Parfit

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time – Bertrand Russell

Russel’s quote is something that I often think about each time I spend time reading stuff that I barely understand and more importantly that is of no practical use. When Dave Edmonds biography of the philosopher Derek Parfit started getting rave reviews, I decided to dip into it.

Parfit, considered to be the most influential contemporary philosopher, (he died in 2017 at the age of 75) made seminal contributions to the topics of Identity and Population Ethics. Most of his work was geared towards creating a branch of ethics that was free from the distorting influence of religion. Parfit summarized the history of ethics in four well-defined steps: 1. Forbidden by God. 2. Forbidden by God, therefore wrong. 3. Wrong, therefore forbidden by God. 4. Wrong.

One of his most mind-boggling ideas on Population ethics has been on highlighting how each of our modern day interactions influence future generations. Imagine this: If the sperm that fertilized you was ejaculated a few milliseconds earlier or later, you wouldn’t exist today. The time of your conception was influenced by umpteen factors – your parents’ interactions on that day, the modes of transport they took, the time taken to finish their meals etc. Each of these decisions in turn were influenced by the times they lived in – the technologies available, the trajectories of historical events and the decisions of policy makers and so on. Your birth in turn influenced the trajectory of their lives. Their lived experience as a parent, the future friendships they struck thanks to your schooling and social circle, and so on. So, in a nutshell, everyday through each of our interactions and decisions, we are probably influencing the lives of someone somewhere who is yet to be born. This idea has deep implications for the fields of ethics in policy making, resource allocation and more importantly for the hot topic of Effective Altruism. In fact, the first time I heard of Parfit was in the EA champion William MacAskill’s ‘What We Owe the Future’.

On harming future generations:

Just as it makes no difference whether a life is harmed one mile from my home or a thousand miles away, it is as bad to harm a life in the future as a life now. If I leave broken glass in the undergrowth of a wood, and a child steps on it in a hundred years, what difference does it make if this child is not yet alive? But there are far tougher puzzles. Here is one: Imagine a 14-year-old girl. Let’s call her Angela. She chooses to have a child. Because she is so young her child (let’s call him Bill) has a bad start in life. It will still be a life worth living. But had Angela waited for several years, she would have had a different child, who would receive a better start in life. Most people believe that it would have been better if the girl had waited. But Parfit noticed an intriguing feature of this case. Angela’s bad decision, to have the child, made nobody worse off. If she had delayed having a child, Bill would not have been better off, since Bill would not have been born. Another child would have been born in his place. How strange. Can an action be wrong if nobody is wronged by it?

Parfit optimized his life to solely focus on philosophy. He followed the same dress code, ate frugally, spent more time brushing his teeth than eating, while reading all the while; and understandably had limited social skills. On being invited by his sister for her wedding, he quipped: “I only attend funerals; I do not attend weddings’. A condolence letter sent to the writer Joyce Carol Oates when her first husband died, read: ‘I am very sorry to learn that Ray died a couple of weeks ago. When someone I loved died I found it helpful to remind myself that this person was not less real because she was not real now, just as people in New Zealand aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.’

Apart from his philosophy, his only serious passion was photography. Each year, he spent weeks in Venice and St. Petersburg fanatically clicking photographs with the same seriousness as he did philosophy.

For a short, well-crafted explanation of Parfit’s idea called the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’, check out this clip: