welfarist theories that could apply to cases that involve infinite quantities of such things as suffering and happiness. That's a worry, but it doesn't undermine our confidence in the theories that can handle cases with only finite quantities