David Edmonds is a philosopher, writer, podcaster and presenter. His most recent book is a biography of Derek Parfit. Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.
“Derek was perhaps the most important philosopher of his era. This scintillating and insightful portrait of him is one of the best intellectual biographies I have read.” -Tyler Cowen
Other books include: The Murder of Professor Schlick, Would You Kill the Fat Man? and (with John Eidinow) the international best-seller Wittgenstein’s Poker. He’s a Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. With Nigel Warburton he produces the popular podcast series Philosophy Bites. For three decades, he was a multi-award winning presenter/producer at the BBC and the host of The Big Idea.
We start off discussing “Trolley problems” and the ethical implications of choosing between lives now and in the future. Edmonds provides a nuanced perspective, discussing the argument that while a life in the future is (almost) as valuable as a life today, the decision to kill five lives today could potentially reduce future life.
Would you kill five people today, or five people in 100 years?
I think I would choose five in a hundred years, but it would be a very marginal decision…on the whole, I agree with Parfit in I think that there should be no moral discounting in that I think a life in the future is as valuable as a life today. But presumably if you kill five lives today, you are affecting who gets born. So that's why I would kill five lives in the future because I might be also reducing future life as well if I take lives today.
We chat about if thought experiments are even useful at all (contra, Diane Coyle, who dislikes them).
I then ask about real life challenges such as NHS budgets and potentially choosing between saving pre-term babies or diabetics.
I ask David about his favorite paradox (think about God and a very large breakfast) and give him the St Petersburg paradox to answer.
"Can God cook a breakfast so big that He can't eat it?"
We discuss the life of Derek Parfit, his personality and obsessions. Whether he might have been a good historian (vs philosopher), the pros and cons of All Souls College and if an autistic cognitive profile mattered.
David gives his view on why Derek’s second book was (and is) considered inferior to his first.
We also touch on Effective Altruism (EA) and Derek’s influence here on longtermism and possible foundational philosophical roots to the EA movement.
We end on what chess opening David would use against Magnus Carlson, what countries David would like to visit, current projects and life advice David has.
Podcast available wherever you listen, or below. Video above or on YouTube.
PODCAST INFO
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Transcript (only lightly edited)
David Edmonds in conversation with Ben Yeoh
Ben
Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to David Edmonds. David is a philosopher, writer, podcast and presenter. His recent book is a biography of Derek Parfit, of which Tyler Cowen wrote. Derek was perhaps the most important philosopher of his era. This scintillating and insightful portrait of him is one of the best intellectual biographies I have read. David, welcome.
David
Thank you, Ben. Nice to be here.
Ben (00:31):
I'm going to start with a trolley problem in honor of your book, "Would You Kill the Fat Man?" I think of this as a pure thought experiment. So maybe an easy one to start with; would you kill five people today, or five people in 100 years?
David (00:52):
Are they definitely going to die?
Ben (00:55):
Yes, they are definitely going to die. You can see I'm speaking to a philosopher. He's already thinking of the nuances. Not meant to be so tricky, but definitely going to die.
David (01:03):
Well, I think I would choose five in a hundred years, but it would be a very marginal decision. We're going to go onto Parfit later, but on the whole, I agree with Parfit in I think that there should be no moral discounting in that I think a life in the future is as valuable as a life today. But presumably if you kill five lives today, you are affecting who gets born. So that's why I would kill five lives in the future because I might be also reducing future life as well if I take lives today.
Ben (01:41):
Yeah. Very well thought out. So you can see this is someone who has worked on a whole book on trolley problems. So the follow up for that is, would you kill five people today, or six people in the future in a hundred years?
David (01:55):
Well, it's getting trickier and trickier, and the more you increase the gap, the tougher it's going to become. Again, I will take the five lives today. We know nothing about those lives. We assume that they might be young, they might be old, they might be past childbearing age. But with not knowing any of that, I'm assuming that a few of them will have futures where they may have kids and so on. So I'll take the six lives in the future.
Ben (02:32):
Sure. Great. And is there a number do you think we can find in equilibrium? What type of number do we get to go, "Ohh, this is getting really difficult here?"
David (02:41):
It is going to get very difficult. I'm not going to put a specific number on it. I think the reason why our intuitions are so sort of confused in these areas is that we find it very difficult to imagine that we can make a decision that will definitely affect people in a hundred years’ time; which is true because in practice, we just don't know what's going to happen in a hundred years’ time. So our intuitions are very, very messy. That's why I stipulate at the beginning-- I asked a question, "Are we definitely sure that these lives are going to be lost?" But I think we find it very difficult to get our head around it because the future is so uncertain. There would be some number of lives where I would say, "Let's take the current lives now." If you said take one life now, or a million lives in a hundred years’ time that would be quite easy, for example. But where the equilibrium lies, I think I would find that very difficult to say.
Ben (03:47):
And I very much enjoyed reading in your book the explanations between the difference between intentionality and all of these little nuances around these analogies. And I think you referred to it earlier. I've started off with this future one because I was going to ask you, but you already said, what do you think Derek Parfit would choose?
