Vol. 45 No.

11 · 1 June 2023

Non-Identity Crisis
Stephen Mulhall

Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality 

by David Edmonds.
Princeton, 380 pp., £28, April, 978 0 691 22523 4

F
or David Edmonds​, and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was
one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill.
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, or even an appropriate, way of
achieving this goal is to write a biography of him.

There was a time when biographies of philosophers weren’t just common, but expected and even
required. Following Socrates, the great schools of Hellenistic philosophy (the Stoics, the
Epicureans, the Neoplatonists) all tried to encourage the pursuit of a certain kind of life. For them,
philosophy wasn’t primarily something you learned, but something you practised, with a view to
self-transformation. So it was indispensable in critically evaluating a philosopher to critically
evaluate their way of life, for that life was the definitive expression of their philosophy, and their
writings were primarily a means of achieving that essential work on the self.

This ancient sense of philosophy as having an existential telos retains some power even today. Ray
Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein from 1990 is philosophically illuminating precisely because its
way of presenting Wittgenstein’s thinking as part of a broader account of his life brings out the
ethical spirit that informed both, and so casts valuable light on the nature and purpose of the
thinking. Admittedly, such cases are rare in the modern era, when the discipline has moved
further away from spiritual concerns, is no longer a vocation but a profession, and has
increasingly kept its practitioners in universities, where they are shut off from the broader
currents of communal life. Even so, the lives of modern philosophers are sometimes interesting,
and even interact with broader cultural movements, in ways that suggest intellectual insights.
There is, for example, Kierkegaard’s transformation of religious and romantic trauma into the
topics and forms of his writing, or Heidegger’s detestable entanglements in the larger historical
currents of 20th-century German politics, or Iris Murdoch’s complex erotic life. A biographical
narrative in such cases can contribute to our understanding if it casts light (or shade) on the
philosopher’s intellectual interests – in these examples, self-sacrifice, authenticity and love
respectively.
Few contemporary philosophers, however, lead unusually dramatic personal lives. And since their
working lives tend to consist in a ceaseless round of teaching and administration and (if they are
lucky) occasional forays to foreign hotels and conference centres, detailed accounts of them would
be equally drab. Parfit’s life was pretty unexceptional in these respects. He was what is sometimes
tactfully called a philosopher’s philosopher. He held no brief for philosophy as a spiritual exercise,
and had no interest in contributing to conversations about morality and politics outside the
seminar room. He gave no media interviews, wrote no op-ed pieces for newspapers or websites,
and had no social media presence of any kind.

Parfit’s parents and grandparents led adventurous lives for a time as missionaries in the Middle
East, India and China. But his childhood was mostly spent in the English suburbs, and his life
followed a golden thread of educational privilege: the Dragon School, Eton and Oxford – first
Balliol College, then the exceptionally advantageous academic environment of All Souls, where he
spent almost all of his productive intellectual life. For four decades, even the usual demands of
teaching and administration were mostly sloughed off in favour of writing – its production, private
circulation and ceaseless redrafting in response to selected colleagues’ responses. Edmonds tries
to wring some drama out of Parfit’s delayed transition from his seven-year prize fellowship as a
young man at All Souls to a lifelong senior research fellowship, to the point of suggesting in the
title of his chapter about it that it amounted to a scandal. But even aficionados of C.P. Snow novels
will find the gruel rather thin, since it boils down to the college quite reasonably believing that
Parfit needed to show a more substantial record of publication before being rewarded with a
lifetime’s freedom from everyday academic burdens, and in the end giving him additional time to
achieve it. All Edmonds has to work with once Parfit settles into All Souls, apart from a deepening
interest in photography and a range of testimony to the high esteem in which his colleagues held
his intellectual gifts, is his subject’s personality and character, which became increasingly
idiosyncratic over the years – to the point at which Edmonds feels obliged to consider the
possibility that Parfit met the diagnostic criteria for an autism spectrum disorder.

Since the public face of such a life is so lacking in dramatic texture, Edmonds must content
himself with painting an extended, detailed and exposing portrait of Parfit’s peculiar personality.
This raises serious issues of taste and tact; but it also creates a problem with respect to Edmonds’s
primary goal, which is to communicate Parfit’s ideas. For if recounting the life is given too much
space, then the amount available to explain the work will be so reduced that the chances of doing
so both accurately and accessibly become very small.

