What Matters in Caring: Some Reflections on Derek Parfit's On What Matters

This essay is prompted by the recent publication of a volume of critical essays on Derek Parfit's On What Matters, along with a third volume of On What Matters responding to those essays. Parfit and his interlocutors often end up either barely engaging with one another, or engaging on terms tha...

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Veröffentlicht in:Sophia
1. VerfasserIn: Cordner, Christopher Donald (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
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Veröffentlicht: Springer Netherlands [2019]
In: Sophia
Jahr: 2019, Band: 58, Heft: 3, Seiten: 525-533
RelBib Classification:NCA Ethik
VA Philosophie
weitere Schlagwörter:B Normative reasons
B Moral responsiveness
B Caring
B Parfit
B What matters
Online Zugang: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:This essay is prompted by the recent publication of a volume of critical essays on Derek Parfit's On What Matters, along with a third volume of On What Matters responding to those essays. Parfit and his interlocutors often end up either barely engaging with one another, or engaging on terms that are often questionable. As others have done, I question Parfit's radical bifurcation of a merely ‘psychological' sense of caring, of what it is for a thing or creature to matter, and a ‘purely normative reason-implying sense' of those things. But I question it in a distinctive way, by emphasising its moral as well as its philosophical implications. I argue that what Parfit gives us with his ‘normative, reason-implying sense' of caring and mattering is not an account of genuine moral-normative responsiveness but a morally impoverishing rationalistic distortion of it. In the last part of the essay, I briefly undertake to put my specific criticisms on a wider canvas.
ISSN:1873-930X
Enthält:Enthalten in: Sophia
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s11841-019-0713-x