Reasons and Persons
Supplement. "A brilliantly clever and imaginative book ... Strange and excitingly intense."--Alan Ryan, Sunday Times (London). "Not many books reset the philosophical agenda in the way that his one does ... Western philosophy, especially systematic ethics, will not be the same again."--Annette Baier, Philosophical Books. Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions that most of us will find very disturbing
1 online resource (560 pages)
9780191519840, 0191519847
1027509397
Part One: SELF-DEFEATING THEORIES
Chapter 1 THEORIES THAT ARE INDIRECTLY SELF-DEFEATING
1 The Self-interest Theory
2 How S Can Be Indirectly Self-defeating
3 Does S Tell Us to Be Never Self-denying?
4 Why S Does Not Fail in Its Own Terms
5 Could It Be Rational to Cause Oneself to Act Irrationally?
6 How S Implies that We Cannot Avoid Acting Irrationally
7 An Argument for Rejecting S When It Conflicts with Morality
8 Why This Argument Fails
9 How S Might Be Self-Effacing
10 How Consequentialism Is Indirectly Self-defeating. 11 Why C Does Not Fail in Its Own Terms
12 The Ethics of Fantasy
13 Collective Consequentialism
14 Blameless Wrongdoing
15 Could It Be Impossible to Avoid Acting Wrongly?
16 Could It Be Right to Cause Oneself to Act Wrongly?
17 How C Might Be Self-Effacing
18 The Objection that Assumes Inflexibility
19 Can Being Rational or Moral Be a Mere Means?
20 Conclusions
Chapter 2 PRACTICAL DILEMMAS
21 Why C Cannot Be Directly Self-defeating
22 How Theories Can Be Directly Self-defeating
23 Prisoner's Dilemmas and Public Goods. 24 The Practical Problem and its Solutions
Chapter 3 FIVE MISTAKES IN MORAL MATHEMATICS
25 The Share-of-the-Total View
26 Ignoring the Effects of Sets of Acts
27 Ignoring Small Chances
28 Ignoring Small or Imperceptible Effects
29 Can There Be Imperceptible Harms and Benefits?
30 Overdetermination
31 Rational Altruism
Chapter 4 THEORIES THAT ARE DIRECTLY SELF-DEFEATING
32 In Prisoner's Dilemmas, Does S Fail in Its Own Terms?
33 Another Weak Defence of Morality
34 Intertemporal Dilemmas
35 A Weak Defence of S. 36 How Common-Sense Morality Is Directly Self-Defeating
37 The Five Parts of a Moral Theory
38 How We Can Revise Common-Sense Morality so that It Would Not Be Self-Defeating
39 Why We Ought to Revise Common-Sense Morality
40 A Simpler Revision
Chapter 5 CONCLUSIONS
41 Reducing the Distance between M and C
42 Towards a Unified Theory
43 Work to be Done
44 Another Possibility
Part Two: RATIONALITY AND TIME
Chapter 6 THE BEST OBJECTION TO THE SELF-INTEREST THEORY
45 The Present-aim Theory
46 Can Desires Be Intrinsically Irrational, or Rationally Required? 47 Three Competing Theories
48 Psychological Egoism
49 The Self-interest Theory and Morality
50 My First Argument
51 The S-Theorist's First Reply
52 Why Temporal Neutrality Is Not the Issue Between S and P
Chapter 7 THE APPEAL TO FULL RELATIVITY
53 The S-Theorist's Second Reply
54 Sidgwick's Suggestions
55 How S Is Incompletely Relative
56 How Sidgwick Went Astray
57 The Appeal Applied at a Formal Level
58 The Appeal Applied to Other Claims
Chapter 8 DIFFERENT ATTITUDES TO TIME
59 Is It Irrational to Give No Weight to One's Past Desires?
60 Desires that Depend on Value Judgements or Ideals