Reasons and Persons
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| Author | Derek Parfit |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Ethics, rationality, personal identity |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
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Publication date
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1984 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 560 pages (paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 9827659 |
Reasons and Persons is a philosophical work by Derek Parfit, first published in 1984. It focuses on ethics, rationality and personal identity.
It is divided into four parts, dedicated to self-defeating theories, rationality and time, personal identity and responsibility toward future generations.
Part 1 argues that certain ethical theories are self-defeating. One such theory is ethical egoism, which Parfit claims is 'collectively self-defeating' due to the prisoner's dilemma. Ultimately, Parfit rejects "common sense morality" on similar grounds.
In this section, Parfit does not explicitly endorse a particular view; rather, he shows what the problems of different theories are. His only positive endorsement is of "impersonal ethics" – impersonality being the common denominator of the different parts of the book.
Part 2 focuses on the relationship between rationality and time, dealing with questions such as: should we take into account our past desires?, should I do something I will regret later, even if it seems a good idea now?, and so on.
One of Parfit's arguments is as follows: self-interest theorists consider the differences between different persons at the same time as significant in terms of rationality, but do not consider the difference between the same person at different times to be as significant. But if, as Parfit argues, a reductionist theory of personal identity holds, then the difference between different persons at the same time is more like the difference between the same person at different times. So, if reductionism is true, self-interest theorists are inconsistent in viewing spatial relations as significant but temporal relations insignificant. Thus, the foundations of the self-interest theory are undermined by non-reductionism, which lends support to the present-aim theory of rationality, the critical version of which Parfit favours.
Part 3 argues for a reductive account of personal identity; rather than accepting the claim that our existence is a deep, significant fact about the world, Parfit's account of personal identity is like this:
At time 1, there is a person. At a later time 2, there is a person. These people seem to be the same person. Indeed, these people share memories and personality traits. But there are no further facts in the world that make them the same person.
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