Derek Antony Parfit spent his career trying to answer two questions. What is a person? And can anything matter if God does not exist? He believed the second question was the most urgent question in the world, and he arranged his life so that almost nothing else could interrupt his work on it. He wore the same clothes every day. He ate the same food. He mixed instant coffee with hot water from the bathroom tap because a kettle took too long. He read philosophy while he brushed his teeth. Colleagues called him the greatest moral philosopher of his age. Strangers had never heard of him. Both facts would have struck him as beside the point.
On June 13, 1981, the fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, met to decide whether Parfit deserved a permanent post. The case for him looked unanswerable. John Rawls (1921-2002) had told the college that Parfit was the most important moral philosopher of his generation, and Rawls based that judgment on fewer than a dozen articles. The referees admitted the publishing record was thin and explained it as a symptom of standards higher than other men could imagine. “He is not as other men are,” wrote R. M. Hare (1919-2002), the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy. The committee that judged academic qualifications recommended his election without dissent. The college said no. Parfit was thirty-eight years old, he had published no book, and All Souls had run out of patience.
He did the arithmetic. He could reapply for the senior research fellowship in March 1984, which meant a book had to appear, or be about to appear, a month or two before that. He had about twenty months. What came out of those twenty months was Reasons and Persons, published by Oxford University Press on April 12, 1984, a book many philosophers rank as the most important work of moral philosophy since Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900). The rejection that humiliated him produced the book that made him permanent. When the college met again in mid-June 1984, Hare wrote that he had called Parfit the probable best moral philosopher of his generation three years earlier and now wished to withdraw the word probable. Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) rose and spoke for him, a speech Berlin later described as designed to leave no dry eye and no possible reason for refusal. The fellows elected him. He stayed at All Souls for the rest of his working life.
The life began far from Oxford. Parfit was born on December 11, 1942, in Chengdu, in the Chinese province of Sichuan. His parents, Norman and Jessie Parfit, were doctors and medical missionaries who taught preventive medicine. The missionary line ran back a generation further on both sides. His father drifted from the mission toward sympathy with Mao, a conversion he managed to square with his pacifism. When the family left China in 1945, the small boy rode home under the gun turret of a Liberator bomber. The family settled in Oxford. The faith did not survive the journey. Parfit later said he abandoned Christianity as a boy because he could not worship a God who would send anyone to hell. The theological revolt of an eight-year-old became the program of a seventy-year career. If God could not ground morality, something else had to, or nothing did.
He went to Eton as a top scholar, edited the school paper, wrote poems, and won the history prizes. At Balliol College, Oxford, from 1961 to 1964, he read history and finished as the best history undergraduate of his year. Then came the swerve. A Harkness Fellowship sent him to America, where he sat in on classes at Columbia and Harvard and discovered that the questions he cared about belonged to philosophy, not history. He came back to Oxford in 1967, started the BPhil at Balliol, and took tutorials from Peter Strawson (1919-2006), A. J. Ayer (1910-1989), David Pears (1921-2009), and Hare. That autumn he sat the All Souls examination and won a Prize Fellowship, the most coveted academic prize in England. He never finished a graduate degree in philosophy. He never needed one. In 1971 he published an article called “Personal Identity” in the Philosophical Review, and after that the credential question closed itself.
All Souls has no undergraduates. It asks almost nothing of its fellows except that they think. For most men the arrangement breeds idleness or eccentric hobbies. For Parfit it removed the last excuse. He had the quiet, the library, the dinners he could skip, and the long corridor of years. What he could not do was finish. In his 1973 application for a Research Fellowship he promised three books. None appeared. He wrote and rewrote, circulated drafts to enormous lists of colleagues, absorbed their objections, answered the objections with new distinctions, and sent the manuscript out again, longer than before. The method looked like paralysis. It was closer to a theory of knowledge. Parfit believed philosophy was a cooperative hunt for objective truth, and a draft was a trap he set for his own errors. Other people were the instrument that sprang it.