David (04:07):
Yeah, again, I think Derek would come up with my answer because of what I said; that current lives may create future lives. So if you remove current lives, you are also removing future lives. But he had this idea-- and I think he's right, that a life just because it's not yet in existence is nonetheless as morally significant as a life that currently is in existence. So just as we might think that it doesn't matter whether somebody is suffering on the far side of the world as opposed to suffering in the next town to us, that geography is an irrelevance-- all other things being equal; so time is an irrelevance as well. So I think he would say that, but I think he would come up with my answer, that there are those complications that I mentioned that current lives can create future lives.
Ben (05:05):
Yeah. I hadn't, until I started reading some moral philosophy, had truly thought very hard about that; about what is the discount we might give to time, something like economists might say, or distance or some of these other things. But I was interesting. You'd done some work or had a podcast with some experimental philosophers. I hadn't realized that this was a kind of newer branch of philosophy where philosophers go out into the world and try and survey and ask some of these questions, at least in revealed surveys because there's an issue with kind of revealed preference or survey preference. But when we survey, what type of number do you think we would come up? And does that number then indicate-- at least for the society or country that we might do this in-- does that kind of give where society has a type of discount rate for a future person? And is this useful or problematic?
David (06:06):
It might be useful in all sorts of ways. I wouldn't necessarily rely on it ethically because people can make ethical mistakes. They were very good grounds for discounting; for economic discounting. Those are the one on the whole, people would prefer something now to something in the future. And so you have to pay people an interest rate to delay their consumption. So that's how we operate. We prefer our preferences to be satisfied immediately. We have to be given a reason why we should delay our preferences and the discount rate sort of covers that.
Also, the other reason for discounting is what I mentioned earlier-- is uncertainty. You can never be certain about the future. So if you were sure that you could save a life now, well that's obviously a very good thing to do. You're very unlikely to be certain that you can save a life in a hundred years’ time. So it's worth discounting for that for the chance that in fact, you won't. So there are very good reasons for morally discounting on the grounds of probability, but not on the grounds that the life in a hundred years is less important than the life now.
Ben (07:30):
That's very clear. So it's not to do with the so-called value of that life, but the uncertainty that you can save it. So I was speaking last year to the economist, Diane Coyle. Diane seems to hate thought experiments. Simplistically, her line of argument essentially goes, "The nuances of the real world are so far removed from thought experiments that they become unhelpful," or I think maybe she just gets very annoyed by them. We've kind of indicated that it's so far that you have to think quite carefully about what these nuances and types of revealed. On the other hand, even in this short conversation, some of the mechanisms behind how we think do seem to be potentially revealed by these experiments and particularly mathematicians and physicists before they go out and try and find experimental evidence, will try and use these models of the world. Has those who kind of think thought experiments not useful swayed you at all over the years? Or from your start as a moral philosopher using these thought experiments, do you kind of think, "No, they have been useful?"
David (08:39):
Well, as you mentioned, I wrote a whole book called, "Would You Kill the Fat Man" about the famous Trolley problem. And many of your viewers and listeners will know what that is, but I'll just spell it out. So there was a paper that came out in 1967 by a philosopher called Philippa Foot. The paper was actually about abortion; 1967 was the year that abortion was legalized in the UK. And of course in America, Roe versus Wade-- the American courts have just overturned it. But that decision was 1971 or 73, I think. I've forgotten now. I think it's 73-- I'm not sure now. Anyway, 71 or 73, but a few years later. So abortion was a very live, practical applied issue in the UK. In America, it's remains. So in the UK, it's much less of a live moral issue.
But in any case, she imagines that there's a train going along-- I'll change her thought experiment slightly to make it easy to understand. There's a train going along. It's going to kill five people. You are standing by the side of the track, you can turn a lever and turn the train down a spur where unfortunately one person is on that track. So you have a choice between letting the train carry on in which case five people will die, or turning the train in which case one person will die. And what's interesting about that is that almost everybody says that you should turn the train. And then later on, another philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thompson, in the 1980s-- 1986, she comes out, imagines that this time the train is running along again, it's out of control again. There were five people tied to the track.
This time there's another way of saving them. You're standing on a footbridge and you are standing next to a very large man. These days we talk about a person with a heavy rucksack. And you can push this large man or this person with a heavy rucksack over the footbridge. The man is so large or the heavy rucksack is so heavy that it will stop the train from killing the five people. But the large man or the man with the heavy rucksack will die in the process. The question is, "Should you kill the fat man, the large man, the man with the heavy rucksack?" In this case, almost everybody says it's wrong to push the large man or the person with the heavy rucksack. It's a great puzzle because in both cases there's a choice between five lives and one life.
I think that is a useful thought experiment because I think it does get at some important intuitions that you touched on earlier; have to do with intention. And I think intention explains the difference between these two cases; we can go into it if you would like. So I think there is an example of a thought experiment being very helpful in reinforcing a view that what we intend matters in moral philosophy. I should say that there's a whole branch of moral philosophy or sub-branch, called teleology, which has hundreds of these weird thought experiments. And some of them I think are completely useless because they're so weird. They've got so many aspects to them, so many dimensions to them, and they're so implausible in almost every way that I think our intuitions no longer hook onto anything of any substance.
