2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Thoughtful but not very satisfying, 2007-07-31
This book does a very good job of pointing out inconsistencies in common moral intuitions, and does a very mixed job of analyzing how to resolve them.
The largest section of the book deals with personal identity, using a bit of neuroscience plus scenarios such as a Star Trek transporter to show that nonreductionsist approaches produce conclusions which are strange enough to disturb most people. I suspect this analysis was fairly original when it was written, but I've seen most of the ideas elsewhere. His analysis is more compelling than most other versions, but it's not concise enough for many to read it.
The most valuable part of the book is the last section, weighing conflicts of interest between actual people and people who could potentially exist in the future. His description of the mere addition paradox convinced me that it's harder than I thought to specify plausible beliefs which don't lead to the Repugnant Conclusion (i.e. that some very large number of people with lives barely worth living can be a morally better result than some smaller number of very happy people). He ends by concluding he hasn't found a way resolve the conflicts between the principles he thinks morality ought to satisfy.
It appears that if he had applied the critical analysis that makes up most of the book to the principle of impersonal ethics, he would see signs that his dilemma results from trying to satisfy incompatible intuitions. Human desire for ethical rules that are more impersonal is widespread when the changes are close to Pareto improvements, but human intuition seems to be generally incompatible with impersonal ethical rules that are as far from Pareto improvements as the Repugnant Conclusion appears to be. Thus it appears Parfit could only resolve the dilemma by finding a source of morality that transcends human intuition and logical consistency (he wisely avoids looking for non-human sources of morality, but intuition doesn't seem quite the right way to find a human source) or by resolving the conflicting intuitions people seem to have about impersonal ethics.
The most disappointing part of the book is the argument that consequentialism is self-defeating. The critical part of his argument involves a scenario where a mother must choose between saving her child and saving two strangers. His conclusion depends on an assumption about the special relationship between parent and child which consequentialists have no obvious obligation to agree with. He isn't clear enough about what that assumption is for me to figure out why we disagree.
I find it especially annoying that the book's index only covers names, since it's a long book whose subjects aren't simple enough for me to fully remember.
9 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
Wittgenstein & Reality, 1; Parfit & Fevered Imaginings, 0., 2003-11-04
I was excited some years ago to have this book assigned as a reading in a graduate school political philosophy class taught by a well-known American expert in the field . . . I was pleased, actually, just to have gotten into that class as there was a long enough waiting list.
But neither that philosopher, nor his class, nor this book did much for me at all.
The last of these in particular promises much, and many obviously think it delivers . . . but only to those who think thinking through one hypothetical example after another, one unfounded thought-experiment after another will get a thinker somewhere, rather than nowhere.
Examples, quandaries and issues predicated on "real world" data, actual and existing dilemmas are much more my speed.
If they are yours too . . . just forego reading this book . . . as it has nothing in it for you.
Parfit won't mind . . . I'm sure . . . we were told he enjoys a lifelong Oxbridge sinecure (no teaching duties or anything . . . just writing and pondering . . . it is no wonder his thought is so little grounded in anything that even remotely resembles the world we live in).Don't get me wrong! Parfit is gentleman and scholar enough to let us in on his game . . . he points out with great academic punctilliousness that arguments of his sort are not to be bothered with by those who prefer actual and not imagined worlds . . . he cites Wittgenstein to this effect.
So read Wittgenstein instead, I say. The "late" Wittgenstein, that is.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A first-rate work about personal identity..., 2003-01-11
Having read enough books about personal identity to choke a horse, I can assure you that this is one of the titles that stands above most others. Parfit's book is excellent because it covers a lot of ground, but it isn't bogged down with a lot of jargon.
He gives many great analogies that challenge the standard ways we think about a person's identity over time...and his conclusion will probably shock those who aren't used to abstract philosophical ideas.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Do not ignore this book..., 2003-01-11
As a graduate student of philosophy doing a thesis on personal identity, I'd say that this is one of the best books available on the topic for several reasons: 1)the scope of the material that is covered; 2) the prose is very smooth - this should be an accessible read for most people; 3) Parfit's analogies are very instructive in challenging our commonsense views of personal identity.
Anyone who has read and enjoyed books by John Searle and Daniel Dennett will probably appreciate Parfit's work.
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
Big, long, and hard to summarize, 2002-12-12
This isn't an easy book either to read or to review, and I don't expect I'll be able to provide an adequate summary of it here. But it's one of those massively important books that there's just no way to get around. It's easily the most weighty and thorough work of utilitarian ethics since Henry Sidgwick's _The Methods of Ethics_, and it has something of Sidgwick's spirit of judicious reasonableness.
Derek Parfit exploded onto the scene with this book in 1984. His work is a goldmine of helpful reflections on, and criticisms of, our ordinary notions of moral behavior, rationality, and personality.
The work is divided into four major parts. In the first, he argues that many of our common-sense moral theories are "self-defeating" in the manner of a Prisoner's Dilemma (which, by the way, is the part that first interested me in the book). In the second, he considers the relations between rationality and time and worries about how we should take the past and the future into ethical account. In the third, he offers a theory of personal identity and its relations to morality. In the fourth, he considers the role that future generations ought to play in our moral deliberations.
Well, sure enough, that's _not_ an adequate summary. I haven't even begun to convey the sheer virtuousity with which Parfit raises objections, makes distinctions, brings out difficulties that are so un-obvious that nobody ever noticed them before, and generally develops his arguments with clarity and vigor. Heck, I haven't even adequately conveyed his views themselves.
So I guess you'll just have to do what I did: read the book. If you have any interest in ethics, you're going to have to read it _sometime_. So get a copy, put it on your bookshelf, take it down and browse through it once in a while.
I'm no utilitarian myself, but if you want to study utilitarian ethical theory, you'll want to read not only this book but also Sidgwick's aforementioned _The Methods of Ethics_. You probably already know to look for Bentham and Mill, and you've probably heard of Samuel Scheffler; you may also want to scare up a copy of Hastings Rashdall's _Theory of Good and Evil_. More recent not-well-known works of a broadly utilitarian bent include Brand Blanshard's _Reason and Goodness_ and Timothy Sprigge's _The Rational Foundations of Ethics_.
And on the "con" side, don't overlook F.H. Bradley's _Ethical Studies_, W.D. Ross's _The Right and the Good_ and _The Foundations of Ethics_, and the critiques of Bernard O. Williams.