Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality

"This is a surprisingly good book. That might sound rude to David Edmonds, but I say it is ‘surprisingly good’ because Derek Parfit didn’t do very much. One of the things we associate with a good biography is action; Derek Parfit spent most of his life sitting in his room, listening to Wagner, and failing to write his books. Which is a nice little anecdote, but we’ve got 300 more pages to fill. What the hell can one say? What David Edmonds does so well is to show you that even though Derek Parfit was the great modern philosopher of selflessness—which has been foundational to the effective altruism movement and other modern philosophies—his philosophy was closely associated with his personality. Edmonds is very good at explaining Parfit’s ideas, and doing so in a way that is not oversimplified—but is also not the headache of reading Parfit’s original work. The real achievement of the book is to show you how Parfit’s personality changed significantly in later life. It also embraces this question of—as he became more reclusive and obsessed with his work—whether he, as some people say, became a cruel and selfish person willing to upset the people who loved him. Was he in some way neurodivergent? Had he masked it in early life? Edmonds shows you how the emotions of the man could lead him to his ideas. My favourite moment is when Parfit, during a talk, said how sad it is that Bach died before finishing The Art of the Fugue . Then he cried—I think for 90 seconds—in the middle of this philosophy conference. That’s very representative. There are lots of anecdotes in the book about Parfit eating lunch at All Souls, talking about moral philosophy, and the person he was with would express a particular opinion and he would look physically pained before saying: ‘No, no, you mustn’t believe that; that would mean that torture is acceptable.’ And he would be clearly, emotionally upset. So he became reclusive, perhaps selfish, certainly very, very detached from the world. But he was also vibrantly emotionally responsive. That clearly, hugely informed his philosophical beliefs. The question of how his personality affects him is that—in my reading of the book—he may have been more productive if he was less cossetted, if he had been forced to give more lectures. Maybe he would have worked differently? The book does a really good job of linking the personal with the philosophical. It’s a fascinating book. I spoke to a young philosophy student recently who told me that he walks around listening to it in Oxford. I think it’s a great example of how—a bit like George Eliot, a bit like John Stuart Mill, a bit like Malcolm X—the story of the individual can be just as interesting and motivating as the ideas themselves. If a philosopher says to us: You’re wrong about the nature of the self. You’re wrong about the nature of morality. Then we must immediately be interested in how that person has lived. What biography can do, in a way perhaps no other genre can do, is say: this is what it means to be an intellectual. This is what ideas actually look like. I think that’s very important. My own book, Second Act , is half-biography, half-social science. You might read a chapter about network science or midlife crises, and think: Very interesting, but I don’t know how I could use that in my life. What you won’t forget is the story of how Samuel Johnson was plucked from obscurity by a coincidence of his network. Or how Frank Lloyd Wright had a midlife crisis and didn’t—like his father and mentor—become a hopeless alcoholic, but through dogged and sometimes very cruel determination make a second, rather brilliant, career. These stories will, as George Eliot said, give you the picture of life. Who Parfit is, is not more important than his ideas, but is very important to the transmission of his ideas. Malcolm X affected the world with a force of personality as much as with his demands for justice. In art the question is often asked: can you separate the dance from the dance? Intellectual biography shows you that if we do separate the thinker from the thoughts, then we lose some of the persuasive and explanatory power of the ideas."