So we imagine that train is going along and the only way you can save the five is by pushing a tractor. The tractor will push a large man in front of the train, blah, blah, blah. There are so many kind of permutations to this thought of them. Some philosophers say, "Well, obviously the right thing to do in this example is X." And my reaction is, "Well, I don't think anybody could have any strong sense of what the right thing to do is because it's now so wacky and so absurd." I think those thought experiments are not useful. But I think some of them can be. I think the basic thought experiments in the trolley problem are useful, and the justification for those thought experiments is that in the real world, it's precisely because the real world is so messy and has elements to it that are relevant to the situation at hand. That if we can clean up the real world and remove some of the complications, then it might help us see what's going on in some of these cases. So I think if done right, these thought experiments can be helpful.
Ben (13:49):
That strikes me as a good defense. "If done right," I guess is the big caveat there. But I'll accept that. So I'm going to give you close to a real world puzzle then. I gave this one to Jonathan Wolf (Jo Wolf), and also to Larry Temkin; two other philosophers who've been on the podcast. It's really to do with the UK health system or the health systems overall, but specific to UK, which has a defined budget. So I guess all government policy does have this budget. I usually do it with preterm babies and also diabetics. But they're just kind of two classes of patients which the National Health Service here in the UK or any closed system budget has to do. The issue is around the fact that broadly speaking, although there's uncertainty, the calculations to save a year of a diabetic's life-- and you can talk about these kind of qualities; these quality adjusted life years (QALY)-- but just to say this is the ballpark, tends to be say something around 20,000 pounds to save a year of that life for diabetics. And actually, there's other patients who are like that.
Then you have the preterm baby-- although you can also put rare genetic diseases in this class. Preterm babies tend to cost somewhere between 200,000 to a million pounds to save a sort of year of life on a sort of equivalent. And rare genetic diseases-- maybe not quite as high as that, but very large numbers. This is a puzzle which actually the government when they were thinking about this-- And I think Joe was involved, but some philosophers were involved in terms of how to try and set and think about pricing that and what we should do. But then they also actually surveyed people. So they actually thought, "Okay, what is this also that society would like to do or not?" So a lot of this was behind the scenes in terms of how the policy developed. How then do you think we should think about weighing up money spent on things like diabetes or diabetes patients compared to preterm babies or rare genetic diseases or other interventions which could be very expensive, but would also save your life?
David (16:15):
Well, I totally understand the QALY approach. I think one can question the basic assumption. And often when people criticize the movement of effective altruism, they sort of criticize the basic premise which is that the kind of individual has to accept the status quo. Actually, we don't, we could try and change the status quo. The premise of your argument is that resources are limited. Of course they are. But presumably, one can choose to spend more on health if one wanted and less on some other things. But accepting that there is definitely going to be a limit at some stage, you can't spend everything on health. There are other priorities; transport, education, other important priorities. You've got to spend something on defense. I think the quality approach is a very sensible one.
I think healthcare is-- especially a system like in the UK and national healthcare, it has to rely on public support. And so it's not totally unreasonable to throw in some survey evidence about what matters to people. I mean, I do think that should only be a very small part of it because people can be very prejudiced in all sorts of ways. If you were to do this with animals, people would prefer furry animals, cute looking animals to animals that were less cute, even if there was kind of suffering; the suffering was equal on both types of animals. So I do think you have to be cautious about taking into account public support. Having said that, as I say, the National Health Service has to rely on some kind of consensus because we're all paying into the system. And to take into account people's preferences to a certain degree, is not unreasonable.
Ben (18:39):
That seems fair. And then in this particular case, where do you fall out?
David (18:45):
Well, you mean between the diabetes case that cost 20,000 and the preterm case that cost 200,000?
Ben (18:53):
Yeah. So I guess would be, do you think actually we should perhaps not save as many of those preterm babies? I guess that's the crux of the dilemma.
David (19:06):
Yeah. It sounds very heartless, doesn't it?
Ben (19:08):
Yeah, it does.
David (19:09):
That's why people are so reluctant to do it. But I mean, that is the basis of the quality calculation. And of course, the whole point is if you don't perform those kind of operations or those kind of procedures, you can add many, many more lives to other people. So where the discrepancies is so vast like that, I think I'm prepared to bite the bullet.
Ben (19:40):
Interesting. So if you do the survey evidence, then the typical person in the street-- although I think it's not quite as strong as the trolley but it's almost there, says, "No, we should save the preterm baby." The kind of group which is an exception tends actually to be medical practitioners. Medical practitioners who tend to be, at least within this domain a little bit more cost benefit analysis or utility or utilitarian around it. The compromise that the system actually does, it says, "Well, we will take into account society preference and we will save some of both." But you can see with a limited budget, obviously you are actually not saving the maximum amount of either, and we don't really know where the number is.
