David Edmonds on the Life and Philosophy of Derek Parfit
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Warburton. And me, David Edmonds. If you enjoy Philosophy Bites, please support us. We're currently unfunded and all donations will be gratefully received. For details, go to www.philosophybites.com. There's a lot of interest in philosophers' lives at the moment, and we've decided to interview a number of biographers of philosophers, starting with Philosophy Bites co-creator David Edmonds.

I asked him about his life of the quirky Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, who's famous for his imaginative thought experiments and reflections on the nature of the self. So welcome to the first of our mini-series, BioBytes. David Edmonds, welcome to Philosophy Bytes. Thanks very much. It's a podcast I've heard a lot about, so I'm delighted to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on today is Derek Parfit, his life and philosophy. Now those aren't two separate questions, the issue of what his life was like and his philosophy. What we're interested in is the interrelationship between the two. But before we get on to that, could you just give the briefest sketch of what his life was like?

So from one perspective, his life is extremely dull. He spends it literally in cloisters. He goes first to a prep school in England, then he goes to a boarding school, the most famous school in England, Eton. Then he goes to Oxford, then he spends time on a fellowship in America. He's something called a Harkness Fellow and he goes to Harvard. He comes back to Oxford and he gets a fellowship to All Souls, which is a very prestigious college in Oxford and

just for people doing research it has no undergraduates at all and he spends his entire life basically at All Souls so as I say from one perspective quite a dull existence on the other hand he is a very eccentric man he becomes increasingly eccentric so there are lots and lots of stories attached to his life

But he first emerged into the consciousness of philosophers beyond Oxford with his early writings on the nature of the self. Could you say something about those? Yeah, he was actually trained as a historian, not as a philosopher. And when he was on his fellowship in America, by chance, he happened to share a long car journey

with a philosopher called David Wiggins, who he didn't know at all. This was a connection through his then girlfriend. And David Wiggins wrote about the subject of personal identity, what it is that makes me the same person over time, what it is that makes me the same person now that I was when I was five years old and will be when I'm 80 years old.

And I think that's probably the reason that Parfit first becomes interested in the subject of personal identity. He writes his first paper in 1971, when he's 29 years old, on personal identity, and it makes his international reputation. Roughly, what does he say?

Roughly, he says in the tradition of Locke and Hume that there's no essence of us. I mean, if you're a religious believer, you might believe that we have a soul and it's the soul that remains the same from conception to death. Parthick believed that we're constantly changing, we're constantly evolving.

So his question was, what matters to us? What should matter to us? If our bodies are constantly changing, what should matter to us as we change through time? And his answer was more or less a Buddhist answer that not all that much should matter to us. And in fact, we might be more like other people now than we will be like our future self.

So essentially he says what should matter to us is psychological connectedness. Insofar as the person in a few years time has our memories, has our personality traits and so on, that's a kind of survival. He has this famous thought experiment where he imagines you go into a teletransporter and your molecules are copied and you reappear on planet Mars or planet Zog.

And then you die on planet Earth, but this exact copy of you is on planet Mars or planet Zog.

And Parfit's general view is really what matters to you has survived. Although it's just a copy of you, your personality, your memory, they're all exactly the same. You shouldn't feel too worried about it. Many people might think, oh, you've died and you've just got a copy of you. But Parfit thinks what really matters has continued to exist. But as he developed his views later on, this has moral implications as well. It's not just about where is the self.

Yes, so if you think that there's no essence of you, then the connection between you and your future self and your past self becomes weaker. That has all sorts of implications about how guilty you should feel about things that you did 30 years ago. It has implications about whether you should save your future self in 30 years' time. So it's

draws a kind of gap between you and your past self and future self but also according to Parfit the gap between you and other people is narrowed in the past there might be this picture of you have this essence other people have this essence once that image disperses there's nothing as it were that sharply differentiates you from other people so you become further away from your future self and your past self and you become nearer to other selves

So how does that relate to Derek Parfit, the man? Because what we're really interested in teasing out is this relationship between the life and the ideas. And there is a hint, at least, of these ideas of his emerging from certain distinctive features of his own psychology.

Yeah, I think like with a lot of Parfit's ideas, it's very easy to trace a connection between them and his personality traits. So in this particular case, Parfit thinks the body itself is not important. It's the psychology that matters.

And Parfait himself had a very strange relationship with his body. I think for him, it was just like a vehicle. It carried around all the important stuff, but it itself was not very important. And

There were lots of stories about him showing a sort of lack of awareness with his body. He would exercise naked on his exercise bike, even when the curtains were open, seemingly unaware or just completely unconcerned about whether people could look at him. There are stories about him taking off his shirt when he was hot, or even his trousers when he was hot, because he wanted to cool down, not caring at all what people thought of him or how they perceived his body.

there were stories about him being unaware of personal space around his body and sitting a bit closer to people than is normal. There was nothing sort of pervy about it or anything like that. He was just sort of unaware that around his body there was a kind of area which was his and he shouldn't enter other people's personal space. So I think in lots of ways he was a sort of disembodied self himself and

And so it was easy to imagine for him that what was important was not the body, but what was inside the body, as it were, the mind. But also many distinguished thinkers have to fight for their own privacy, fight for time to get on with their work.

He seemed to be the opposite. He seemed to make himself hugely available to a very wide range of thinkers. So it wasn't just his body that he wasn't particularly concerned with. It seems like his mind was there for all takers, that he would devote mental energy to thinking about other people's problems in great depth.

Yeah, there was a limit to that. He would only devote his time to other people's philosophical problems, not to their personal problems, not to their relationship problems and so on, or their financial problems. But if they had a philosophical problem, then his generosity was almost boundless. And he would give people 10-hour tutorials if there was something they needed to work through, and he would talk to not just...

very well-known philosophers, but he would give an enormous amount of time to students and not necessarily brilliant students. So when it came to philosophy, he didn't really regard time as his own. He wasn't free of ego.

but he was essentially concerned with the truth. He wanted to get to the truth, and if somebody else, if another philosopher could help him get to the truth, he wasn't particularly concerned with who got the credit for that. He was very interested in ironing out problems, and if other people could help him with that, so much the better, and he was very happy to give credit to other philosophers.

I was trying to hint at the idea that perhaps his views, which tend towards altruism, are connected with this kind of psychology of really not overly asserting his own rights to his own thinking. Yeah, that's definitely true. That comes up in lots of other ways. So most of us think in a much less impartial way to Derek Parfitt. So most of us have very strong links and relationships with our nearest and dearest, with our friends, with

perhaps with our neighbours and so on, and a much weaker relationship with people who live on the other side of the world. And if you're an impartial philosopher, as Derek was, and many of his arguments tend to the view that what matters is producing the best possible outcome for everybody, irrespective of where they are, either geographically, either physically, or temporally, or in time,

Many of his arguments reached that conclusion, but it came much more naturally to him than it does to the rest of us. He had much weaker psychological links to his nearest and dearest. So if a friend had a wedding and asked him to go along, his work was much more important

than going to that wedding. And so he would politely decline and say, I'm too busy, I'm working on my manuscript or whatever. And yet, if he learnt about suffering, which could be suffering that was taking place in a war at the moment, but it could be the suffering of people in the trenches of World War I...

When he started talking about those things, he would just burst into tears. The suffering of people 100 years ago would move him to tears. And he seemed to be almost as affected by the suffering of strangers at a different time than he was about the suffering of his friends living in Oxford at the same time he was.

I mean, that is quite an unusual character. Look, he's celebrated as a significant philosopher, but why should we take seriously the moral philosophy that's emerging from what appears to be such an alien being? This seems to be not a typical human being. This seems to be somebody who is a kind of impartial Martian who's landed in our midst. That's a good question. It's a live philosophical debate to what extent the provenance of an idea is

should undermine an idea. I'm of the view that it might tell you something interesting about the idea, it might help you interpret the idea, or it might help you understand what the philosopher was trying to say when they come up with this idea. But nonetheless, there's still the idea to address in and of itself.

So you could say about Parfit's philosophy, well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Given the kind of person he is, of course, those are the conclusions he's going to come to. Well, famously or notoriously, his arguments are incredibly detailed. He's got premises and he's got conclusions. The job of a philosophical critic is to look at those premises, to look at the argument and to say whether it makes sense.

So whatever the provenance of Parfit's ideas, the fact that he comes at these arguments from an interesting psychological perspective, I don't think in and of itself should undermine the arguments. There's also an insight that we can get about the zeal with which he pursued philosophy, actually from his parents' profession. His parents were missionaries, I think I'm right in saying.

Both his parents were missionaries. All four of his grandparents were missionaries. And he brings a kind of missionary zeal to his philosophy. He's also a total perfectionist, so he won't publish anything until he's perfectly happy with it. The two books he writes are very large, but they take a long time to arrive. He wants to persuade everybody that he's right, and that's part of his missionary zeal. So

On What Matters, which is his second book, the project in On What Matters is to try and prove, well, firstly, that morality is objective.

that it's not relative, that it's not a matter of opinion, that it doesn't vary from place to place, that there are facts about morality. And secondly, to show that the different traditions of morality, be they contractualism, a tradition that comes from people like Rousseau, be they Kantian, be they utilitarian, that those different traditions are not nearly as distinct as other people have claimed that they were.