Most genuinely interesting philosophical ideas are challenging to communicate, and Parfit’s
commitment to a particularly pure version of contemporary analytic philosophical methods does
less than one might hope to diminish that challenge. His approach is to critically evaluate
morality by seeking ever more scrupulous discriminations between ethical stances and their
multiple possible variants, searching for foundational premises from which a given ethical
judgment follows necessarily, and attempting to construct a unified theoretical account that
accommodates as many well-grounded moral judgments as possible on the basis of as few moral
premises as possible.

This approach generates prose that is in one sense as clear and rigorous as Parfit can make it: each
claim he advances is assigned a precise meaning, and must have survived every critical response
he can envisage. But the remorseless drive to divide and conquer also leads to an endless coining
of technical terminology, and enumerating of premises and conclusions, as Parfit generates long
chains of arguments for and against other chains of arguments for and against ultimately
discarded views, on the way to a hoped-for ultimate clarity that never quite arrives.
An insightful summariser could usefully prune away a lot of this luxuriant textual foliage, but they
couldn’t justify entirely detaching the ideas that survive Parfit’s dialectical sifting from those that
don’t, or from the sifting process itself. For that process isn’t simply a means to the end of
distinguishing truths from falsehoods; it is part of the end, internal to the point of the enterprise
as Parfit conceives of it. Indeed, the value of philosophy – whatever one’s conception of it – lies
not just in the conclusions one reaches, but in acquiring the skills of reflective and critical
thinking whose application leads to those conclusions, and might later lead away from them in
favour of discarded alternatives. Philosophy is in this sense more an activity than a body of
knowledge; and Edmonds sees at least as much value in Parfit’s way of practising philosophy as he
does in the conclusions he arrives at.

Summarising and critically evaluating both aspects of Parfit’s work in a way accessible to non-
academic readers would, then, require a lot of space in its own right. Edmonds’s book isn’t short,
but it isn’t an accessible introduction to Parfit’s thinking either, because he has chosen to devote
most of it to his life. Of its 23 chapters, perhaps six are given over (sometimes only in part) to
presenting Parfit’s ideas and arguments. It’s true that Parfit published just two books in his
lifetime: the first, Reasons and Persons (1984), secured his senior research fellowship, and the
second, On What Matters, appeared after the more than thirty years of intense labour that the
fellowship made possible. However, neither is easy to grasp, and the second was around 1900
pages long (including its third, posthumously published volume). So even setting aside the many
articles he also published – still the genre of writing favoured by analytic philosophers – neither
Edmonds nor anyone else could possibly provide, in such a confined space, an account even of
Parfit’s most celebrated ideas that would be at once accessible and intellectually responsible.

Take Edmonds’s treatment of Reasons and Persons. He foregrounds two of its central ideas: Parfit’s
reductionist account of personhood, and what is known as the ‘non-identity problem’. He
provides a fair summary of Parfit’s view that a person is fundamentally constituted by relations of
psychological connectedness and continuity, which are themselves related to a particular brain.
These psychological relations are created by phenomena such as memories and intentions, which
tie us to our past and our future respectively, and which are plainly a matter of degree (the strength
of the connection varying with time). Since the relation of identity is not a matter of degree (either
A is identical to B, or it isn’t) and is transitive (if A is identical to B, and B is identical to C, then A
is identical to C), there will be situations in which, while we can specify the degree of
psychological connectedness and continuity between a person and their future selves, we cannot
intelligibly claim either that they are or that they are not one and the same person.

Parfit invokes a thought experiment to illustrate this. A person’s brain is extracted, divided and
transplanted into two separate bodies, after which each re-embodied half preserves the same
degree of psychological connectedness to its original owner as the brain would have had if left
undivided. (Parfit makes himself the subject of the example: ‘Each of the resulting people believes
that he is me, seems to remember living my life, has my character, and is in every other way
psychologically continuous with me.’) Call the original owner A, and the two recipients B and C.
Any available basis for claiming that B is identical to A would equally provide a basis for claiming
that C is identical to A; but if both relations held, then B would be identical to C, which makes no
sense given that they are plainly two distinct beings. And yet it seems arbitrary to say that A is
identical to one of their descendants and not the other, and counterintuitive to say that A ceases to
exist after the operation (since the same degree of psychological continuity holds between A and
their descendants as it would with A’s future self had there been no operation). In such a situation,
Parfit asserts, identity claims become empty; but since psychological continuity continues to
hold, everything that truly matters about our continued existence would also continue to hold.
And this reveals that, despite our ordinarily couching the issue in terms of identity, what really
matters in both normal and abnormal circumstances with respect to our continued existence is an
appropriately substantial degree of psychological continuity.