"So Derek Parfit was an unusual figure and David Edmonds has collected a lot of information about just how unusual he was. As a philosopher, he came to notice in the early 1970s with a couple of articles about personal identity—what it is to be a self over time. I remember reading these as an undergraduate student, and they were very different to the typical philosophical journal article. But his basic position was that there could be good reasons for thinking that we might have more in common with the people around us now than we might with our future selves. That’s a Buddhist-like concept of the self, and he did explicitly draw some analogies with Buddhism . It was an unusual position to take for a mainstream Oxford philosopher, though elements of it were in a tradition that stems from John Locke . Then he went quiet for a bit before he produced, in the mid-1980s, under great pressure, a book called Reasons and Persons . It elaborated on what he thought about the nature of the self and how that impacts on morality and questions about altruism. Then he went on to the mission that occupied the rest of his life, which was that he thought he could and should prove conclusively the objectivity of morality—according to him what is right or wrong is not subjective, but absolutely objective. He wanted to do that without bringing in any kind of divine guarantee for this objectivity. He was very much an atheist, but as Edmonds’ biography makes clear, he followed a family tradition of being a missionary. His parents were literally missionaries. And Parfit had a sort of missionary zeal for proving and persuading people beyond doubt that morality was objective, meeting every possible objection and persuading his most eminent colleagues that this was so. Or at least trying to. He even said that his life would have been a waste if he didn’t succeed in showing that morality was objective. I think it’s generally accepted that he didn’t succeed in that. But he became obsessed … when I say obsessed, I mean he was obsessive as well. Quite a lot of the biography charts the fascinating arc of his life—from the good-looking, intelligent, young man, a brilliant student, who had always been exceptional in his intelligence, and the transformation that happened in later life. He was somebody who was…neurodiverse, let’s put it that way. He had some OCD characteristics, would clean his teeth for hours, would work absolutely obsessively. He doesn’t seem to have had the same kinds of connections with people that you might have expected of someone who writes in such an elegant, sophisticated way. I used to share an office with his wife, Janet Radcliffe Richards. She used to tell me some stories about him. He was always working—writing a paper, or reading a book, or commenting on other people’s writing. But he needed the fuel of coffee to keep him going. So rather than waste time making a decent cup of coffee he would use instant coffee and just turn on the hot tap. Janet said he sometimes didn’t even wait for the water to warm up. Parfit would be reading a book at the same time as making the coffee. He was unusual in other ways too: he could be incredibly generous with his time. For someone considered a high flyer—he had an All Souls fellowship, didn’t have to teach, could devote himself entirely to his research—he had a huge amount of time for anyone who wanted to discuss ideas with him. If somebody sent him an essay on something he’d written, he would return the next day with comments even longer than the essay. This was partly because he wanted to get everything right. For exercise, he would happily sit on an exercise bike in his underpants in front of the main window overlooking the street, absolutely oblivious to people looking in. And maybe he didn’t always put underpants on. It just wouldn’t have occurred to him that this might be found offensive or disturbing. Well, Diogenes’ philosophy wasn’t a written philosophy. He was performing philosophy as a series of gags, really, some of them visual. Derek Parfit was all theory. It was philosophy through words not performances. All he did for most of his later life was theorise, talk philosophy, write philosophy, communicate about philosophy, talk, give talks, and so on. Behind all this, there is an interesting question about what you’re doing when you’re writing a biography of a philosopher. There was a much-read profile of Parfit that appeared in his lifetime, by the New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar. Like all of those New Yorker pieces, it was a very elegantly constructed profile, and focused very much on how unusual he was as a man. The question is, how connected is that kind of obsessive behaviour with his philosophy? That’s a question that Edmonds had to address too. It’s difficult to say. There’s a risk that he just gets remembered as this odd guy, who did strange things, was neurodiverse, whatever. There was a critical piece about Edmonds’ biography in the London Review of Books that argued that he should have written more about Parfit’s philosophy and by implication perhaps less about his quirks. And I can sympathise with that to some extent. But someone else can write the definitive book about Parfit’s philosophy. This is a biography. There’s a sense in which biography gives an opportunity to expound on somebody’s thought in historical context. Philosophers have philosophical ideas, and you have a duty to write about those in a biography. That’s what Ray Monk did so well in his biography of Wittgenstein. Edmonds did a great deal of research, talking to people who knew Derek Parfit well, and what lingers for them is just what an unusual man he was, as a man as well as a thinker. And that’s interesting for a wider readership as well, the mystery around how he developed into that obsessive workaholic from what he was as a young man. So once he’d done that research, Edmonds was right to tell that story. It’s very interesting. Many of the people who knew Derek Parfit well, (and there were a lot of them because he cultivated a network of philosophers who commented on what he wrote), really admire Edmonds’ book. It’s very difficult to achieve that when your subject has died so recently."