The argument that made him famous concerned what a person is. Common sense treats identity as a deep fact. There must be an answer, we assume, to the question of whether a future person will be me, and everything hangs on that answer. Parfit denied it. What matters, he argued, is not identity but psychological continuity and connectedness: chains of memory, intention, desire, and character that hold by degrees and can branch, fade, or overlap. He called the bundle Relation R. To force the point he built thought experiments that read like pulp science fiction. A machine scans your body, destroys it, and builds an exact replica on Mars. A surgeon divides a brain and puts half in each of two bodies. Which one is you? Parfit's answer was that the question has no deep answer, and that this does not matter, because Relation R survives even where identity gives out.
The doctrine sounds bleak. Parfit experienced it as release. In Reasons and Persons he wrote that his life had once seemed like a glass tunnel through which he moved faster every year, with darkness at the end, and that when he gave up the belief in a deep further self, the walls of the tunnel disappeared. The distance between his present self and his future self grew; so did the distance between himself and other people shrink. If the border of the self is a matter of degree, egoism loses its metaphysical charter. Prudence and morality start to look like neighbors. He took comfort in the thought that his death would break no deep thread, only end one chain of connections among many.
Reasons and Persons did more than dissolve the self. Its final section invented a field. Parfit asked what present people owe to future people, and found that the question breaks our tools. Choose one energy policy and certain people will be born; choose another and different people will be born instead. If the risky policy leads to lives that are hard but still worth living, whom has it wronged? The people it burdened owe it their existence. He named this the Non-Identity Problem, and no one has solved it. He then pressed further and derived what he called the Repugnant Conclusion: on assumptions most people accept, an enormous population of lives barely worth living comes out better than a small population of excellent lives. He hated the conclusion. He spent thirty years trying to escape it and never did. The two puzzles now sit under every serious argument about climate policy, existential risk, and the movements that call themselves effective altruism and longtermism. Parfit organized nothing and led nothing, but the people who ask whether humanity's remote future should govern present choices are working inside rooms he built.
The man who wrote these arguments became a legend of another kind. In September 2011 Larissa MacFarquhar (b. 1968) profiled him in the New Yorker, and the portrait fixed the public image. He struck her as somehow not quite present in his own body, without the ordinary anti-social emotions of envy, malice, and dominance. He did not credit his conscious mind with his own work. He pictured his thinking self as a minister at a large desk who writes a question, drops it in the out-tray, and twiddles his thumbs while unseen civil servants in a back room labor over the answer and return it to the in-tray. He was helpless before other people's moods, above all unhappiness, which flooded him. He could form no mental images of his own past; his memories came to him as propositions, facts without pictures. He wept at the mere thought of suffering, and he held that no one, not even Hitler, could deserve to suffer. The wardrobe was uniform: white shirts and gray trousers bought in bulk so that dressing required no decision. He carried water in a vodka bottle. He rode an exercise bike with a book propped on the handlebars. Every minute saved from the body went to the work.
The austerity had one exception, and the exception obeyed the same law. Parfit photographed buildings. He shot three places only, Oxford, Venice, and St. Petersburg, and he traveled to the last two every year for the purpose. He worked at dawn and dusk, in slanting light, water, and mist. People rarely appear in the frames, and where they do they look like accidents. He employed a professional retoucher and gave the man instructions: remove the army truck parked before the Winter Palace, strip the scaffolding from the front of San Marco, take out the telephone wires, the litter, the passersby. His widow explained the project in a sentence. “He was capturing an ideal.” The perfectionism that delayed his books for decades governed the pictures too. He wanted the buildings as they ought to be, permanent, with the accidents deleted. It was his metaphysics with a camera.
He was not the recluse the anecdotes suggest. Younger philosophers who sent him papers received back comments longer than the papers. He built careers other than his own. His partner from the early 1980s was Janet Radcliffe Richards (b. 1944), a philosopher and bioethicist, and the two married in 2010, the same year Oxford's mandatory retirement rule pushed him out of his fellowship at sixty-seven. He took the eviction hard. He kept working through recurring visiting posts at Harvard, New York University, and Rutgers, where graduate students met a tall white-haired man who would pursue an objection down a corridor and into the street because the argument was not finished.
