Reflections on Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality

Parfit's life was bizarre and fascinating

“There are going to be so many insane anecdotes in this,” my friend declared immediately prior to the release of David Edmonds’ Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. Both of us had already been Parfit aficionados for quite a while at that point, and when one reads about Parfit, they find a steady stream of bizarre and hilarious anecdotes. We’d both heard stories of Parfit being brought to tears by thinking about suffering in the abstract, as well as other stories that were equally bizarre.

The book delivered in terms of hilarious anecdotes. Parfit was a big believer in external normative reasons—that one can have a reason to care about things unconnected from their desires. Even if one desires to eat a car or set themselves on fire, for example, it is irrational to do so—one has a reason not to do it. Bernard Williams, a philosopher who Parfit loved, claimed to find the concept of a reason unintelligible—how can one have a reason to do something if it doesn’t connect to their desires?

After Williams died, Parfit became obsessed with the apparently great cosmic tragedy of Bernard Williams not having the concept of a reason. He told everyone about it; at one point, he was moved to tears, not by Williams’ death, but by the fact that he didn’t have the concept of a reason. He was so bothered by this that Bernard Williams’ widow once comforted Parfit when he expressed distress about this—she later remarked on how strange the interaction was.

One day, Parfit’s friend Sam Scheffler found Parfit in a spirited conversation with Scheffler’s wife, Katy. Scheffler was surprised—Parfit rarely chatted much with non-philosophers. After they were done, Sam asked Katy what they were talking about. She replied, “apparently, Bernard Williams lacks the concept of a normative reason.”

Parfit was also bizarrely blasé about violating social conventions regarding wearing clothes. Apparently, he would exercise on his exercise bike in just his underwear. One time, when he was delivering a lecture, it was very hot, so he pulled down his pants to his underwear—and continued lecturing as if nothing was the matter.

But the book delivers more than just funny anecdotes—it gives a fascinating picture of the life of Derek Parfit. It tells of a man who started out fairly normal, before becoming a hermitlike philosophy obsessive—thinking of little else.

Reading about Parfit in his later years, I expected him to have begun at least a little bit of an oddball. But Edmonds convincingly argues that this isn’t true at all—that he started out pretty normal and only later got weird. His childhood friends and siblings described him as a relatively normal boy—though clearly a genius. He was consistently at the top of all of his classes—there was only competition for the number two slot. Even in math, which Parfit later professed to be terrible at, he consistently got the highest scores.

All of the reports from his childhood stress how normal he was when he was young; he dated, he had friends, he was not unpopular. So it seems that his eccentricity developed later in life; somehow, a relatively normal boy transformed, over time, into a person who pulled his pants down in the middle of lecture and acted like nothing was the matter, and was moved to tears by suffering in the abstract.

But later in life, Parfit became obsessed with philosophy. He spent basically all of his time thinking, writing, reading, or talking about philosophy. He would apparently write for hours a day, and would read philosophy while brushing his teeth. When he was in the hospital, connected to a breathing tube and thus unable to speak, the first sentence he wrote informed people that he was supposed to serve on Johan Frick’s thesis committee—he had to be talked out of going to Frick’s thesis committee from the hospital, with a breathing tube in.

Parfit was, apparently, insanely generous with his time when it came to reviewing philosophy. Edmonds tells stories of people sending him a draft of something, and him, within hours, having 30 pages of typed responses. Edmonds described it as genuinely mysterious how it was that Parfit replied so thoroughly and quickly.

Parfit was also bizarrely perfectionist. He spent decades writing each of his books—revising, rereading, editing, and so on. It seemed that every sentence had to be perfect—and he even had preferences about how it would be printed. He apparently drove the editors completely insane with hyper-specific requests about how exactly particular sentences should be printed. One wonders how much Parfit could have changed the world if, given that editing has declining marginal utility, he had focused less on obsessively reediting things and more on writing more things. It seems that his perfectionism got in the way of having more ideas. Of course, despite this, Parfit managed to be one of the most influential—and in my mind one of the best—philosophers of the 20th century.

Parfit seems to be a paragon example of one whose life is utterly consumed by philosophy—who does and thinks about little else. While, for a while, it was one of his two great loves next to photography, eventually the photography faded into the background and all was philosophy. Because of a combination of his genius and obsession, he was able to make significant contributions and be, in my mind, perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time.

I think this principle generalizes. Those who become truly obsessed with a topic, who eat sleep, and breathe that topic tend to be the most successful and clearest thinkers on the topic. The people I know who are best at math think about it all the time—the people who were the most impressive debaters in high school would think about debate all the time. Parfit seemed to have taken this to the extreme, but because of this, he managed to have a significant impact.

In On What Matters, Parfit’s latter book, Parfit discussed Kant’s universalizability principle, according to which an act would be wrong if it followed from a maxim that couldn’t be universally acted on. Parfit objected to this—it is not wrong to meditate in a secluded forest even if it couldn’t be that everyone acted on did that, for then it would no longer be secluded. I think something similar about Parfit.

We would not want a world of only Parfits. Because of his single-minded focus on philosophy, Parfit neglected many of the other things in life—he lost the ability to seriously engage with non-philosophers. But a few Parfits make the world dramatically better—through their single-minded, obsessive focus, they can make truly revolutionary progress. They can, like Parfit did, effectively invent entire fields of philosophy, and discover paradoxes previously overlooked. That is something worth celebrating.

Most philosophers are quickly forgotten about. Very few of us know about many philosophers from the 16th century. But I don’t think Parfit will be forgotten about. Parfit’s genius will live on, even though he is sadly no longer with us. And though I never met Parfit, though I was never able to email him, I think that the sense in which I know Parfit is the sense in which he would want to be known; I know him for his ideas.