Comments on: Parfit Group Week 2: Open Thread

By: Steven Maloney

Steven Maloney — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:46:25 +0000

Sorry I'm late to the party. Part of the difficulty I see with Parfit is that his examples require no discovery costs. How do I know what benefit I might get out of a Sunday drive if I never take one? How do I know the range of benefit unless I go frequently? If the only way to come to know such effects is to engage in the activity in the first place, where does that leave our revised moral position?

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:28:24 +0000

I'm with you, Toby. For a guy seeking reasons, Parfit seems to depend on intuition pumps and thought experiments an awful lot. If stories about wounded men in the deseert count as reasons for rejecting an argument, then we're working with a fairly broad definition of 'reasons.' Moreover, his tendency isn't quite reflectively rational: he doesn't move back and forth between theory and examples, but rather moves between examples, always adapting the theory. At best theoretical hurdles help him generate new examples.

That said, I take Parfit to be fairly responsible in his reason-giving vis-a-vis imperceptibles. Since he begins by showing that we can praise or blame an agent for their share of the total increase or decrease in benefits or harms, his further claims about small changes (the pint of water each of us adds to the water-cart) seem to follow both theoretically and intuitively. Since each of a thousand altuists must add their pint in order to save the wounded men, each altruist has to be able to come to the same conclusion in order for the water-cart to be filled. The same is true for any collective activity: if a consequence requires coordinated activity, then agents seeking that end need to be able to realize through some theory of action what is required of them to achieve the collective effect, or else that effect is impossible or merely happenstance.

By: Toby

Toby — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:43:19 +0000

Assume that my abstaining from unnecessary driving in no way diminishes the suffering that is caused by global warming. Some versions of consequentialism hold that I therefore am not obligated to abstain from unnecessary driving. Yet I still have the intuition that I am obligated to abstain from unnecessary driving. So I should reject either this intuition or the versions of consequentialism that conflict with this intuition. But I have no idea how to decide which should be rejected. How much weight should our intuitions be given versus some ethical theory that conflicts with those intuitions? (There is the further problem of determining what counts as an intuition, but I leave that aside.) At times, Parfit seems to rely on intuitions as offering overwhelming reason to reject some theory (e.g., the "Repugnant Conclusion" is felt to be repugnant, and this calls for a rejection of any theory that entails the “Repugnant Conclusion”). At other times, Parfit seems to reject intuitions on the basis that they conflict with some theory (e.g., we should reject our intuition that personal identity matters in light of Parfit’s theoretical arguments that personal identity does not matter). But how does one know when to reject the theory in favor of the intuition or vice versa? It seems that Parfit should provide non-arbitrary criteria for determining this, and I am not aware that he has done so.