In Parfit’s view, the only alternative to his reductionist reframing – the only framework that would
justify assuming that identity is what matters – would be if there were some further fact
(something other than facts about our bodies and minds) whose determinate presence or absence
constituted our identity: a Cartesian Ego, or a soul. But since there are no such things, we should
accept reductionism and reconsider our ethical beliefs in that light. In particular, a reductionist
framework makes our relation to our future selves less substantial than we take it to be, and it
renders the distinction between ourselves and other persons less absolute. Parfit claims that this
should engender less self-interest and more altruism, and that it might also reduce the
significance we attribute to death.

Edmonds glancingly acknowledges the long historical roots of Parfit’s view: it emerges in John
Locke’s work, and depends on thought experiments devised by other contemporary analytic
philosophers. But Edmonds barely considers (no doubt because he barely has room to mention)
the various ways in which such a view has been criticised. In particular, he simply follows Parfit for
the most part in writing as if there were only one possible non-reductionist account of personal
identity, associated with (very unsophisticated versions of ) Descartes and Christianity. But in fact
the most influential opposition to Parfit’s reductionism comes from contemporary secular
philosophers who would reject either kind of ‘further fact’ account, and nevertheless regard our
ordinary non-reductionist ways of characterising identity over time, and the significance of our
continued existence, as perfectly coherent. They question Parfit’s tendency to privilege the
psychological over the physical because it represses the fact that human beings are animals of a
specific kind (the speaking, and so social and cultural, kind), rather than individual overlapping
threads of mental activity whose vehicle is a brain driving the larger vehicle of its body.

Equally significant, Edmonds establishes no critical distance from Parfit’s devotion to the analytic
philosophical method of exploring our intuitions about moral and other matters by the
construction of radically counterfactual thought experiments. He acknowledges that this
technique ‘turns the grey matter of some philosophers red’; but he simply cannot understand why,
and so follows his subject in essentially ignoring the objection, even when it is developed at length
by colleagues whose commentaries are incorporated into Parfit’s second book.

Parfit adored trolley problems, the kind stipulating that a runaway train will kill five people on its
current track unless you change the points, transferring the train to another track on which it will
kill one person: should you change the points? He was lavishly ingenious in inventing new
versions of such tales, elaborating variants of them and pursuing the implications of each branch
line – resembling nothing so much as a philosophical Fat Controller, sending his readers’
intuitions on a journey through the world’s most complicated train set. Allen Wood’s commentary
on this aspect of Parfit’s work, incorporated in the second volume of On What Matters, is scathingly
intemperate, but his main point deserves serious attention. He begins by pointing out that a real
railway system is nothing like a train set. Real railway companies put a lot of checks in place to
prevent the possibility of runaway trains; they also prohibit and otherwise hinder people from
getting anywhere near a track, and certainly from having any access to untended points. This is in
large part because they are obliged to do so by laws designed to ensure that passengers, workers
and passers-by are treated with the respect their moral status as autonomous individuals requires.
If the company fails to respect those laws, it will rightly be held responsible for any carnage that
ensues; and if people ignore the warnings and barriers that keep them away from dangerous areas
of track, then they will be primarily responsible instead.
Parfit’s and Edmonds’s brains turn red when faced with such a response, for it seems to them
simply to miss the point of the thought experiment, which is deliberately to excise real-world
complications so that we can focus attention on one set of morally relevant factors, then to ask
how we should calculate their relative weight. It is meant to be an intuition-clarifying exercise in
moral mathematics. But Wood’s point isn’t that such tales are unrealistic. It is that the stipulations
that give the tale such clarity also force its readers to wear moral blinkers, encouraging an
exclusive focus on ranking the relative merits of states of affairs (one dead person versus five).
Parfit’s tales do not prevent the reader from ranking those outcomes by invoking factors other
than beneficial consequences, for example by preferring states of affairs in which people’s rights
are fully respected. But they do strongly suggest that morality is solely or essentially a matter of
evaluating the outcomes of individual actions – as opposed to, say, critiquing the social structures
that deeply shape the options between which individuals find themselves having to choose. What
Wood’s retelling reminds us is that a non-consequentialist focus on individuals as ends in
themselves – distinct centres of self-responsible significance – makes it ethically imperative to
arrange public transport systems in ways that ensure trolley problems do not arise.

