Background
Parflt, Derek Antony was born in 1942 in Chengtu, West China.
Parflt, Derek Antony was born in 1942 in Chengtu, West China.
Balliol College. Oxford.
Since 1967. various Fellowships at All Souls College. Oxford; 1986. Fellow of the British Academy.
In Reasons and Persons (1984), Parfit exhaustively attacks the idea that the rational course of action for an individual is always to further his own good. In place of this he proposes a broadly utilitarian ethic, although one that gives some priority to benefiting those who are worse off. These normative views rest partly upon a view of personal identity. According to Parfit, a person's identity over time consists merely in the various relationships between certain psychological states and traits, such as remembering, intending, believing and so on. These relationships can hold to different degrees, and so the continuance of one's personal identity is also a matter of degree. Parfit holds that, since we are less strongly psychologically connected with our more distant future selves, it is not irrational for us to care less about our further future. Our concern for the welfare of others, however, should be correspondingly greater, since, given this view of personal identity, the distinction between individual persons is correspondingly weaker. Parfit's work is widely thought to be one of the most significant contributions to utilitarian theory this century.