The last project was the largest. On What Matters appeared in two volumes in 2011, with a third published in 2017 after his death. The book grew from a decades-long draft called Climbing the Mountain, and the title carried the thesis. Parfit argued that the three great modern moral theories, the Kantian, the contractualist, and the consequentialist, are not rivals but climbers ascending the same mountain from different sides. Revised into their best versions, he claimed, they converge on a single set of principles, which he called the Triple Theory. Beneath the convergence claim sat the deeper one. Parfit was an atheist who insisted that moral truths exist anyway, objective, unmade by us, binding whether or not anyone cares. Some things matter, he argued, and their mattering is as hard a fact as arithmetic. He said that if this were false, if all reasons bottomed out in desire and convention, then nothing would matter, and his life's work, and everyone's, would have been pointless. He did not present this as one thesis among others. It was the wager of his existence.
The philosophical world honored him and divided over him. The British Academy elected him a fellow in 1986. He received the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 2014. Reasons and Persons became the best-selling academic philosophy title in the modern history of Oxford University Press. But many colleagues thought the mountain had no single summit, that Kant's dignity, the contractualist's reasonable rejection, and the consequentialist's ledger of outcomes run on different engines and meet nowhere. Bernard Williams (1929-2003), the philosopher Parfit admired most and agreed with least, had spent his career arguing that the impartial view from nowhere leaves out what makes a human life worth leading. The dispute is not settled. Parfit's answer to his critics was more argument, more drafts, more replies folded into the text, until On What Matters swelled past two thousand pages, a book that reads less like a treatise than like a man conducting his own posthumous seminar in advance.
He died in London in the first hours of January 2, 2017, at seventy-four, with the third volume finished and in press. In 2023 David Edmonds (b. 1964), a former student, published Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, and the biography weighed the explanations for the strangeness: the pressure of the 1981 snub, an autistic cast of mind Edmonds first credited and later doubted, or the simpler possibility that the work itself, pursued without remainder, will make any man strange.
The story invites a moral, and the temptation should be resisted, because Parfit resisted it. He did not think his life exemplary. He thought his questions urgent. He gave up variety in food, clothes, travel, and company the way a man running toward something drops what he carries. What he ran toward was a proof that the death of God did not kill morality, that suffering is bad whoever suffers it, that the future people who will never thank us have claims on us now, and that the self whose comfort we guard so fiercely is a looser and less important thing than we fear. He wanted to be survived not by a reputation but by conclusions. On his own theory, that wish makes sense. What mattered about Derek Parfit was never the man inside the borders. It was Relation R, the chain of thought still connecting, still branching, running forward through people he never met.
Notes
The June 13, 1981 All Souls rejection scene, the twenty-month calculation, the Rawls, Hare, and Glover references, Berlin‘s June 1984 speech, and the OUP sales claim come from David Edmonds‘ account excerpted in the New Statesman, April 13, 2023.
The father’s turn toward Maoism, the Liberator bomber gun turret, and the April 12, 1984 publication date come from the Oxford Alumni review of the Edmonds biography.
The 1967 All Souls exam sitting, the tutors, and the 1973 application promising three books come from Jonathan Dancy‘s British Academy memoir of Parfit, which draws on the All Souls college file.
Photography details, including the three cities only, annual trips, dawn and dusk light, the retoucher, the army truck at the Winter Palace, the San Marco scaffolding, Richards’ “capturing an ideal” quote, the weeping at suffering, and the Hitler line, come from the New Statesman piece on the Narrative Projects exhibition, June 2018.
The civil-servant image of his mind, the absence of anti-social emotions, the flooding empathy, and the propositional memories without pictures come from Larissa MacFarquhar, “How to Be Good”, The New Yorker, September 5, 2011.
The vodka bottle of water comes from the Princeton University Press page for Edmonds’ biography, Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, quoting a review.