But it tends to be for these more rare conditions or conditions interestingly, and this comes through in the survey. I don't know whether this is society misjudging, but the idea is that these types of patients typically have something where they can be saved. So like rare genetic diseases and preterm, we have the medical technology. There is a sense that it wasn't the baby's fault or the person with the rare genetic disease fault. Something happened and we can do something about it. Yes, it costs a lot more money, but there does seem to be-- at least in UK society today, and I haven't seen data across other society. So I would be interested then if no one has done that, but has accepted that, "No, there is some sort of sense of fairness within that."
David (21:27):
Yeah. Well, I don't know fairness is necessarily the right word there. I was going to suggest that attitude to responsibility might be relevant here. So there are some diseases people have that are not entirely unrelated to lifestyle and to choices that people have made. And then I think people have the intuition that the preterm baby who's clearly not responsible for their condition is blameless. Whereas people elsewhere in the medical system could be held responsible to varying degrees for their conditions. So I think that's another intuition that plays into people's intuition. So I think that's probably a reasonable intuition to some extent.
Ben (22:26):
Yeah, it's interesting. Speaking with Diane and a few others over the years, I do put a little bit less weight on the pure utilitarian calculation than I used to do. Part of it is actually a little bit of disquiet around the fact that transitivity for some of these things may not hold up. That's what Larry Temkin has potentially convinced me of. But I actually, for a lot of things like this or at the margin, I don't see many better tools. We've got surveys and we've got other things to draw into what we call a technical health assessment which we have to do a lot of. But I have got a little bit more cautious on that. Perhaps that's a good segue though into paradoxes. And I was wondering, do you have a favorite paradox?
David (23:20):
Well, strangely enough, about 30 years ago in one of my early, I had a kind of twin career as a philosopher and a BBC journalist. So probably in the early 1990s, one of my first series was on philosophical paradoxes, and we covered five interesting paradoxes. Some of them were puzzles rather the paradoxes, but I guess I quite enjoyed one which is essentially about infinity which is, "Can God cook a breakfast so big that He can't eat it?"
Ben (24:03):
Yeah. I like that one. I told that one to my son actually after listening to your ones. Yeah, can you have a meal so big that you can't eat it?
David (24:14):
Can you be so powerful that you can cook a meal which is so big that you can't, as an all-powerful person, eat it? We did Theseus' ship which is not really a paradox at all. So that's the ship that goes into dry dock in Perez and it's rotten and you change the ship plank by plank until there isn't a single plank left of the original ship. And the question is, "Is it still the same ship?" That's quite interesting for all sorts of areas, including personal identity. It's not really a paradox, I don't think so much.
There's interesting puzzles about vagueness. I quite enjoy those about the bald man who can never go bald because if you lose one hair, clearly that can make no difference. You don't go from being hirsute to being bald by taking away one hair. So then you can take away one hair, then you can take away another hair, and at no stage have you gone from hirsuteness to baldness. Eventually, you have no hair left at all, and you can't be bald because one hair can make no difference. Now, that is a really difficult puzzle. There's one philosopher, Tim Williamson, who's a very brilliant philosopher who thinks that there is a moment where you actually do go. It's the only way it makes logical sense; that you actually do go from not being bald to being bald. It's just we don't know what that hair is. But that is a genuine, difficult sort of paradox to crack, I think.
Ben (26:01):
That's a good one. We might come onto something with ships because hopefully we're going to talk about maybe future persons and that thing. I wonder about the hair one. I wonder whether quantum has some-- Well, I guess there's a paradox within that because there's light wave or a particle answer yes, depending on how you look at it. But I was going to throw in a paradox, which maybe isn't quite a paradox, but it has a couple of segues into it, which is the St. Petersburg paradox is the one it's called. There's various ways I guess you can ask it. But one would be you sort of have a flip of the coin and it's 51%, 49%. And 51%, you double the value of something enormously. So you can say double the value of the world. And at 49%, the world goes to nothing so you destroy the world. Do you take that bet?
David (27:00):
Well, I definitely wouldn't. I don't know very much about this paradox. It reminds me a bit about the way that you are guaranteed to win money on a roulette wheel. That you bet one pound on red, and then if you lose, you bet two pounds on red, and then if you lose, you bet four pounds on red. And then if you win, you've won one pound. But if you lose, you bet eight pounds on red, and if you lose, you bet 16 pounds on red. And then if you win, you've won one pound. So eventually, you're bound to win one pound when you win. But the problem is you eventually run out of money. There's a risk that you run out of money. Like Parfit, who we'll eventually go on to talk about, I think the catastrophe of extinction is so great that you need more than a 51 to 49 odds to justify.
Ben (28:06):
Well, the paradox comes in because you're then asked to play it again and again and again. It's a paradox which is a struggle for utility theory actually. Some people think that ergodicity might solve that, but it's a utility problem. I mention it on two things. One is that when Sam Bankman- Fried (SBF) was asked it, he said he would take the bet which in hindsight seems really revealing. Most recently I heard Peter Singer decline to answer-- at least in public, on the grounds that he doesn't support gambling which was a very good dodge from Singer, because obviously a naive or pure utilitarian does tend to take the bet. But actually, I mentioned St. Petersburg as my segue into Derek Parfit because Derek in your biography, seemed to travel to St. Petersburg a lot to take photographs.
