[HN Gopher] Derek Parfit: The Perfectionist at All Souls
___________________________________________________________________
Derek Parfit: The Perfectionist at All Souls
Author : miobrien
Score : 12 points
Date : 2023-04-24 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| greenie_beans wrote:
| trying to remember the fiction book where derek parfit was
| mentioned. was it a michael bible book? blake butler?
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| _" Few works of philosophy have the urgency of Reasons and
| Persons, which was written with extraordinary speed, driving its
| author to the brink of collapse and its publisher to despair."_
|
| Makes me feel slightly less bad about abandoning my first attempt
| at reading this very dense book. I was trying to read it in short
| bits (the book is split into quite short sections but with a big
| apparatus of parts, chapters, sections and so on with implied
| cross referencing) during a busy time.
|
| I'll try again over the summer in a more concentrated way.
|
| No recourse to spirits or pills though...
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _How to Be Good: The Philosopher Derek Parfit (2011)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037240 - Jan 2020 (6
| comments)
|
| _Why anything? Why this? (1998)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315746 - Jan 2017 (77
| comments)
|
| _Derek Parfit has died_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13304873 - Jan 2017 (38
| comments)
|
| _How to Be Good: Derek Parfit 's Moral Philosophy_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273495 - March 2016 (16
| comments)
| rektide wrote:
| The moral obligation to future people is a strong current that
| runs through Kim Stanley Robinson's _Ministry for the Future,_ a
| recent semi hope-punk book of his.
|
| Fun to run across an earlier line of inquiry here, in Parfit.
|
| And a code I strongly believe in. Orienting yourself to best help
| the future, perhaps even futures beyond your time. As the Greek
| proverb goes:
|
| > _A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade
| they shall never sit._
| tuatoru wrote:
| I've never understood the reasoning, except maybe as nerd-
| sniping.
|
| If there is any technological progress, then future people
| collectively will be much richer than us, and so they will be
| able to solve their problems much more easily than we can. Even
| problems they inherited from us - those should be trivially
| cheap for them to solve in a few hundred years.
|
| I see it as "they owe us" (for enabling their existence at all)
| rather than "we owe them".
|
| And if there isn't any more technological progress, then there
| won't be many future people.
|
| Our obligations to present people, to enable them to have their
| own self-determined futures, seem far more important to me.
| zvmaz wrote:
| I don't know a lot about Derek Parfit, but one interesting
| philosopher who claims to have solved Parfits' problems about
| population and moral theory is David Benatar [1]. His solution is
| anti-natalism, which he defends extensively in his book Better
| Never to Have Been, The Harm of Coming into Existence.
|
| [1] https://academic.oup.com/book/32901/chapter-
| abstract/2766430...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-24 23:01 UTC)