Alexander’s Reviews > Reasons and Persons > Status Update

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.”

“We ought not to do to our future selves what it would be wrong to do to other people.”

"After reviewing my arguments, I find that, at the reflective or intellectual level, though it is very hard to believe the Reductionist View, this is possible. My remaining doubts or fears seem to me irrational. Since I can believe this view, I assume that others can do so too. We can believe the truth about ourselves."

“If the self-interest theorist has no more replies, then we should reject the self-interest theory.”

:drops-mic:

This book is a real mind twister.
In the first chapter, Parfit demonstrates that the Self-Interest theory and the Consequentialist theories of rationality and morality are "indirectly self-defeating" but then he asserts that "These facts do not show that these theories are either false, or indefensible... They at most show that what can be justifiably claimed is more complicated than we may have hoped."