It was one of the images which stays with me. Images are quite interesting because there's some evidence that he had some form of face blindness or he didn't process faces in the way that a more typical person might process faces. I don't think Derek would've taken the St. Petersburg paradox, but he went to St. Petersburg all the time. But I guess my question here is what do you make of his photography and his, I guess, obsessiveness with certain images and going back to them? And do you think that had any commentary on how his philosophy came about? Or do you think it's quite separate in terms of just an interesting fact of his life, which doesn't necessarily bear any relevance to his thinking or his moral thinking?
David (30:09):
Well, I think it definitely tells us something about him as a personality, and that probably does tell us something about his philosophy. He had something called aphantasia, which is not quite the same as face blindness, but it's sort of linked. So he couldn't conjure up mental images. So if he was thinking of St. Petersburg, he couldn't conjure up all those beautiful buildings that he loved so much. Of course when he went to St. Petersburg, it was not St. Petersburg, it was Leningrad because he went at the time of the Cold War. He would go to two cities every year. So he would go to St. Petersburg and he would go to Venice. The other city he would photograph all the time that he didn't need to travel to-- he could just look out of his window, was Oxford.
So he would photograph those three cities and there were thousands and thousands of photographs he took of those three cities. He eventually gave up in about 1999, about 2000. But for years and years, he would go to these cities and he would take these photographs of the same buildings at sunset and sunrise. It was obviously an obsessive hobby. The word obsession comes up a lot when you're talking about Derek. He used to then come back after taking these photographs and he would then tinker with them. This was long before Photoshop. And what he would do is he would send them to a developer, initially in Italy, then later in London, and he would ask them to remove bits of the photograph that he didn't particularly like. He didn't want people in his photographs so if there was a person in his photograph, he'd get them to remove the person. Or there was a lamppost that got in the way, he'd get them to remove the lamppost.
Then he was very fascinated and interested and obsessed with color. He would want to tinker with the color and he would change how bright something was or he would kind of make something more mellow. If it didn't work, he would send it back again to the developer. Photographs would go back and forth half a dozen times at the cost of hundreds and hundreds of pounds. So does it tell you anything about-- well, it certainly tells you something about his personality and his perfectionism. He was a total perfectionist. He wanted to get everything right. He wanted to make, develop, to photograph the perfect shot.
His philosophy was very much like that. He was very slow at publishing, and that was partly because he didn't want to release anything into the world until he felt it was absolutely perfect. So there was definitely that parallel. Some people have said the way he used to remove people from his photographs is in some ways quite kind of un-Kantian; the people weren't very important. The overall image he wanted to portray-- and maybe there's a link there. So I think you can certainly draw connections between Parfit personality and his philosophy. I mentioned that he gave it up. He gives it up in about 2000. And then the rest of his life is purely philosophy. So for years he had these twin obsessions which were philosophy and photography. When he was young, he had a much richer life, but he got rid of all those other interests and just had philosophy and photography. Then he got rid of the photography and it was just philosophy. And that was, as I say, the last kind of 15, 20 years of his life.
Ben (34:15):
And within photography, do you know whether he started with also a broader range of subjects and interests and narrowed down to Venice, St. Petersburg, Oxford, or did it always start out relatively narrow?
David (34:32):
He was given a camera as a young person, and unfortunately we don't have any of the photos from that time. But I imagine it was a bit broader because that would mesh with his life. His life was much broader. He had many more interests in those days, and I can imagine that he would photograph his family he talks a lot about in his diaries that I have from when he's 10 and 11. So it's only a surmise, it's only a guess. As soon as he went to Venice, he fell in love with Venice. He'd been to Rome, but he didn't fall in love with Rome and he never went back to Rome. Whereas Venice, he went back to time after time, after time. I think he says at one stage that he was unusual in that when he found something that he liked, he never got tired of it.
So there would be musical pieces that he could listen to over and over and over and over and over again. There could be buildings that he could look at over and over and over and over and over again. He didn't crave the way lots of us crave. He didn't crave variety. It's a bit like-- My father was a little like that. If he found a nice restaurant that was the restaurant he would want to go back to time, after time after time. Derek was like that with most things; that once he found something that he thought was sublime, he didn't feel the urge to then try other things. He found Venice and Leningrad and he fell in love with both of them. He loved Oxford, never got tired of them and photographed them for decades.
Ben (36:23):
Yeah, I can really see that. My son is like that too. But I think about his early years in the biography, which I found really fascinating because we describe him now-- and I think philosophers of the time, as one of the greatest philosophers in the last fifty hundred years, certainly in the top. Partly in originality of his thinking and the work he did put out, partly because he seemed to enable so many other philosophers and thinkers. And one of the threads I get from the book is in some way his enablement of others, which I suppose is a kind of second order thing, in some ways might go on to be his greatest legacy. I guess we'll see. Obviously, he's that within his work, but he obviously enabled so many other thinkers. When I think in his early years, historian obviously could have become if you look at the beginning and the references, one of the greatest historians of our era potentially.
