Principles and Persons: The Legacy of Derek Parfit

by Jeff McMahan (editor), Tim Campbell (Editor), James Goodrich (Editor)

Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the most significant moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty-one new essays in this book have all been inspired by his work. They address issues with which he was concerned in his writing, particularly in his seminal contribution to moral philosophy, Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984). Rather than simply commenting on his work, these essays attempt to make further progress with issues,both moral and prudential, that Parfit believed matter to our issues concerned with how we ought to live, and what we have most reason to do. Topics covered in the book include the nature of personal identity, the basis of self-interested concern about the future, the rationality of our attitudestoward time, what it is for a life to go well or badly, how to evaluate moral theories, the nature of reasons for action, the aggregation of value, how benefits and harms should be distributed among people, and what degree of sacrifice morality requires us to make for the sake of others. These include some of the most important questions of normative ethical theory, as well as fundamental questions about the metaphysics of personhood and personal identity, and the ways in which the answers tothese questions bear on what it is rational and moral for us to do.

Genres: Philosophy

490 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 11, 2021

About the author

Jeff McMahan is an American philosopher. He completed a BA degree in English literature at the University of the South (Sewanee), then did graduate work in philosophy in Britain as a Rhodes Scholar. He studied first under Jonathan Glover and Derek Parfit at the University of Oxford and was later supervised by Bernard Williams at the University of Cambridge, where he was a research fellow at St. John’s College. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has written extensively on normative and applied ethics. His publications include The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford, 2002) and Killing in War (Oxford, 2009), which deals with Just War theory and argues against the deeply held beliefs within the theory, The Morality of Nationalism (co-edited with Robert McKim; Oxford, 1997), and Ethics and Humanity (co-edited with Ann Davis and Richard Keshen; Oxford, 2010).