parfit_-_what_we_could_rationally_will.pdf

What We Could Rationally Will

DEREK PARFIT

THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES

Delivered at

University of California at Berkeley

November 4, 5, and 6, 2002

D EREK P ARFIT is senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He

regularly teaches there and is also afŠliated with New York University

and Harvard. He was educated at Oxford and was a Harkness Fellow at

Columbia and Harvard. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton,

Temple, Rice, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is a fellow

of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sci-

ences. He has made major contributions to our understanding of per-

sonal identity, philosophy of the mind, and ethics, and he is thought to

be one of the most important moral philosophers of the past century.

His many academic articles include “Personal Identity” (1971), “Over-

population and the Quality of Life” (1986), “The Unimportance of

Identity” (1995), and “Equality and Priority” (1997). Rationality and

Morality and Rediscovering Reasons are forthcoming from Oxford Univer-

sity Press. His book Reasons and Persons (1984) has been described by

Alan Ryan of The Sunday Times as “something close to a work of genius.”

I. RATIONAL CONSENT

According to Immanuel Kant’s best-loved statement of his supreme

moral law, often called

the Formula of Humanity: We must treat all rational beings, and the

rationality of these beings, never merely as a means, but always as

ends-in-themselves. 1

In calling rational beings “ends-in-themselves,” Kant means in part

that we must never treat such beings in ways to which they could not

consent. For example, when he explains the wrongness of lying prom-

ises, Kant writes:

he whom I want to use for my own purposes by such a promise can-

not possibly agree to my way of treating him. 2

Christine Korsgaard comments:

People cannot assent to a way of acting when they are given no

chance to do so. The most obvious instance of this is when coercion

is used. But it is also true of deception.… knowledge of what is go-

ing on and some power over the proceedings are the conditions of

possible assent.… 3

Onora O’Neill similarly writes:

In writing these lectures I have been greatly helped by my commentators, Allen Wood,

Thomas Scanlon, Susan Wolf, and Samuel Schefšer. I am also grateful for comments from

Henry Allison, Elizabeth Ashford, Robert Audi, Bruce Aune, Jonathan Bennett, John

Broome, Ruth Chang, G. A. Cohen, Mary Coleman, Roger Crisp, Jonathan Dancy, Stephen

Darwall, David Enoch, Allen Gibbard, Bradford Hooker, Thomas Hurka, Shelly Kagan,

Frances Kamm, Patricia Kitcher, Martha Klein, Christine Korsgaard, Jefferson McMahan,

Ingmar Persson, Thomas Pogge, Peter Railton, Andrews Reath, Sophia Reibetanz, Tamar

Schapiro, Jerome Schneewind, Philip Stratton-Lake, Roger Sullivan, David Sussman, Larry

Temkin, and some people to whom I apologize for forgetting their names.

1 The Groundwork (henceforth G ), pp. 428–29. (Page references are to the page numbers

of the Prussian Academy edition, which are given in most English translations.)

2 G, p. 430.

3 Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (henceforth CKE ) (Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1996), p. 139.

[287]

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The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

if we coerce or deceive others, their dissent, and so their genuine con-

sent, is in principle ruled out. Here we do indeed use others, treating

them as mere props or tools in our own projects. 4

Korsgaard concludes:

According to the Formula of Humanity, coercion and deception are

the most fundamental forms of wrong-doing to others. 5

These remarks suggest this argument:

It is wrong to treat people in any way to which they cannot possibly

consent.

People cannot possibly consent to being coerced or deceived.

Therefore

Coercion and deception are always wrong.

It can be right, however, to treat people in ways to which they cannot

possibly consent. When people are unconscious, for example, they can-

not consent to life-saving surgery, but that does not make such surgery

wrong. And we can rightly make some decisions on behalf of people

whose whereabouts we don’t know.

Kant’s objection, Korsgaard might say, applies only to those acts

whose nature makes consent impossible. Deception, unlike surgery, is

such an act. To be able to consent to someone’s treating us in some way,

we must know what this person would be doing. And, if we knew that

this person would be trying to deceive us, we could not be deceived.

But consider

Deadly Knowledge: You ask me whether Grey committed some mur-

der. I know that, unless I tell you a lie, you would come to believe

truly that Grey is the murderer. Since you could not conceal that be-

lief from Grey, he would then, to protect himself, murder you as

well.

4 Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason (henceforth CR ) (Cambridge University Press,

1989) p. 111.

CKE, p. 140.

[PARFIT] What We Could Rationally Will

289

If I told you the truth, and Grey murdered you, you could reasonably

complain, with your dying breath, that I should have lied to you. It

would be no defense to reply that I could not have deceived you with

your consent. This deception would be like life-saving surgery on some

unconscious person. I may know that, just as some unconscious person

would consent to such surgery, if she could, you would consent to my

life-saving lie. It is a merely technical problem that, if I tried to get your

consent, that would make my act impossible. We could solve this prob-

lem if you could make yourself lose particular memories. I could then

get your consent to my deceiving you, and you could make this decep-

tion possible by forgetting our conversation. I would be a moral idiot if

I believed that, because you lack this ability to lose particular memories,

my life-saving lie would be wrong. Since you would consent to being

deceived, if you could, this lie is morally as innocent as the lies that

might be needed to give someone a surprise party.

Similar claims apply to coercion. We can sometimes freely and ra-

tionally consent, in advance, to being coerced in some way. Before the

discovery of anaesthetics, people gave such consent to being coerced

during painful surgery. And it may be true, even while we are being co-

erced, that we would consent to this coercion, if we could. Most of us

would vote in favour of everyone’s being coerced to pay their taxes, and

to obey certain laws. Since people can rationally consent to being de-

ceived or coerced, these are not acts whose nature makes consent impos-

sible.

Nor, I believe, does Kant’s view imply that deception and coercion

are always wrong. Kant claims:

(A) It is wrong to treat people in any way to which they cannot pos-

sibly consent. 6

There are two ways to understand this claim. “People cannot assent,”

Korsgaard writes, “…when they are given no chance to do so.” O’Neill

similarly writes:

To treat others as persons we must allow them the possibility either of

consenting to or of dissenting from what is proposed. 7

6 Though Kant does not explicitly make this claim, he treats his remark about lying

promises as presenting what he calls “the principle of other human beings” ( G, p. 430). (A)

is the most straightforward statement of that principle.

CR, p. 110.

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