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Derek Antony Parfit FBA (/ ˈ p ɑːr f ɪ t /; 11 December 1942 – 2 January 2017 [3] [4]) was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Reasons and Persons is a 1984 book by the philosopher Derek Parfit, in which the author discusses ethics, rationality and personal identity.. It is divided into four parts, dedicated to self-defeating theories, rationality and time, personal identity and responsibility toward future generations.
A solution to the problem is to adopt impersonal views, theories that don't rely on the notion of personal identity, such as utilitarianism. But impersonal views lead to what Parfit calls the " repugnant conclusion ", the idea that "For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive ...
Derek Parfit. This debate about further facts concerning personal identity over time is most closely associated with Derek Parfit. In his Reasons and Persons, he describes the non-reductionist's view that "personal identity is a deep further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity". [1]
The mere addition paradox (also known as the repugnant conclusion) is a problem in ethics identified by Derek Parfit and discussed in his book Reasons and Persons (1984). The paradox identifies the mutual incompatibility of four intuitively compelling assertions about the relative value of populations.
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According to Parfit, it is rational for people who perceive very little connectedness with their future self to act in ways that neglect the future self (e.g., by smoking). The psychological work that followed did not similarly argue for Parfit's normative view but has instead attempted to test the descriptive validity of Parfit's theory. [6]
Dr. A. Thomas McLellan, the co-founder of the Treatment Research Institute, echoed that point. “Here’s the problem,” he said. Treatment methods were determined “before anybody really understood the science of addiction. We started off with the wrong model.” For families, the result can be frustrating and an expensive failure.