[HN Gopher] Up Mount Improbable
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Up Mount Improbable
Author : drdee
Score : 26 points
Date : 2023-12-30 04:00 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (drb.ie)
(TXT) w3m dump (drb.ie)
| dash2 wrote:
| _Reasons and Persons_ is a truly mind-expanding book. It 's the
| opposite of the cliche of analytic philosophy as arid word games.
| rrherr wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240102150542/https://drb.ie/ar...
| xpe wrote:
| > Those who don't buy the jigsaw puzzle view of humanistic
| thought are unlikely to be convinced by Parfit's ingenious
| version of moral monism. After all, why should we think that all
| genuine human ideals and values, such as equality, freedom,
| justice and compassion, must form part of some pre-ordained or
| constructible harmonious whole? The evidence would suggest
| otherwise: that is, that an irreducible conflict of ethical
| ideals and values is the unalterable human situation (past and
| present). Monists like Parfit perceive the undeniable fact of
| moral disagreement as an avoidable state of affairs and one that
| can be eliminated through the application of human reason. And
| moral monists also tend to believe, as Parfit unequivocally did,
| that the only coherent form of moral realism is moral monism - in
| other words, that the only alternative to the view that there is
| a single, true morality is moral relativism, or its unblushing
| first cousin, moral nihilism, the philosophical view which denies
| the existence and possibility of objective moral values.
|
| I'm concerned that the reviewer, Johnny Lyons, is erroneously
| conflating what _is_ (descriptive) from what _should_ be
| (normative). Parfit surely recognizes what exists, descriptively;
| his project involves motivating a normative ethics.
|
| This criticism is so obvious (to philosophers at least) that I
| wonder if I'm missing something and/or misinterpreting Lyons.
| gmaster1440 wrote:
| I understood Lyons as driving at a related point of Parfit
| getting too deep into theoretic analytic philosophy and being a
| little too ambitious or carried away with reconciling
| irreducible frameworks and values, which is tangential to your
| point around the difference between ought and is.
| dang wrote:
| Another recent review of the same book:
|
| _Nothing Personal: How ideas made Derek Parfit_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38494017 - Dec 2023 (26
| comments)
|
| Related:
|
| _Derek Parfit: The Perfectionist at All Souls_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688300 - April 2023 (21
| comments)
|
| _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)
| johngossman wrote:
| Having just read the book, I will say this review seems spot on
| in its assessment. It's a good but not great read, approachable
| and a good story, but thin on philosophical insight.
| johngossman wrote:
| Thinner than it could be
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