Derek Part

Derek Part (/prft/; born 11 December 1942) is

a British philosopher who specialises in problems of
personal identity, rationality, ethics, and the relations
among them.

logic and language.

In Part I of Reasons and Persons Part discusses selfdefeating theories, namely the self-interest theory of rationality (S) and two ethical frameworks: common sense
morality (CSM) and consequentialism (C). He posits that
S has been dominant in Western culture for over two millennia, often making bedfellows with religious doctrine,
which united self-interest and morality. Because S demands that we always make self-interest our supreme rational concern and instructs us to ensure that our whole
life goes as well as possible, S makes temporally neutral
requirements. Thus it would be irrational to act in ways
that we know we would prefer later to undo.

His 1984 book Reasons and Persons (described by Alan

Ryan in The Sunday Times as something close to a work
of genius) has been very inuential. His most recent
book, On What Matters (2011), was widely circulated and
discussed for many years before its publication.
Part has worked at Oxford University for all of his academic career, and is an Emeritus Senior Research Fellow
at All Souls College, Oxford. He is also a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University, Harvard
University, and Rutgers University, and was awarded the
2014 Rolf Schock Prize for his groundbreaking contributions concerning personal identity, regard for future generations, and analysis of the structure of moral
theories.[1]

As an example, it is irrational for a 14-year-old to listen

to loud music or get arrested for vandalism if he knows
such actions will detract signicantly from his future wellbeing and goals (such as an academic career in philosophy
or having good hearing).

Part is also an experienced photographer and a retired Most notably, the self-interest theory holds that it is irrapoet. He is married to the philosopher Janet Radclie tional to commit any acts of self-denial or to act on desires
that negatively aect our well-being. One may consider
Richards.
an aspiring author whose strongest desire is to write an
award-winning novel but who, in doing so, suers from
lack of sleep and depression. Part holds that it is plausi1 Early life
ble that we have such desires outside our own well-being,
and that it is not irrational to act to fulll these desires.
Derek Part was born in Chengdu, China, to Norman
and Jessie Part (ne Browne), both medical doctors Aside from the initial appeal to plausibility of desires that
who had moved to Western China to teach preventive do not directly contribute to ones life going well, Part
medicine in missionary hospitals. The family returned to contrives situations where S is indirectly self-defeating.
the United Kingdom about a year after Part was born, That is, it makes demands that it initially posits as irsettling in Oxford. Part was sent to Eton College. From rational. It does not fail on its own terms, but it does
an early age Part endeavoured to become a poet, but recommend adoption of an alternative framework of rahe gave up poetry towards the end of his adolescence.[2] tionality. For instance, it might be in my self-interest to
He later studied Modern History at the University of Ox- become trustworthy to participate in mutually benecial
ford, graduating in 1964. In 196566 he was a Harkness agreements, even though in maintaining the agreement
Fellow at Columbia University and Harvard University. I will be doing what will, ceteris paribus, be worse for
He abandoned historical studies for philosophy during the me. In many cases S instructs us precisely not to follow S
fellowship,[3] returning to Oxford to become a fellow of {Section 63, Chapter 8, Reasons and Persons}, thus tting the denition of an indirectly self-defeating theory.
All Souls College.
Part contends that to be indirectly individually selfdefeating and directly collectively self-defeating is not fatally damaging for S. To further bury S, Part exploits its
2 Ethics and rationality
partial relativity, juxtaposing temporally neutral demands
against agent-centered demands. The appeal to full relaReasons and Persons is a four-part work, with each suctivity raises the question whether a theory can be consiscessive section building on the last. Part believes that
tently neutral in one sphere of actualisation but entirely
nonreligious ethics is a young and fertile eld of inquiry.
partial in another. Stripped of its commonly accepted
He asks questions about which actions are right or wrong
shrouds of plausibility that can be shown to be inconsisand shies away from meta-ethics, which focuses more on
1

2
tent, S can be judged on its own (lacking) merits. While
Part cannot oer an argument to dismiss S outright, his
exposition lays S bare and allows its own failings to show
through. It is defensible but the defender must bite so
many bullets that they might lose their credibility in the
process. Thus we need to search for a new theory of rationality. Part oers the Critical Present Aim Theory
(CP), a broad catch-all that can be formulated to accommodate any competing theory. Part constructs CP to
exclude self-interest as our over-riding rational concern
and to allow the time of action to become critically important. He leaves the question open, however, whether
it should include to avoid acting wrongly as our highest concern. Such an inclusion would pave the way for
ethics. Henry Sidgwick longed for the fusion of ethics
and rationality and, while Part admits that many would
more ardently avoid acting irrationally as opposed to immorally, he cannot construct an argument that adequately
unites the two.