He seems to have, or you describe a strange relationship with numbers. But even without that numbers, it strikes me that he could have been one of our great economists, particularly one of the economists who didn't perhaps work with numbers or a historian economist. The passage or the passages talking about the discussions he had or this panel discussion with Amartya Sen and the others really made me realize how interconnected these intellectual stars are, the way they kind of talk and think. But also, actually that broad base that Parfit had in the beginning, I really now miss. I really want to know what that would've been and maybe not. So I was wondering whether do you think he could have been brilliant in so many other domains had this obsessive focus not happened? And I guess my follow up is my conflicted reading then about All Souls. But do you think this from your reading of all of the sort of transcripts and people that early year work is brilliant across many domains, including, I would say creative writing, history, economics all of that. Is that secure? And do you think therefore he could have gone on to do many things?
David (38:45):
He was clearly academically extremely gifted. He was clearly a superb historian. I think he found the right domain for him for a number of reasons. One is that I think he had to work on something that he felt mattered. And the reason he would never have been a great historian is that although he could do it very easily, and he was extremely gifted at it and could have no doubt done the primary research and strung it all together in a great narrative and had something useful and interesting and original to say about topics-- the French Revolution was the thing he specialized in, Aries specialized in when he was an undergrad. He didn't fall in love with history. He ultimately didn't care enough about it. In fact, when he goes to All Souls and some younger people arrive in All Souls, he tries to persuade them all to give up their history or to give up their discipline and to do what really matters, namely philosophy. So I think that was one reason why philosophy was right for him.
You mentioned his relationship with numbers. So he had a phobia about mathematics and notation. And as I discovered in my research, one of the weird aspects of that is that he was clearly quite good at maths. He came first in maths at school; both at his prep school and at school. He was first in maths, he was obviously a good mathematician. He was clearly capable of doing maths at least to a reasonably high degree, and he developed this phobia of it. So he would never write anything in logical notation. Some philosophers write like to present their arguments in logical notation, convert them into symbols. And when anybody did that with any of his arguments or with any of their arguments and sent them to Derek, he would say, "I don't understand. Write it in prose and then I'll respond." Yet he had a very analytic mind. He was capable of following arguments down a long family tree down lots of branches and keep it in his head; very unusual in that regard, which is one reason why he didn't need logical notation because he could follow it in his head.
Could he have been a great economist? I think his phobia about notation of maths had he developed that, had he gone into economics would really have been a constraint for him there because that is very important to economists. Every economist to some degree understands how to manipulate numbers and how to present arguments in econometric terms. There are some economists who can get away without doing that, but command of numbers and mathematics I think is very important to economists. So I think he would've struggled in that area. Economists on the whole like him because he thinks in lots of ways like economists and there were group of economists at All Souls where he was based with whom he used to communicate. He's very interested in things like the prisoners dilemma, which is a kind of puzzle or a paradox that economists have made great use of.
So game theory, he was very interested in game theory and applying that to philosophy. So there were definitely parallels between what he was doing and what economists were doing. He thought in a kind of economist way, but I'm not sure he would ever have been a great economist. I think he found his metier. He could have been an academic in a number of different disciplines, I think. But he possibly could have only reached the real heights in one discipline, which was philosophy. I think he found the right area.
Ben (43:08):
Well, that's quite convincing to me. I was wavering a little bit, but at least the way you put it and you have great firsthand and secondary knowledge of that. So I'm convinced. My follow on from that then is do you think he would've reached those heights without All Souls? So my reading of All Souls-- and now I've done a little bit more reading into it I found that like, "Oh, I hadn't known enough about the institution of All Souls." It seems that in some ways it very much protected him, allowed him to develop those obsessions and heights, and to some extent not immediately getting into All Souls and some of the challenges that All Souls brings in terms of getting that book out was also that.
I wonder whether without Derek, All Souls would've really progressed. I kind of view that actually there is obviously arguments for continuity. But when I look at the range within hindsight and looking back, and obviously I don't have the full facts, it seems to me a little bit too stuck in certain traditions and not enough moving forward into the world. So I get mixed feelings about it. But I do sense that maybe without All Souls, there needs to be a place or institutions where people like Derek can really make a home and they can be good for one another. So perhaps that outweighs everything else. But do you have a view on how important All Souls was and whether All Souls itself needs more change?
David (44:51):
So there are lots of questions in that. Let me first explain what All Souls is because most people won't know what All Souls is. So All Souls is a college in Oxford purely dedicated to research. So it doesn't have any undergrads. At the time when Derek goes there, it's unique. So they now have institutions where they just have researchers and there's a budget just for people to study and they don't need to teach. But at the time, there were no others. Derek applies in 1964 as a historian and as one of his rare failures, probably should have been accepted, but he was rejected. I think they were trying to put him down, bring him down a peg or two. He goes off to America on a Harkness Fellowship and he comes back and he applies again, this time as a philosopher, and he's accepted in 1967, and he spends the rest of his life in All Souls.