In other words, although Parfit’s favoured method for pursuing and refining ethical thinking
presents itself as open to all whatever their ethical stance, it actually incorporates a subtle but
pervasive bias against approaches to ethics that don’t focus exclusively or primarily on the
outcomes of individual actions. The problem here is not that those alternative approaches are
obviously superior; it is that from the outset Parfit’s and Edmonds’s methodological preferences
reflect their ethical preferences in ways that load the dice against alternative ethical approaches.

T
he​second central idea from Reasons and Persons that Edmonds highlights is the non-
identity problem. Edmonds is in awe of this aspect of Parfit’s work: he points out how rare
it is for genuinely novel problems to arise in as ancient a discipline as philosophy, and
praises his subject for having identified such a problem. Again, however, it’s far from clear –
certainly from Edmonds’s compressed and confusing presentation of it – that Parfit deserves quite
such extravagant praise. The non-identity problem arises from the observation that each of us is
the product of a union between a particular sperm and a particular egg. A child conceived by our
parents at any other point in time would have involved a different sperm and egg, so would have
resulted in a different person – my soul is not, after all, waiting in some celestial antechamber
impatiently awaiting its insertion into one of an indefinite number of such unions. It follows that
anything – including any human action – that altered the timing of that (or any other) moment of
conception would alter who comes into existence. Parfit’s insight was that this observation
appears to conflict with our conviction that we can and do harm future people by our choices in
the present.

Consider social policy decisions that affect future generations. When we justify plans to shift from
fossil fuels to renewable energy, we often say that this may reduce our current levels of wellbeing,
but it will make the lives of our descendants much better than they otherwise would have been, by
preventing reductions in their wellbeing that we would otherwise be responsible for. But which
people’s lives would otherwise go worse? If we had instead continued to use fossil fuels, the
people who would have benefited from the contrary policy would not in fact be brought into
existence. And the people who will suffer from that continued use could not claim that their lives
have been made worse by it, because they would not have come into existence at all if we hadn’t
pursued those climate-depleting policies.

This is certainly a fascinating paradox, but in what does its supposedly radical novelty consist? At
bottom, it exposes and exploits one aspect of an utterly familiar piece of philosophical wisdom –
the radical contingency of our individual existence. Any moment of our lives might be our last;
each such moment might have had a different content; and we might never have been born at all.
In short, every aspect of our existence is utterly lacking in necessity, absolutely contingent: this is
part of what it means to talk of the finitude of human being. The sheer contingency of our birth
shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has read Heidegger or Kierkegaard, let alone
any Christian theology.

This doesn’t mean that Parfit’s predecessors thought our finitude was easy to comprehend; on the
contrary, its nature and ramifications deeply challenge our ability to make sense of it. But Parfit’s
approach isn’t designed to get us to appreciate the mysterious, awe-inspiring significance of
procreation and death in human life; it is simply the springboard for a new puzzle in moral
theory-building. For it places intolerable pressure on what might seem like an uncontroversial
moral principle: that if something is wrong, it must harm some particular person or group of
persons. If we combine that person-affecting principle with a recognition of the sheer
contingency of identity, we have no basis for rejecting climate-depleting policies as wrong. Since
the future people whose quality of life will be determined by the implementation of those policies
were also (in part) brought into being by it, making that choice amounts to one condition for their
having lives to live at all, so it’s hard to see how doing so makes them worse off.

To his credit, Parfit doesn’t regard this as a reason for denying that climate-depleting policies are
wrong; he takes it to show that the person-affecting principle must be jettisoned. And this sets
him off on a long and fruitless search for a theory that will provide an alternative basis for morally
condemning such policies, and any other future-oriented action-choices (of which there are
many). But there were already other ways of perceiving the inadequacy of the moral principle he
jettisons. For example, who is wronged when someone’s grave is desecrated? The dead person no
longer exists; and although the desecration will distress their friends and relatives, that is because
of the evil inherent in the desecration, so can’t be what that evil consists in. And it’s not obvious
that the only, or the best, way of dealing with the problem is to look for another universal principle
that might ground a wide-ranging theory. Perhaps we should rather expect moral principles to
have limits as well as a general reach, and consider alternative accounts that aim only to elucidate
the heterogeneous moral lineaments of specific contexts. In the climate-depletion case, for
example, we might consider humanity (rather than specific individuals at particular times) as
vulnerable to harm, or the planet as undergoing desecration.

