Jimmy Goodrich

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit argues for a reductionist view of persons and that our ethical thinking should become more impersonal. While doing so, he argues that we may need to give up some widely shared intuitions about the Separateness of Persons and all of those views which crucially hinge upon it. However, this chapter argues that Parfit was mistaken. His reductionist views of persons and his more general claim that our ethical thinking should become more impersonal are in fact compatible with several plausible interpretations of the Separateness of Persons. Parfit’s project in _Reasons and Persons_ should thus be understood not as undermining the Separateness of Persons, but as transforming our understanding of it. The chapter closes by considering the degree to which Parfit had reason by his own lights to accept some version of the Separateness of Persons.

According to the Wrong Restriction, we are liable to defensive harm only when we threaten to wrong others. While attractive on a first pass, we argue that plausible philosophical claims make the Wrong Restriction difficult to accept. In its place, we offer the Impermissibility Restriction, according to which one is liable to defensive harm only if one would act impermissibly, all things considered. Accepting the Impermissibility Restriction in place of the Wrong Restriction has significant implications for the ethics of self‐defense.

Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the best moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty new essays in this book were written in his honour and have all been inspired by his work - in particular, his work in an area of moral philosophy known as 'population ethics', which is concerned with moral issues raised by causing people to exist. Until Parfit began writing about these issues in the 1970s, there was almost no discussion of them in the entire history of philosophy. But his monumental book 'Reasons and Persons' (1984) revealed that population ethics abounds in deep and intractable problems and paradoxes that not only challenge all the major moral theories but also threaten to undermine many important common-sense moral beliefs.

This book is a collection of essays, most of which appear here for the first time, that were written in honour of the legendary moral philosopher, Derek Parfit. The essays are mainly concerned with issues that Parfit addressed in his book, Reasons and Persons. They include the relevance of personal identity to ethics, the rationality of different attitudes to time, the nature of well-being, the varieties of consequentialism, reasons for action, aggregation in ethics, causal overdetermination, egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and supererogation.