Great post, help me a lot in sorting my thoughts. I still have a question: is there a parallel existing between Parfit’s ideas concerning personal identity and his ideas concerning normative truth? Because in Parfit’s view, subject is reducible, and can be reduced to experimental relations. And at the end of this reduction,Parfit concludes that we should care more about the nature of experience and less on person. Can we compare this nature of experience to his normative truth? Because identity is descriptive can compare to the non-ontological of moral truth. Parfit thinks identity is descriptive and therefore non-substantive, he grants person with substantive moral status(otherwise, how could pure quantitative experience have any qualitative force and hence be somehow related to normative truth?)So in conclusion,I think my main confusion is, how can Parfit be a reductionist about personal identity and a non-naturalist at the same time?
Great post! Really enjoyed it. But I still don't really understand Parfit's claim that moral truths have no positive ontological implications. What makes 'murder is wrong' true if not that murder has the property of wrongness? And if murder has the property of wrongness, aren't we then committed to the existence of wrongness?
I think a more promising approach to the understanding the nature of normativity is the end-relational analysis in Stephen Finlay’s Confusion of Tongues, which I also discuss at http://jamesaitchison.co.uk. This may dissolve some of the mysteries that Parfit addresses in OWM Book VI. What do you think?
Great post, help me a lot in sorting my thoughts. I still have a question: is there a parallel existing between Parfit’s ideas concerning personal identity and his ideas concerning normative truth? Because in Parfit’s view, subject is reducible, and can be reduced to experimental relations. And at the end of this reduction,Parfit concludes that we should care more about the nature of experience and less on person. Can we compare this nature of experience to his normative truth? Because identity is descriptive can compare to the non-ontological of moral truth. Parfit thinks identity is descriptive and therefore non-substantive, he grants person with substantive moral status(otherwise, how could pure quantitative experience have any qualitative force and hence be somehow related to normative truth?)So in conclusion,I think my main confusion is, how can Parfit be a reductionist about personal identity and a non-naturalist at the same time?
Great post! Really enjoyed it. But I still don't really understand Parfit's claim that moral truths have no positive ontological implications. What makes 'murder is wrong' true if not that murder has the property of wrongness? And if murder has the property of wrongness, aren't we then committed to the existence of wrongness?
I think a more promising approach to the understanding the nature of normativity is the end-relational analysis in Stephen Finlay’s Confusion of Tongues, which I also discuss at http://jamesaitchison.co.uk. This may dissolve some of the mysteries that Parfit addresses in OWM Book VI. What do you think?