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Parfit the Perfectionist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2014

Roger Scruton
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Abstract

I summarize and criticize Derek Parfit's impressive attempt to reconcile the Kantian and the Consequentialist approaches to moral thinking, and argue that his ‘cognitive non-naturalism’ fails to do justice to the roots of moral sentiment in personal relations. I outline the destructive effect of ‘trolley problems’ on ethical reasoning, and mount a case for seeing moral reasoning as a consequence of ‘reactive’ attitudes, arising from the attempt to reach a rational consensus in the things that we praise and blame.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 89 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 621 - 634
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2014 

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References

1 Parfit, Derek, On What Matters, two volumes (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar

2 Scanlon, T.M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998Google Scholar.)

3 Parfit's is not the first attempt to reconcile Kantian and consequentialist approaches to moral reasoning. Hare, R.M., in Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), sets out on the same path as Parfit, to similar effectCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Darwall, Stephen, ‘Agreement Matters: Critical Notice of Derek Parfit, On What Matters’, Philosophical Review, vol. 123, no. 1 (2014), 79–105, page 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Blackburn, Simon, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

6 As, for example, in Broome, John, Weighing Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Interestingly, the revulsion against ‘mathematical’ moral problems, which we find among anti-consequentialist thinkers like Anscombe, Elizabeth (‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Philosophy 33, No. 124 (1958))CrossRefGoogle Scholar and vehemently expressed by Allen Woods in his response to Parfit (included in Vol. 2 of On What Matters), is shared by R.M. Hare, who thinks of trolley problems as the recourse of the anti-consequentialists, in their last-ditch attempts to resist the inevitable triumph of utilitarianism. See Moral Thinking, op. cit., 139.

8 Strawson, P.F., ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974Google Scholar)

9 Darwall, Stephen, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006Google Scholar)

10 Austin, J.L., ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961Google Scholar)

11 See Scruton, Roger, The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), chapter 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A Humean might reach this conclusion too, in something like the way David Wiggins reaches the conclusion that the circumstances of life in a community of rational beings will of themselves lead to a recognition of justice as a fundamental requirement of each participant. This recognition would not necessarily take the Kantian form of commitment to universal principles, but would have the effect, all the same, of upholding the Kantian formula of humanity as a common ground in moral reasoning. See Wiggins, David, Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006Google Scholar).