Editor’s introduction: what matters
Neil Croally
The stars are matter. We are matter. But it doesn’t matter.
Captain Beefheart
Derek Parfit was (variously) a fellow of All Soul’s College, Oxford from 1967 until his retirement in 2010. He died in 2017, aged 74. Though originally educated as an historian, Parfit became a remarkable philosopher, all the more so because, during his long and illustrious career, he published only two books: Reasons and Persons in 1984, and the very substantial two volumes of On What Matters in 2011. Parfit’s writing, in its clarity, its thoroughness and its humanity, is exemplary. But my interest in him in this introduction is that he kept asking ‘what matters?’, whether he was investigating our notions of personal identity, our rationality, our obligations to future generations, 1 or – arguably his most ambitious programme – the possibility of combining rule consequentialism with contractualism and Kantian deontology into a unified theory of secular ethics. 2 I have been wondering what matters, in the realms of ethics and politics (of course), but also in relation to what it means to be a conscious, reasoning, and sometimes rational human being. In this latter area I have been looking for serious explorations of two related but different questions, namely, the role played by evolution in the development of human abstract (or meta) reasoning, on the one hand, and the nature of (human) consciousness, on the other. I do not want to spend too long on the first of these questions, apart from to say that there has been a large amount of interesting work done in this area over the last twenty years or so, and that, in order to understand where the human ability to reason in such a successfully abstract way came from, we could do worse than once again starting with Aristotle’s famous dictum that ‘man is by nature a political animal’ ( Politics 1253a). 3 1 Broadly speaking, the interests of Parfit 1984. 2 This is what Parfit 2011 tries to do in. There are many books and articles on rule consequentialism, and on Kant’s ethics. On contractualism in ethics, see Scanlon 1998. In the third edition of Practical Ethics (2011), Peter Singer states: ‘ . . . I am now more ready to enterta in – although not yet embrace – the idea that there are objective ethical truths that are independent of what anyone desires. I owe that shift . . . to my reading of a draft of Derek Parfit’s immensely impressive forthcoming book, On What Matters ’ (p. xii i). Responses to Parfit can be found in Singer 2016; Parfit 2017 responds in turn. 3 Tomasello 2014 argues for the origins of human reasoning in collectivity, supported by good experimental evidence. The key terms Tomasello employs are ‘joint’ or ‘collective intentionality’ (intentionality is, in this sense, the awareness that others have thoughts). For further discussion of the nature of reason – as modular, as domain- specific or domain-general, as a ‘spandrel’, as not uniquely human, see also Dennett 2017; Godfrey-Smith 2017 (on octopuses); Papineau 2003; Sperber & Mercier 2017. That our ethics arose out of our social nature is, in some ways, obvious; for discussion, see Singer 1981. For an overview of human evolution in terms of neurological development, see Dunbar 2014; for the role that cooking in particular plays in that development, see Wrangham
i
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator