Photograph of a Comtesse

Derek Parfit has been described as “the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of.” He was the author of two monumental books in moral philosophy, the first extracted under threat of expulsion from the Eden of All Souls College, Oxford, the second circulated in manuscript so thoroughly that its appearance was an anti-climax. It was published two years after the first collection of essays devoted to its contents.

The books are radically divergent. Reasons and Persons (1984) is a revolutionary work. It argues that our identity with ourselves, and our separateness from others, are more superficial than we take them to be; the upshot is a challenge to our reflexive egoism and a case for greater ethical selflessness. Parfit’s second book, On What Matters (2011), defends the objectivity of ethics, aiming to reconcile the disagreements that tempt us towards relativism by finding a conciliatory common ground.

Both books have been intellectually influential. But it’s fair to say that philosophers’ fascination with Parfit has been fueled, as well, by his eccentric personality. Anecdotes of his obliviousness to social norms, his monomaniacal devotion to philosophy, and his outsized pedagogic generosity circulate at conferences and colloquium dinners.

So there is a definite audience for David Edmonds’ commanding biography, Derek Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. What is less clear is how many readers it will find outside of academia. Stephen Mulhall is sceptical, both of Parfit’s philosophy, and of Edmonds’ book, in his LRB review:

Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more. So it’s easy to see why he wants to make Parfit’s ideas more widely known outside the academy. What is less easy to understand is his belief that the best … way of achieving this goal is to write a biography of him.

As an aside: I don’t see how the second sentence follows from the first. If Parfit’s theories would have positive effects, it would make sense to share them; but a glance at the influence they have actually had—on the “longtermism” of William MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried—should temper that verdict.

Mulhall’s complaint is in any case less about Edmonds’ goal than the effectiveness of the means. As he goes on to ask, rhetorically:

What is it that Edmonds thinks his readers are gaining by his massively disproportionate biographical contextualisation of Parfit’s thought?

At most, Mulhall suggests, we make out miscellaneous connections, as when Parfit’s theory of personal identity as fundamentally psychological, not physical, is echoed in his relationship to his own body, which he treats, according to a friend and colleague, “like a mildly inconvenient golf cart he has to drive around in order to get his mind from Oxford to Boston to New York to New Brunswick.”

What is most striking in Parfit’s biography, however, is not that his life affected his work, but the extent to which the opposite is true. Parfit has been judged by amateur observers—including Parfit himself—as a plausible case of “Asperger’s syndrome” (or what would now be called ASD): intensely focused on a narrow range of interests, sometimes oblivious or indifferent to social cues. (Remember when we all acquired the ability to diagnose Asperger’s?) But there is no sign of this in Edmonds’ sketch of his abundant youth.

At the Dragon School in Oxford, Parfit excelled in art, played a decent game of chess, learned piano, wrote for The Draconian, loved poetry, acted in school plays, won prizes in every subject—and gained a scholarship to Eton. There he played jazz trumpet, edited the school newspaper, joined the chess and debate clubs, and took A-levels in History and English. He was an academic superstar, bound for Oxford to study Modern History at Balliol. But he was also popular, with wide-ranging interests. His three idols, he proclaimed, were “the Bird, the Bard, and Bardot.” Parfit interned at The New Yorker before college—how he acquired this gig is something of a mystery—and went on to publish a poem in the magazine before he turned twenty.

Edmonds notes the parallel between the poem’s theme and Parfit’s work on personal identity. But the poignancy of the verse depends on taking for granted that the girl in the photograph and the dying woman are one and the same—an “animalist” conception of our nature Parfit went on to disdain.

In fact, it is identity through discontinuity that is the principal theme of Edmonds’ book. For Parfit radically changed.

When he went to the US as a Harkness fellow in 1965, he was interested in Herbert Marcuse, psychology, and sociology; he studied ethical theory with the Marxist philosopher Robert Paul Wolff at Columbia, and proposed a thesis on “empirical assumptions in morality” to John Rawls. Parfit had an active romantic life.

By 1983, having finished Reasons and Persons and met his future wife, the feminist Janet Radcliffe Richards, Parfit was well-embarked on the path to narrowness, rigidity of habits, social withdrawal, and intense, impatient, increasingly dogmatic intellectual obsession of his last three decades. He was running out of time to forge consensus on the moral truth; and his approach to doing so was unremittingly a priori, disengaged from history, psychology, and social theory. Edmonds quotes Parfit’s response to intricate questioning by his co-instructor, Selim Berker, in a 2015 seminar at Harvard:

“Selim,” he said in a calm, stern voice, “if we were immortal, it would perhaps be worth trying to settle these issues. However, our time here is limited, and we must move on to more pressing matters.”

When I interacted with him—in the Harvard seminar and in one he taught at NYU fifteen years earlier—Parfit would respond to disagreement with visible agitation.

Parfit was a different person in the second half of life than in the first: there is a psychic disconnect between pre-1972-Parfit and Parfit-post-1980. But he remained himself throughout. A book about his life is not a group biography.

Edmonds grapples with the rift in Parfit’s character, toying with the possibility of long-suppressed (or late-onset?) Asperger’s. But the puzzle is less how Parfit could be so transformed than our reluctance to accept the mundane explanation: Parfit was sincere in his beliefs. If he is right, what matters in life is not survival but psychological connectedness with future selves, like the connections with readers and acolytes that form an intellectual legacy; and the future welfare of rational beings counts for more than anything else.

Mulhall comes close to this conclusion. Parfit “went further than most in a direction that is built into his philosophical ideal of truth-seeking,” he writes, an “ideal [that] naturally seeks expression in a particular form of life,” encouraging “work on the self of a kind that the Stoics or Epicureans might recognize.”

But it also implies that that work will result in a radically isolating, inward-looking, bare mode of existence. In other words, it suggests that the philosophical practice of which Parfit was an exemplary instance has an intrinsic tendency to impair the human flourishing of its devotees.

Maybe so. But Mulhall’s reading is too abstract and too general. What it finds in Parfit’s life is an orientation to the truth that shaped his work, as it shapes the work of others. What I think we find is not just that. It’s a commitment to specific truths about what matters, on which what seems to us a dramatic impoverishment in life—from Renaissance man to monomaniac—is a justified submission to the greater good.

BONUS CONTENT: I wrote about Parfit’s later work for professionals (in Mind), and for a wider audience (in the TLS).