Now, there is one way that All Souls helps a lot, and another way which I think it possibly doesn't. So the way in which it helps is-- you mentioned this, Derek gets a prize fellowship for seven years, then he gets another fellowship for seven years, and then he applies for the senior research fellowship in 1981 that will give him a job for life. And I think he just assumes he's going to get it because everything has come very easily to him. He has had virtually no knock backs in his life, and I think he just assumes it's there for the taking. They don't give it to him. And the reason they don't give it to him is because he hasn't-- after 14 years of being at All Souls without having any real responsibilities, he hasn't produced a single book. And they say to him, "Unless you produce a book, we will throw you out. We will extend your fellowship for another three years. But unless there's a book, you are out in the big wide world."
That focuses Derek's mind. And I really think it's possible these kind of counterfactual truths. I mean, there's a whole area in philosophy wondering, "What kind of status these counterfactual truths have?" But let's assume that there are these counterfactual truths. I think there is a world in which All Souls hadn't put him under that pressure, and his famous book, "Reasons and Persons" had never appeared. So in that sense, they did him a big favor. He took on lots of students because he liked teaching philosophy, he liked engaging in philosophical tour, and he gave lectures as well. He took on a tiny bit of admin. But I think in general, it's not necessarily a case that academics benefit as much as they think they will from having these pure research posts.
It depends how much their workload is. Many academics are just weighed down by the bureaucracy, by the extent of the contact they have to have with individual students and how many lectures they have to give. And that leaves no room for research. But I think in general there's probably a nice balance to be had for a certain type of academic where you have some time for research, but you are also devoting time to lecture and to engage with students. The reason I think that is because I think engaging with students and lecturing is a catalyst to ideas and a stimulus for thought, and it doesn't necessarily benefit everybody to have these pure research roles. Having said that, Derek was definitely allowed to be himself. It suited Derek, I think. An institution like that where he was fed and he was watered and he didn't have to do anything, it suited his personality.
Beyond Reasons and Persons increased his productivity? Well, I'm skeptical about that. One final point about All Souls, it was a very conservative organization when Derek joined. Derek was at the center of a movement to make it slightly more modern in that it was all male when Derek arrived, and he was one of the leaders of a movement to bring women fellows into All Souls. Without Derek, it was inevitable, I think that at some stage it had to modernize. There are no all-male colleges left now at Oxford. So I think it would've happened eventually in any case. I think Derek sped up the process. I'm sure it could modernize further. I think if you talk privately to some All Souls fellows, they will admit that in some ways it's still quite stuck in its ways. On the other hand, in terms of demographic representation, it's a world away from what it was when Derek joined in the 1960s where it was mostly middle class or indeed posh white males. So that has changed very dramatically. But in other ways, the college has changed much less and probably not as far as it needs to.
Ben (50:55):
Yeah, I could see that. So the counterfactual is that it would've happened anyway, but Derek was part of it. Whether it would've happened quite as quickly, that's interesting. I'm going to circle back on two things. So one was that it was obviously good for his personality. But I do wonder on this connection to others because littered throughout the book are social events and they seem kind of very rich and kind of normal. But towards his later life, he does so many fewer of them. And there was this one kind of heartbreaking anecdote I felt about one social event. I think it was a funeral and Derek wanting to work on his philosophy kind of thinking that he would decline and someone countering saying, "You work on what matters." "Well, this is what matters."
And I wonder with that obsession, losing that little bit of edge, and I wonder whether All Souls didn't help with that. But perhaps before getting to the later life, I wanted to reflect just on quite how astonishing the first book is. I think you describe it or maybe someone else describes it as a kind of neutron bomb into philosophy. I think for people outside of academic philosophy is perhaps harder to really appreciate how different, how difficult it is to have new ideas in a way which it contained. And I really got that sense actually through your writing where you explain, I think, quite difficult concepts very clearly. Then you have this beautiful sense of essentially narrative. We have this non-fiction narrative genre, an arc now. But the narrative explanation of it is very beautifully written and quite moving. But I guess as you're philosopher trained, and actually in some ways this and some of your interactions makes you a kind of unique biographer on that, whether you would highlight how important you think that first book is maybe to you or to others.
David (53:14):
Well, it's not an uncontroversial or an uncontentious book or an uncontested book. So if you were to compare it to something like one of Kant's great works or the Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein, one thing that's important to say is that I think he won't find a single senior philosopher who would denigrate the Philosophical Investigations or who would think that Philosophical Investigations was not an important work. There are some philosophers who really dislike the way Derek does moral philosophy and who don't rate Reasons and Persons, which I think is his greatest book as highly as some others. So it's not an uncontested work of genius. On the other hand, it's widely acknowledged as an extraordinary work and a work that, as you say, is very, very different. I finished my undergraduate in 1986, Reasons and Persons comes out in 1984.