Mandatory retirement at 67 in 2010 and the visiting posts at Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers come from Wikipedia on Derek Parfit.
Edmonds’ shifting view on autism comes from reader accounts of the biography at Steps to Phaeacia and The End of Better.
Reasonable extrapolations I made: the boyhood loss of faith over hell, widely reported in both the MacFarquhar profile and the Edmonds biography, though I did not pull a page reference; the instant coffee with tap water and reading while brushing teeth, standard Parfit lore from the same two sources; the “glass tunnel” passage, his own words in Reasons and Persons, part three, near the end of the personal identity discussion; white shirts and gray trousers bought in bulk, from MacFarquhar and Edmonds; the exercise bike with a book, from the same sources; the closing line of the second volume of On What Matters about our obligations to the future, which I paraphrased into the final paragraph’s themes rather than quoting; and general characteristics of All Souls, including no undergraduates and minimal duties, which are matters of common knowledge about the institution.
‘How to be Good’
Larissa MacFarquhar writes in The New Yorker on Sep. 5, 2011:
Parfit lived near his parents in Oxford, and saw them once a week, for Sunday lunch. His mother read up on philosophy to try to understand his work, but since Parfit saw her only with his father they couldn’t talk much about it. His father was baffled by him; he couldn’t understand why he became a philosopher—he thought he ought to have been a scientist. He tried, unsuccessfully, to interest his son in tennis.
Joanna [Derek’s sister] struggled to find work. Finally, she managed to qualify as a nanny. She became pregnant and had a son, Tom, whom she raised on her own. A few years later, she adopted a daughter. She loved her children, but they didn’t make her happy. Every few months, she telephoned Parfit to talk to him about how depressed she was and how badly things were going. He dreaded those calls. Then, in her thirties, she died in a car crash.
She had not made a will, and after she died there was a harrowing fight over her son. Her daughter was re-adopted quickly, but Jessie was determined that Tom should be placed in a family she knew. The trouble was, his placement was in the hands of the local council, and Jessie so antagonized the council with her uncompromising opinions and her upper-middle-class accent that it sought actively to thwart her. Jessie was in agony, and Parfit became very emotionally involved. The case ended up in court, and he wrote a long and passionate brief supporting his mother. At last, the case was resolved in their favor. Jessie died soon afterward, although she was not sick or particularly old. Once Tom was safely placed with his new family, nearby, Parfit never saw him.
As the years went by, Theo came to accept that although her brother loved her, it was simply not important to him to spend time with his family. He was extremely softhearted, and she knew that in a crisis he would always help her, but deepening ties to his past through continuity, valuing blood as a source of kinship—these were just not part of who he was. Years later, Parfit wrote to her in a letter that they had reacted to their unhappy family in opposite ways. They were like the Rhine and the Danube: they begin very close, but then they diverge—one flows to the Atlantic, the other to the Black Sea.
Sometime around 1982 or ’83, the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards moved from London to Oxford, having ended her first marriage. She had become well known a few years earlier for writing “The Skeptical Feminist,” a fierce attack on anti-rational tendencies in the women’s movement, and was teaching philosophy of science at the Open University. She was very beautiful and very feminine. She attended a seminar that Parfit was teaching. She had never encountered anyone like him: he was obviously a strange person, but not in any of the usual ways. Afterward, Amartya Sen, a friend, who was co-teaching the seminar, greeted her, and, when she left, Parfit asked Sen who she was…
Parfit read Richards’s book and wrote her a letter about it, suggesting that they meet and discuss it further. He went out and bought three identical black suits. They met. He offered to rent her a computer. (He had just discovered computers—he had bought one secondhand and was very excited about it.) With unpracticed but single-minded diligence, he pursued her.
