On what matters

What Hacker News says

1. rvernJan 2017
   I like Parfit's writing. His two most important books are probably Reasons and Persons and On What Matters. In On What Matters,[1] he suggests a new ethical theory which is a synthesis of consequentialism, Kantian deontology, and social contract theory.

   [1]: A nice EPUB: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=35E9FA954593C060F52...

   thread
2. JimmyMAug 2016
   On What Matters by Derek Parfit.

   Happened to be vol. 1, but vol. 2 is also fantastic. Honestly, Reasons & Persons would also make a fine gift.

   thread
3. jhickokSep 2024
   I'm glad you like his style! I find him incredibly approachable and clear for some of the reasons you outlined above. He also take great pains to be a clear communicator, which you can see in pieces of media like his appearance on Sean Carroll's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU

   Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc), or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle, Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data, or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters".

   Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz, Carruthers, etc.

   Show morethread
4. archon1410Feb 2024
   > Better by what metric? Better for whom?

   From Derek Parfit's On What Matters, chapter 126 (Has It All Been Worth It?):

   > If someone dies a slow and painful death, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended earlier. The last part of this person’s life was worse than nothing, or in itself bad. We can reach similar conclusions about the whole of someone’s life. If someone’s life contains much prolonged suffering, and nothing or little that is good, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended just after it started. Things may be in one way different if we suppose instead that this person’s life had never even started. Perhaps we could not claim that this alternative would have been better for this person. But when we ask which alternative would have been impersonally better, there is little difference between these two comparisons. Since it would have been better if this person’s life had stopped just after it started, it would also have been better if this person’s life had never started. In other words, it would have been impersonally better if this wretched person had never existed. And since such claims make sense when applied to one person, they also make sense when applied to all conscious beings, or to the whole of reality.

   Parfit thinks it was/is worth it, given the good things in life, and using future improvements in QoL as one of the arguments.

   I don't. What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood? It would be very difficult to justify the creation of a world given that tradeoff, but people are much hesitant to accept that it is unjustified now that it already exists.

   Show morethread
5. ucarionJul 2017
   If we do not have free will, it would not be a tragedy. Ethics would still exist, and the importance of thinking about right and wrong would not be diminished.

   Thinking about what is ethical often precedes acting ethically, because it puts your brain in a good mindset. Since we have good reasons to improve the world, we have good reasons to act ethically, and thus we've good reason to think about ethics. In this way, failing to consider ethics is a form of foolishness, because letting the world go to hell is a foolish thing to do.

   This isn't a direct answer to your concern, but it might reduce how important free will is to you. If you're interested on the account I just summarized, see Derek Parfit's On What Matters, Vol 1 Section 38: "The Freedom that Morality Requires" (or just reply and I'll give my best attempt at answering).

   Show morethread