Such ideas would need extensive working out, yet Edmonds has deprived himself of the space he
needs, not only to explain Parfit’s position clearly, but to contextualise it in relation to alternative
treatments. He thereby discourages his readers from any critical evaluation of Parfit’s conclusions,
or of the philosophical methods he employs to reach them. This isn’t a good way of conveying
what philosophy is, or what at its best it aspires to inculcate in its practitioners.

The other major focus of Edmonds’s account of Parfit’s ideas is On What Matters. This vast text has
two main goals. The first is to show that the three major approaches to ethical evaluation and
decision-making in contemporary moral philosophy are (when rightly understood and charitably
reformulated) convergent on a single perspective – that they are, as Parfit puts it, climbing the
same mountain from different starting points. The second is to demonstrate that moral values
and judgments are objective, because if they are not, then morality as such, and more generally
the meaningfulness of our lives, would evaporate. I can, fortunately, treat both claims in less
detail than those advanced in Reasons and Persons, because it is fairly obvious, both from the critical
commentaries from colleagues included in On What Matters and from its wider reception, that he
failed to justify either.
The first claim is, on the face of it, wildly implausible. It is no accident that students are
introduced to the approaches of Aristotle, Kant and Mill as being mutually opposed: the first
centres morality on the goal of living a virtuous life, the second on fulfilling one’s obligations, and
the third on maximising beneficial consequences. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Parfit
succeeds in creating the appearance of convergence between them only by subjecting each to a
sufficiently radical reformulation in the light of largely familiar criticisms that they lose what is
distinctive about their specific orientations to the good and the right.

The second claim is certainly a live possibility in contemporary debates in what philosophers call
‘meta-ethics’ – the part of moral philosophy that deals with questions about the nature of morality
that arise regardless of one’s particular understanding of what is involved in living a good life.
Modernity has been obsessively concerned with whether moral judgments and beliefs can be
regarded as objective in the ways that truths in physics or mathematics are held to be – that is,
true independent of what human beings make of them. A range of interacting intellectual and
practical developments arising from the death of God, the overthrow of kings and the enhanced
powers of science have rather made it seem that we can only make sense of moral value in ways
that presuppose, and so depend on, the distinctive nature and capacities of human beings.

So Parfit is swimming against the tide in endorsing the objectivist view, and for what it’s worth I
sympathise with his choice of direction, if we understand the situation as a forced choice between
two clear-cut options. But his attempts to defend objectivism and to criticise its subjectivist
opponents show a surprisingly limited understanding of the internal complexity and
sophistication of the positions he is attacking. For their proponents think that morality’s
dependence on human beings can perfectly well support the continued authority of its claims on
us, and Parfit simply cannot take that claim seriously. So time and again, the commentators whose
responses are included in the book tactfully suggest that he is oversimplifying and otherwise
misunderstanding the positions he criticises; and each time, Parfit doggedly insists that the issue
is far simpler than they claim, and that his position is the only one capable of ‘saving morality’.

There is an additional twist. Just as Parfit insists that Aristotle, Kant and Mill are brothers under
the skin, so he claims that many of his subjectivist opponents don’t really disagree with him, or at
least they wouldn’t if they fully understood what they were saying, and what he is offering as an
alternative. There is an endearing aspect to this strategy, as there is to the idea that the fate of
morality and the possibility of meaningful human life depend on attaining universal agreement in
a highly technical debate in meta-ethics. But it hardly outweighs the intense irritation it must have
provoked in those on the receiving end – as Allen Wood’s contribution makes clear.

Edmonds dutifully records the mixed reception that On What Matters received. Many reviewers
were much more critical of it than commentators on Reasons and Persons had been, and there was a
general sense of anticlimax (which Edmonds attributes to the fact that its main elements had been
circulated so extensively over the decades that most of Parfit’s colleagues had already made up
their minds about it). Notwithstanding the respect owed to the immense intellectual labour Parfit
expended on the project, I suspect that few of those who share Edmonds’s estimation of him as a
philosopher would deny that On What Matters falls short of the standard set by Reasons and Persons
(though they might also stress that this is a high bar to clear). Privately, some might wonder
whether it wouldn’t have been better for Parfit and for analytic moral philosophy if he had stuck
with his earlier decision to eschew meta-ethics, on the grounds that it was too difficult for him
and that other colleagues were better equipped to handle its complexities.