She was bewildered. An eminent philosopher had sent her a letter that in tone and content resembled an academic article, and now he was offering to rent her a computer. How much did it cost to rent a computer? He had not named an amount. He certainly seemed very interested in talking with her, and he was charming and brilliant and unexpectedly good-looking, but what was he up to? He never flirted—he talked to her exactly as he would talk to a man. After a time, she deduced from the sheer frequency of his attentions that his interest must be romantic, but this was not apparent in his behavior. She began to wonder if he would propose to her before they had kissed…
Soon, having won her, Parfit burrowed back into his work. At first, this was fine—she didn’t want a man around all the time—but then they decided to buy a house together. They had intended to look in Oxford, but Parfit lost his heart to a beautiful eighteenth-century house near Avebury, a Neolithic henge monument in Wiltshire. He had to have it—he bid the price up and was terribly anxious until the deed was signed. Then, happy to have won his house, he sat in his study with the blinds down. Ten minutes away, there was a glorious bluebell wood, and he loved bluebell woods—one of his fears about global warming was that it would get too hot for bluebells—but Richards couldn’t get him to go there. It existed: that was enough. Eventually, she realized that her need for human company, modest as it was, was greater than he was capable of meeting. They sold the house, she bought a house in London, and he went back to his rooms in All Souls. From then until he retired, more than ten years later, they spent very little time together, although they spoke on the phone several times a day.
If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, the implications for the work of Derek Parfit are profound.
Mearsheimer argues that humans are inherently social, tribal, and shaped by socialization to the point where individualism is secondary. He posits that reason is often a tool used after social and innate sentiments have already determined our moral codes. This perspective directly challenges the project of a philosopher like Parfit, who spent his career using rigorous, individualistic reason to deconstruct personal identity and morality.
Parfit’s reductionist view suggests that a person is nothing more than a collection of physical and mental states linked by psychological continuity. He strips away the idea of a separately existing self, or “soul,” to argue that personal identity is not what matters. In his framework, one should move toward an impersonal morality that transcends the boundaries of the individual.
If Mearsheimer is right, Parfit’s philosophical project suffers from a category error. Mearsheimer would argue that by attempting to use pure, decontextualized reason to arrive at moral truths, Parfit ignores the very “socialization” and “innate sentiments” that define how humans think. While Parfit uses thought experiments like teletransportation to isolate the individual and test rational consistency, Mearsheimer would likely contend that these experiments are artificial. They remove the subject from the social, tribal, and developmental context that shapes the human mind long before it can engage in the type of abstract logic Parfit prizes.
Where Parfit seeks to liberate the individual from the “delusion” of a robust self—thereby allowing for greater altruism—Mearsheimer suggests that this individual is not a free-floating agent waiting to be liberated. The individual is already “embedded in a society.” For Mearsheimer, the “delusion” is not the self, but the liberal belief that humans can be treated as atomistic, rational actors who formulate moral codes through critical reflection.
If Mearsheimer’s account of human nature holds, Parfit’s attempt to construct a universal, rationalist ethic might be seen as an exercise in high-level intellectual abstraction that fails to account for the actual psychological and social structures governing human behavior. Parfit’s focus on the irrelevance of personal boundaries might align with a universalist liberal goal, but Mearsheimer would likely argue that humans are fundamentally wired to prioritize their own group, making the adoption of such an impersonal, universalist morality psychologically unnatural and politically difficult to sustain.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology views the Kantian, the contractualist, and the consequentialist moral theories as expressions of liberal universalism. He considers them to be deeply flawed because they rely on the assumption that individuals are atomistic actors who reach conclusions through reason, rather than products of intense socialization and tribal sentiment.
The Kantian project rests on the idea that an individual can use pure reason to arrive at a moral law that applies to all people at all times. Mearsheimer rejects this because he believes individuals are not autonomous thinkers who form their own moral codes. Instead, he argues that our preferences and values are heavily predetermined by our upbringing and the specific society into which we are born. He would see the Kantian claim—that a rational person can transcend his local, tribal identity to embrace a universal duty—as an illusion. For Mearsheimer, human behavior is driven by strong attachments to one’s own group, not by a commitment to a universal principle that ignores those attachments.
