On What Matters
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| Author | Derek Parfit |
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| Language | English |
| Subject | Philosophy, ethics |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
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Publication date
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26 May 2011 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 1,928 |
| ISBN | |
On What Matters is a three-volume book of moral philosophy by Derek Parfit. The first two volumes were published in 2011 and the third in 2017. It is a follow-up to Parfit's 1984 book Reasons and Persons. According to its dust jacket, the book is "about reasons, values and morality". It has an introduction by Samuel Scheffler.
Parfit defends an objective ethical theory and suggests that we have reasons to act that cannot be accounted for by subjective ethical theories. Furthermore, it attempts to present a moral theory that combines three traditional approaches in moral and political philosophy: Kantian deontology, consequentialism, and contractarianism (of the sort advocated by T. M. Scanlon, and from the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and John Rawls). According to Parfit, these theories converge rather than disagree, "climbing the same mountain on different sides", in Parfit's metaphor.
Parfit labels his synthesis of these three ethical theories the "Triple Theory":
An act is wrong if and only if, or just when, such acts are disallowed by some principle that is
On Parfit's view, these three criteria (a) represent the best versions of consequentialism, Kantian ethics, and contractarianism respectively, and (b) should generally agree in their recommendations. Both claims have proven controversial.
The manuscript, originally titled Climbing the Mountain, circulated for many years prior to publication, and occasioned a great deal of excitement, including reading groups and a conference prior to publication.
Some of On What Matters is derived from lectures given at the University of California, Berkeley as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values in 2002. As part of that series at Berkeley, Parfit's lectures were responded to by Allen W. Wood, T. M. Scanlon and Susan Wolf.
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