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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 .
In Part I of Reasons and Persons Parfit discussed self-defeating moral theories, namely the self-interest theory of rationality ("S") and two ethical frameworks: common-sense morality and consequentialism. He posited that self-interest has been dominant in Western culture for over two millennia, often making bedfellows with religious doctrine ...
The Polish science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem described the same problem in the mid-twentieth century. He put it in writing in his philosophical text Dialogs in 1957. . Similarly, in Lem's Star Diaries ("Fourteenth Voyage") of 1957, the hero visits a planet and finds himself recreated from a backup record, after his death from a meteorite strike, which on this planet is a very commonplace proc
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 economist Tyler Cowen has expressed admiration for Parfit's style ("Reading him is an unforgettable and illuminating experience") in On What Matters, but argues: . I see the biggest and most central part of the book as a failure, possibly wrong but more worryingly "not even wrong" and simply missing the questions defined by where the frontier – choice theory and not just philosophic ...
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.
The problem was described and explored by Derek Parfit in his 1987 book Reasons and Persons. [2] It is a challenge to person-affecting views, which are based on the intuition that "what is bad must be bad for someone". [3] An example proposed by Parfit involves thinking of two policies: "conservation" and "depletion".
These paradoxes may be due to fallacious reasoning , or an unintuitive solution . The term paradox is often used to describe a counter-intuitive result. However, some of these paradoxes qualify to fit into the mainstream viewpoint of a paradox, which is a self-contradictory result gained even while properly applying accepted ways of reasoning .