Yet Edmonds’s subtitle implies that this later project is the most significant feature of Parfit’s
intellectual life taken as a whole, and he ends the book by declaring that the gamble Parfit took in
focusing on it exclusively for thirty years paid off. A rhetorically satisfying conclusion, perhaps;
but what justifies it? By Parfit’s own criteria the gamble didn’t pay off, since he plainly failed to
convince the colleagues he respected to accept his claims. Perhaps Edmonds believes nevertheless
that Parfit was right and his colleagues wrong; but he never says so, and offers no reasons anyone
else should believe it either.

What is it that Edmonds thinks his readers are gaining by his massively disproportionate
biographical contextualisation of Parfit’s thought? What kind of relation between life and thought
is he trying to establish, and why does he take it to be so crucial, or even just helpful, to establish
such a relation? Edmonds is frustratingly inexplicit about this, but as far as I can tell, he sees two
ways in which Parfit’s life and work illuminate each other. The first surfaces when Edmonds
declares that ‘Parfitian philosophy ... is bound up with aspects of his character.’ He points out
that Parfit’s reductionist account of persons downplays the role of the body, and says that this view
was of a piece with the way Parfit treated his own body – in the words of a friend, as ‘a mildly
inconvenient golf-cart he has to drive around in order to get his mind from Oxford to Boston to
New York’. Elsewhere, he connects Parfit’s hostility to retributive views of punishment – according
to which punishment is essentially a legitimate moral response to wrongdoing – to his apparent
lack of any natural reactive attitudes (of resentment or vengefulness) to wrongs done to him by
others in his life.

Although it’s hardly a surprise that peculiar thoughts often reflect the peculiarities of the thinker,
both these idea-character connections are certainly striking. But they are isolated examples:
Edmonds identifies no such connections bearing on the non-identity problem, or Parfit’s
criticisms of Kantianism, or his views about equality. And even in the exceptional cases, Edmonds
shows no desire to draw any conclusion about the merits of the relevant ideas. Presumably this is
because the fact that a peculiar idea about personhood is advanced by someone with a peculiar
relation to their own body tells us nothing about the cogency of the idea. Likewise, hostility to
punishment is central to most forms of consequentialist moral thinking for reasons that have
nothing to do with the prevalence of reactive attitudes among those thinkers. Instead they reflect
the belief that responding to the infliction of suffering with the infliction of more suffering only
makes a bad state of affairs worse. But if Edmonds does think that such biographical facts are
irrelevant to the truth of Parfit’s ideas, why bother locating those ideas in the context of his life in
the first place? By doing so, he only encourages readers to reject ideas that Edmonds values highly,
on the grounds that they are merely the projection of a peculiar personality. In this respect, his
biographical approach actually works against the wider acceptance of Parfit’s ideas.

Edmonds’s second way of relating life to work bears on Parfit’s later quest to demonstrate the
ultimate convergence of our three main ethical theories, and to secure universal agreement on
moral objectivity. Although Edmonds briefly notes that a psychoanalyst might relate this thirst for
agreement to Parfit’s childhood experience of parental conflict, he sees it instead as a particularly
pure expression of a genuinely valuable philosophical ideal, namely a single-minded and intensely
focused search for the truth. Parfit ‘represents an extreme example of how it is possible to
prioritise certain values above all others – in this case, the urge to solve important philosophical
questions’.

Edmonds’s biographical narrative certainly makes two things clear about that urge. First, it
wouldn’t have been easy for Parfit to prioritise his philosophical pursuit so absolutely and
unremittingly without the enabling institutional context of All Souls; and second, in doing so,
Parfit willingly, and it seems happily, sacrificed many of the sources of value and satisfaction that
most of us would regard as vital to a well-lived human life – sources of value and satisfaction that
he showed real interest in pursuing when young. For during the intense, three-year process of
bringing Reasons and Persons to publication in time to secure his fellowship, Parfit fell into a pattern
of ceaseless academic labour barely interrupted by sleep, let alone by the ordinary demands and
opportunities of life with friends and family. That emergency measure became his way of life in
subsequent decades, and contributed to the expansion of his repertoire of behavioural
idiosyncrasies. He wore identical clothes every day so that he didn’t have to waste time choosing
what to wear, cleaned his teeth while cycling through Oxford, refused either to clean or to allow
others to clean his college rooms, avoided most non-academic social settings and more generally
ignored many basic norms of human interaction. Whether or not they are helpfully characterised
as neurodivergent, these choices were consciously aimed at maximising the efficiency of his
monofocal intellectual life.