CRITICISM OF PERSONAL IDENTITY VIEW

ist apart from their components. Part argues that reality

can be fully described impersonally: there need not be
a determinate answer to the question Will I continue to
exist?" We could know all the facts about a persons continued existence and not be able to say whether the person
has survived. He concludes that we are mistaken in assuming that personal identity is what matters in survival;
what matters is rather Relation R: psychological connectedness (namely, of memory and character) and continuity
(overlapping chains of strong connectedness).

On Parts account, individuals are nothing more than

brains and bodies, but identity cannot be reduced to either. (Part concedes that his theories rarely conict with
rival Reductionist theories in everyday life, and that the
two are only brought to blows by the introduction of extraordinary examples, but he defends the use of such examples on the grounds that they arouse strong intuitions
in many of us.) Identity is not as determinate as we often
suppose it is, but instead such determinacy arises mainly
But S is not the only self-defeating theory. Where S puts from the way we talk. People exist in the same way that
too much emphasis on the separateness of persons, C fails nations or clubs exist.
to recognise the importance of bonds and emotional re- A key Partian question is: given the choice besponses that come from allowing some people privileged tween surviving without psychological continuity and
positions in ones life. If we were all pure do-gooders, connectedness (Relation R) and dying but preserving R
perhaps following Sidgwick, that would not constitute the through someone elses future existence, which would you
outcome that would maximise happiness. It would be choose? Part argues the latter is preferable.
better if a small percentage of the population were pure
do-gooders, but others acted out of love, etc. Thus C Part describes his loss of belief in a separate self as
[4]
too makes demands of agents that it initially deemed im- liberating:
moral; it fails not on its own terms, for it still demands
My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through
the outcome that maximises total happiness, but does dewhich
I was moving faster every year, and at
mand that each agent not always act as an impartial hapthe
end
of which there was darkness... [Howpiness promoter. C thus needs to be revised as well.
ever] When I changed my view, the walls of my
S and C fail indirectly, while CSM is directly collectively
glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open
self-defeating. (So is S but S is an individual theory.)
air. There is still a dierence between my life
Part shows, using interesting examples and borrowing
and the lives of other people. But the dierfrom Nashian games, that it would often be better for us
ence is less. Other people are closer. I am less
all if we did not put the welfare of our loved ones before
concerned about the rest of my own life, and
all else. For example, we should care not only about our
more concerned about the lives of others.
kids, but everyones kids.
Part often poses more questions than he answers. In
ethics, he points to a need for a dynamic framework that
combines CSM and C but he oers no specic solution.
Such an attitude tracks his stance that nonreligious ethics
is a young, fertile eld.

4 Criticism of personal identity

view

Fellow reductionist Mark Johnston of Princeton rejects Parts constitutive notion of identity with what he
calls an Argument from Above.[5] Johnston maintains,
Even if the lower-level facts [that make up identity] do
3 Personal identity
not in themselves matter, the higher-level fact may matter.
Part is singular in his meticulously rigorous and almost If it does, the lower-level facts will have derived signibut because
mathematical investigations into personal identity. In cance. They will matter, not in themselves,
[6]
they
constitute
the
higher
level
fact.
some cases, Part uses many examples seemingly inspired by Star Trek and other science ction, such as the In this, Johnston moves to preserve the signicance of
teletransporter, to explore our intuitions about our iden- personhood. Parts explanation is that it is not persontity. He is a reductionist, believing that since there is no hood itself that matters, but rather the facts in which peradequate criterion of personal identity, people do not ex- sonhood consists that provide it with signicance. To

3
illustrate this dierence between himself and Johnston,
Part makes use of an example of a brain-damaged patient who becomes irreversibly unconscious. The patient
is certainly still alive even though that fact is separate from
the fact that his heart is still beating and other organs are
still functioning. But the fact that the patient is alive is not
an independent or separately obtaining fact. The patients
being alive, even though irreversibly unconscious, simply
consists in the other facts. Part explains that from this
so-called Argument from Below we can arbitrate the
value of the heart and other organs still working without
having to assign them derived signicance, as Johnstons
perspective would dictate.

ations. He rst posits that ones existence is intimately

related to the time and conditions of conception. I would
not be me if my parents waited two more years to have a
child. While they would still have had a child, he would
certainly have been someone else; even if he had still been
their rst-born son, he would not have been me.