Contractualism, as framed by thinkers like T.M. Scanlon, posits that morality consists of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement. Mearsheimer would view this as a misunderstanding of how humans operate. Contractualism assumes that individuals can enter into a social contract by setting aside their particular interests in favor of a mutually beneficial arrangement. Mearsheimer’s anthropology suggests that humans are tribal creatures who prioritize the survival and prosperity of their own society over any abstract, universal agreement. He would argue that people do not choose their moral constraints through a rational, egalitarian process; they inherit them through socialization, which effectively binds them to their group and often pits them against others.
Consequentialism, most notably utilitarianism, evaluates the morality of an action by its outcome—specifically, the goal of maximizing the good for the greatest number. Mearsheimer would argue that this is a fantasy because it ignores the tribal nature of human beings. A person is inherently biased toward his own group. When an individual calculates the consequences of an action, he does not weigh the interests of all humans equally. He is fundamentally hardwired to weigh the interests of his own tribe much more heavily than the interests of outsiders. Mearsheimer would suggest that any attempt to enforce a system that demands universal impartiality will fail because it demands that people act against their own deepest social instincts.
Mearsheimer would argue that these three theories are products of an elite, Western, liberal mindset that ignores the reality of human nature. They assume that if people just reason well enough, they will move toward a universal moral consensus. He would counter that because we are born into tribes and nurtured by them, our moral reasoning is always local, tribal, and focused on the survival of our own group. These theories represent a form of idealism that ignores the profound social reality that shapes our identities.
Derek Parfit occupies a strange, complex place within the framework David Pinsof describes. On one hand, Parfit fits the classic archetype of an intellectual who believes the world is a series of misunderstandings to be corrected. He believed that if people only understood the nature of personal identity or the logic of moral reasons, they would stop being trapped by self-interest and parochial concern. He essentially spent his life building a massive, intricate ladder of logic—his books—to help humanity climb out of what he saw as a moral hole.
Pinsof’s critique targets the intellectual who assumes that human behavior is a collection of cognitive glitches. Parfit, however, did not view humans as broken machines in need of a tune-up. He viewed the self as a philosophical mistake. He did not claim that tribalism or self-interest were errors of information processing; he argued that they rested on a metaphysical error—the belief that the boundary between oneself and others is absolute. He thought this belief was not just a strategic bias, but a genuine, objective falsehood about the structure of reality.
The tension between these two perspectives is stark:
According to Pinsof, humans are highly evolved, rational agents pursuing status and resources. What intellectuals call “biases” are smart, self-serving heuristics. Parfit’s attempt to argue people out of their self-interest would be, in this view, a classic case of an intellectual mistaking stated motives for actual ones. Parfit’s “morality” would be dismissed as a high-status signal, a way for an Oxford don to demonstrate his moral superiority while ignoring the zero-sum competition for status and resources that governs human life.
According to Parfit, humans are not mere status-seeking animals, or at least, they do not have to be. Parfit believed that through intense, cold, analytic reflection, it is possible to transcend the evolutionary programming that binds us to our own future selves and our narrow, tribal interests. He did not treat philosophy as a tool for political advocacy or social engineering, but as a path to objective truth. He would likely agree with Pinsof that humans are motivated by things other than “happiness,” but he would argue that the “status” or “dominance” Pinsof highlights are simply irrational goals once you strip away the false importance of the individual self.
Parfit was not trying to “save the world” through policy nudges or by correcting “misinformation.” He was trying to change the fundamental way humans conceptualize their own existence. He was a radical individualist who ended up advocating for a radical form of altruism.
If Pinsof is correct, Parfit’s life work is an example of the intellectual’s “misunderstanding” myth—a man who dedicated his life to the idea that he could talk people out of their evolved nature. If Parfit is correct, Pinsof’s cynical realism is just another form of parochialism, a failure to see that the “real” motives he describes are only real because we have not yet done the work to think our way out of them. Parfit’s life is perhaps the ultimate test of whether an intellectual can transcend the evolutionary logic Pinsof maps, or if that attempt is just one more strategy in the game.