Both positions are extremely contentious and many philosophers did disagree and I'm afraid continue to disagree with Derek but he was obsessed about convincing everybody so he would send

versions of his manuscript around to hundreds, literally, of philosophers. And every time they had an argument, he would try and counter the argument. And his books, as a result, got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, not necessarily better, until he thought he'd convinced everybody who needed convincing. And it was at this period that he really began to shed everything from his life that wasn't philosophy.

And notoriously, he always wore the same clothes. He had an identical set of trousers and shirts so that he didn't have to waste time choosing. He would make coffee from the tap so that he didn't have to waste time boiling a kettle. Anything to save time so that he could focus on what he considered the most important questions in philosophy.

Now, historians of philosophy tend to think that philosophical books just kind of emerge because the thinker reached a point where they wanted to communicate with his or her peers. But in Derek Parfit's case, it's probable that reasons and persons wouldn't have appeared unless there were the social pressures in Oxford at that particular time to publish. Yes, in Parfit's case, he had something called a prize fellowship at All Souls.

then he got a junior research fellowship and he'd been at All Souls for 14 years in 1981 when he wanted to get what's called a senior research fellowship which is effectively a job for life at All Souls and he just assumed that he would get one of these things and there was a revolt in All Souls because a few of the mainly mediocre fellows at the time pointed out that he'd been there 14 years and hadn't produced a single work a single book and much to Derek's shock

he was told that they weren't prepared to give him a senior research fellowship. What they would do is that they would extend his junior research fellowship for another three years, by which time he had to produce a book. And if he didn't produce a book, he would then be thrown out of All Souls. And that was really the most dramatic moment in Derek's professional life and the biggest setback in his life.

He basically, because of publishing schedules, had 18 months or 20 months to produce a tome. And he threw all his ideas, his philosophical ideas to date into this enormous, I think, great work of genius called Reasons and Persons, which covers some of the things we've been talking about

personal identity but also has a huge section about our obligations to future people. He throws it all in and the book indeed comes out just in time for the vote which goes in his favour in 1984 but the book would never have appeared without this pressure and in fact All Souls did him a great favour because it's very likely that nothing would ever have appeared had they not given him this ultimatum.

And that book opens with a famous discussion of how it's possible to give an atheistic account of morality. We're just in the early days of that, with a quotation from Nietzsche and so on. And that seems to be a well thought out introduction. But actually, there's a kind of biographical story about how that connects with Parfit's obsession with photography. Yeah, Parfit was very keen to use a particular image,

on the front cover of that book. He only at that time had two obsessions in his life. One was philosophy, the other was photography. And he would...

go every year to what was then Leningrad, what is now St. Petersburg, and to Venice and photograph the same buildings at dawn and dusk. And there was one particular shot he wanted to have on the cover of Reasons and Persons. And it was a shot with water and a boat on it. And it didn't really relate to the philosophy at all.

But he discovered a Nietzsche quote which had a tenuous link with this photo of a boat and so on. And so he ended up using this Nietzsche quote just so that he could justify the front cover.

Now, you've devoted a lot of time to studying the minutiae of Derek Parfitt's life because you wrote an excellent biography of Parfitt. Do you think that that has given you real insight into him as a thinker, not just as a person, but as a thinker? I think it has helped me understand what motivated some of his ideas.

philosophy. Some of it was just contingent. As I say, I think he got into personal identity just because he had a chance meeting with a famous philosopher who was also working on personal identity. But some of it, I think, was motivated by deep facts about his biography, one of which was related to something we've touched on earlier and his missionary background.

He turns away from religion and Christianity at a very young age, age about seven, partly because he believes that no all-powerful, benevolent God could condemn people

to an eternity of suffering. And all his life, running through his life, is this idea that none of us deserve what comes to us. We're all a product of our environment and our biology. The idea that we deserve anything and that therefore somehow if we've done something bad, the world would be better if we were punished is an idea he abhors.

And I think that's also linked to his turning away from religion and the idea of desert. We should try and increase human flourishing, we should try and reduce human suffering because those are objectively the right things to do. We shouldn't be motivated by the idea that we're being observed by God and if we behave badly we'll deserve

a lifetime of eternal damnation. And if we behave well, we'll deserve a lifetime of eternal paradise. David Edmonds, thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed, Nigel. For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com. You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.