Reading Parfit
On What Matters

Derek Parfit was one of the world?s leading philosophers. His On What Matters was the most eagerly awaited book in philosophy for many years. Reading Parfit: On What Matters is an essential overview and assessment of volumes 1 and 2 of Parfit?s monumental work by a team of international contributors, and includes responses by Parfit himself. It discusses central features of Parfit?s book, including the structure and nature of reasons; the ideas underlying moral principles; Parfit?s discussions of consequentialism, contractualism and Kantian deontology; and his metaethical ideas and arguments.

Reading Parfit will be central reading for students of ethics and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of one of the most important works of philosophy published in the last fifty years.

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

SIMON KIRCHIN

1. Reflections from Wolf and Wood: Incommensurability, Guidance, and the ‘Smoothing Over’ of Ethical Life

SIMON KIRCHIN

2. Normative Naturalism and Normative Nihilism: Parfit’s Dilemma for

Naturalism.

DAVID COPP

3. On what it is to Matter

JULIA MARKOVITS

4. The Buck-Passing Account of Value: Assessing the Negative Thesis

PHILIP STRATTON-LAKE

5. Normativity, Reasons and Wrongness: How to be a Two-Tiered Theorist

DAVID McNAUGHTON and PIERS RAWLING

6. Wrong-making Reasons

KIERAN SETIYA

7. Parfit on Reasons and Rule Consequentialism

DOUGLAS W. PORTMORE

8. Advice for Non-analytic Naturalists

J. L. DOWELL and DAVID SOBEL

9. Contingency and Constructivism

JULIA DRIVER

10. Responses

DEREK PARFIT

Index

Index

Contributors: David Copp, J.L. Dowell and David Sobel, Julia Driver, Simon Kirchin, David McNaughton and Piers Rawling, Julia Markovits, Derek Parfit, Douglas W. Portmore, Kieran Setiya and Philip Stratton-Lake.

Simon Kirchin is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Kent. He is the author of Metaethics (2012) and is the editor of Arguing about Metaethics (with Andrew Fisher) (Routledge, 2006).

Derek Parfit (1942–2017) was for many years a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, retiring as Senior Research Fellow in 2010, whereupon he became an Emeritus Fellow. He also held visiting professorships at New York University, Harvard and Rutgers.