Study of weather patterns and other physical phenomena

in the 20th century has shown that very minor changes in
conditions at time T have drastic eects at all times after T. Compare this to the romantic involvement of future
childbearing partners. Any actions taken today, at time T,
will aect who exists after only a few generations. For instance, a signicant change in global environmental policy would shift the conditions of the conception process
so much that after 300 years none of the same people that
5 The future
would have been born are in fact born. Dierent couples
meet each other and conceive at dierent times, and so
Parts most famous postulations come in Part IV of Rea- dierent people come into existence. This is known as
sons and Persons, where he discusses possible futures for the 'non-identity problem'.
the world. He shows that, in the discussion of possi- We could thus craft disastrous policies that would be
ble futures, both average and total utilitarian standards worse for nobody, because none of the same people
lead to unwelcome conclusions. Applying total utilitarian would exist under the dierent policies. If we consider
standards (absolute total happiness) to possible growth the moral ramications of potential policies in personpaths of population and welfare leads to what he calls the aecting terms, we will have no reason to prefer a sound
Repugnant Conclusion. Part illustrates this with a sim- policy over an unsound one provided that its eects are
ple thought experiment. Imagine a choice between pos- not felt for a few generations. This is the non-identity
sible futures. In A, 10 billion people would live during problem in its purest form: the identity of future generthe next generation, all with extremely happy lives, lives ations is causally dependent, in a very sensitive way, on
far happier than anyones today. In B, there are 20 bil- the actions of the present generations.
lion people all living lives that, while slightly less happy
than those in A, are still very happy. Under total utility maximisation we should prefer B to A, and through a 6 Prioritarianism; ethics
regressive process of population increases and happiness
decreases (in each pair of cases the happiness decrease is
sympathies toward the priority view,
more than outweighed by the population increase) we are Part has expressed
[7]
or
prioritarianism.
forced to prefer Z, a world of hundreds of billions of people all living lives barely worth living, when compared to
A. Even if we do not hold that coming to exist can benet
someone, we still must at least admit that Z is no worse 7 Writings (selected)
than A.
1964: Eton Microcosm; edited by Anthony
Part makes a similar argument against average utilitarCheetham and Derek Part. London: Sidgwick &
ian standards. If all we care about is average happiness,
Jackson
we are forced to conclude that an extremely small population, say ten people, over the course of human history
1971: Personal Identity, Philosophical Review;
is the best outcome if we assume that these ten people
Vol. 80: 327, 1971.
(Adam and Eve et al.) had lives happier than we could
ever imagine. Then consider the case of American immi 1979:
Is Common-Sense Morality Selfgration. Presumably alien welfare is less than American,
Defeating?"; The Journal of Philosophy, Vol.
but the would-be alien benets tremendously from leaving
76, pp. 533545, October 1979.
his homeland. Assume also that Americans benet from
1984: Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon
immigration (at least in small amounts) because they get
Press ISBN 0-19-824615-3
cheap labour, etc. Under immigration both groups are
better o, but if this increase is oset by increase in the
1997: Reasons and Motivation, The Aristotelian
population, then average welfare is lower. Thus although
Soc. Supp.' Vol. 77: 99130, 1997.
everyone is better o, this is not the preferred outcome.
Part asserts that this is simply absurd.
2003: Justiability to Each Person, Ratio, Vol. 16:
Part then moves to discuss the identity of future gener-

pp. 368390, 2003.

11
2006: Normativity, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.),
Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. I, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
2011: On What Matters (two volumes), Oxford University Press.

See also
Larry Temkin
Henry Sidgwick
T.M. Scanlon
Analytical Philosophy
Personal Identity

References

[1] http://www.kva.se/en/Prizes/Rolf-Shock-prizes/.
Retrieved 13 February 2014. Missing or empty |title= (help)
[2] MacFarquhar, Larissa (5 September 2011). How to be
Good. The New Yorker. Retrieved 22 July 2014.
[3] Derek Part. New York University. Retrieved 10 April
2011.
[4] Fearn, Nicholas. The latest answers to the oldest questions : a philosophical adventure with the worlds greatest
thinkers. 1st ed. New York: Grove Press ;Distributed by
Publishers Group West, 2005.
[5] Johnston, Mark (1997). Human Concerns Without Superlative Selves (PDF). Dancy.
[6] Part, Derek (1995). The Unimportance of Identity
(PDF). Oxford University Press.
[7] Part, Derek. 'Equality and priority', Ratio, vol. 10, no. 3
(December 1997), pp. 202221.

10

Further reading

Jussi Suikkanen and John Cottingham (Editors), Essays on Derek Parts On What Matters (Oxford,
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

11

External links

Prole, All Souls College, Oxford

Derek Part: a bibliography. A complete bibliography of writings.
Parts Climbing the Mountain reading group on
PEA Soup
A Small Amount of Biographical Information

EXTERNAL LINKS

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