So Edmonds’s attempt to relate Parfit’s life to his thought ends up tracking his life’s gradual
subsumption into the life of his mind – his transformation of a profession into a vocation – as the
increasing absoluteness of Parfit’s pursuit of perfect philosophical answers generated a
correspondingly absolute commitment to the austere form of scholarly life that made it possible.
Such education in philosophy as Parfit received as a postgraduate student in Oxford in the 1960s
and 1970s (he switched to philosophy only after gaining his undergraduate degree in history, but
never completed either his masters or doctoral studies) plainly inculcated in him a strong version
of analytic philosophers’ self-image as uncompromising seekers after truth. But only someone
whose personality responded hungrily to this conception of truth as an unconditionally
demanding value could have achieved what Parfit did; and here Edmonds notes a connection with
his family’s missionary background without making anything more of it.

Edmonds summarises the intended moral of this part of his narrative neatly:

We do not need to adopt Parfit’s narrow view of what matters in order to realise that forfeiting
the things that other people find fulfilling is a risky strategy. If the work produced is of seminal
value, then the life devoted to it might reasonably be judged as worthwhile, in spite of its self-
sacrifice. But if it is not, then it will seem wasted and impoverished. Readers can turn to Parfit’s
work, and reach their own verdict. My own view, and the reason I wrote this book, is that his
gamble paid off.

Since Edmonds and I disagree about the value of Parfit’s later work, he would expect me to believe
that Parfit’s life seems wasted and impoverished. But he doesn’t seem to expect that his readers
might come to that conclusion even if they see as much value in the work as he does, and that his
biographical narrative of Parfit’s transformation of his profession into an all-consuming vocation
provides a reasonable basis for their doing so. For it suggests that Parfit is an exemplary
philosopher not because he found the truths he was looking for, but because he went further than
most in a direction that is built into his philosophical ideal of truth-seeking. Insofar as his story
shows that this ideal naturally seeks expression in a particular form of life, it implies that even
paradigmatically modern conceptions of philosophy encourage work on the self of a kind that the
Stoics or Epicureans might recognise. 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.

You don’t have to be Nietzsche to see in Parfit’s adult life a particularly stark version of an ascetic
ideal that has its historical roots in the religious framework his family inhabited, but which has
mutated into a variety of avowedly secular cultural forms, in science, art and philosophy. These
ideals attribute a transcendent value to truth and truthfulness, and so to forms of human life that
seek it, no matter what costs they impose. To the martyred Galileo and the abused avant-gardiste,
we can now add the moral philosopher who cloisters himself within a cloistered institution whose
founding purpose was to pray for the faithful departed. All these exemplary figures exhibit a
sadomasochistic structure of self-denial, in which most of what makes life worth living is
sacrificed to one’s intellectual calling. And from Nietzsche’s perspective, doing so willingly and
even happily does not reduce the harm done; if anything, it merely shows how deeply this punitive
impulse has been internalised.

Parfit’s early work already embodied the deliberately impersonal spirit cultivated by analytic
philosophical conceptions of what reason demands, but since it also involved taking up strong
stances on his chosen topics that differentiated him from other philosophers, it did nonetheless
delineate a distinctive philosophical personality. However, precisely because his later writing
seeks to eliminate disagreement between the major movements in contemporary ethical and
meta-ethical thinking, it exhibits fewer and fewer distinctive traces of his own individual
perspective even at the level of content. It’s as if what he aspires to is an apotheosis of
impersonality, the etherealisation of his soul; and although in one sense he fails to achieve it, in
another he was all too successful, in his thinking and in his life.

When Kierkegaard in his Book on Adler offers a highly critical evaluation of a Danish pastor and his
claims to have experienced a revelation, he is well aware that he is taking an ethical risk in
forensically displaying a living fellow citizen’s soul for all to read about. But he claims that it is
justified, insofar as Adler is a transparency through which his age might be more deeply
understood – a case study whose confusions and derangements amounted to an epigram on the
Christendom of his time. Edmonds’s biography of Derek Parfit might have been intended as an
entertaining and admiring portrait of a quirky exemplar of post-religious moral thinking; but it
also unwittingly presents its subject as an epigram on our present philosophical age – a compact,
compellingly lucid expression of its own confusions and derangements.