I have just next to me now, my paperback edition which was given to me by sort of one of my best mates, I think after we graduated. So I must have had the 1986 edition. I went on to do philosophy post-graduate work straight after that. But I gobbled up Reasons and Persons, and I adored it. I think I would find it very difficult to read now because it's very, very dense. It's not obtuse or deliberately complicated. It's extremely transparent and clear in the way he writes. He does his best to make it as clear as possible, but it's very dense. It's got thousands of arguments in it. So unless you've got a great deal of intellectual energy, it's hard work reading from the start to the finish.
But I had a lot of intellectual energy when I was young and I gobbled it up and it had the same effect on me as it had for many people. It was a very, very important book. And I think for lots of people, it persuaded them to go on and do philosophy. For lots of other people it shaped their philosophical interests and people spent the rest of their lives working on philosophical problems that Derek had first identified in Reasons and Persons. I think along with one of the reviewers, that it's close to a work of genius. It's a fantastic, fantastic book; Reasons and Persons-- a very, very important book. So I think in decades to come it will still be read. That's how I would place it. I think that's true of very few works of contemporary moral philosophy, but I think it's true of Reasons and Persons.
Ben (56:33):
I didn't realize that even something like Wittgenstein wasn't contested in his lifetime, but I guess there are very, very few works like that. And so I guess my follow on question just on the writing would be why did the second book not have the impact of the first? I guess there's a question that Tyler Cowen also asked, and I've had a few. I've got a kind of, "You have some inklings within the book” and I have some friends who sort of have some notes on it. But do you have your thoughts as to why the second book-- I guess if we talk about the consensus, didn't have the same impact or hasn't been considered in the same vein? And do you think there's a chance within time that view might change? Or do you think actually it does look like it won't be considered in the same cannon as the first book?
David (57:31):
I'll answer that. Let me just pick up on the Wittgenstein book. Philosophical Investigations was published after his death so it's a posthumous book-- all of Wittgenstein's work apart from the Tractatus. He had an amazing reputation in the Anglo-American world way before he died. The Tractatus had made him sort of internationally famous. But his current reputation is largely based on this huge body of work that only appeared after his death. On What Matters, I think there were two reasons why it didn't have the reception that Reasons and Persons had. The first is that pretty much everybody working in the field had already read it because Derek had been working on it for so long. And because he wanted to get every point right, because he wanted to respond to every potential objection, he had sent it to hundreds of people.
When it eventually came out, I think many of those hundreds of people didn't bother reading it because they'd already read it in multiple drafts. Because they would send it back to him, he would deal with their objection or their points and file it back to them, they felt like they'd read it. It's true of Reasons and Persons as well as On What Matters. Derek, because he wanted to deal with every objection, he made the books longer than they should have been. They've got elements to them that we could have done without. He could have written cleaner books. I mean, it's interesting to compare him with somebody like Thomas Nagle, who was a kind of friend of Derek's. Thomas Nagel writes these brilliant books where he gets to the nub of an issue and he sort of dispenses with all the kind of flippers.
Derek wanted to cover everything and so that's not the way he works. On What Matters just becomes too big precisely for this reason, because he's sending it to all these people. They're sending him objections, and instead of saying, "Well, we don't need to deal with this objection," he would deal with every objection, especially if it came from somebody he respected. So that was one reason why I think it didn't have the reception of Reasons and Persons. The obvious, I think it's just less compelling, it's just less convincing that he has managed to persuade people which he hopes that he has done. He managed to persuade them one of two things. He has two projects. His twin projects in On What Matters are to try and show that the different traditions in moral philosophy are compatible.
The book, "On What Matters" was for many years called "Climbing the Mountain." And his metaphor was that all these different philosophical traditions in ethics are climbing the same mountain, but from different sides. And when they reach the summit, they realize that they have everything important in common. So that was one of his projects. His second project was to show that morality was objective and that there were moral facts in the way that this laptop exists is a fact. Well, not quite in that same way, but that there were moral facts. I think he just hasn't convinced a great many people who weren't already convinced of his position about that. So On what Matters has many, many fascinating things built within it. And so if you have two years of spare time of your life to devote to a philosophy book, go ahead and read On What Matters because that's how long it will take you. Maybe three years depending on how much spare time you have.
There's lots of fascinating things inside it. But the overall project, I think hasn't convinced many people. So I think there were those reasons why it hasn't and won't be remembered in the same way, whereas Reasons and Persons kicks off whole areas of philosophy, which philosophers still investigate to this very day. I mean, most famously, of course, future people and our obligations to future people, which really didn't exist before Derek. So Derek was really the first person to come up with a whole set of puzzles and problems to do with what we owed to future people. And that there are still lots of people working in that area. And just for that reason alone, I think he'll be remembered.
Ben (01:02:56):
That seems really fair. And I guess one of my friends who's critical of the later work does think he's simply chasing the wrong mountain, as it were. So I can see that. Probably then it's worth dwelling on some of that legacy on the future person's piece. And maybe taking it practically today is, I think one could consider him perhaps as the grandfather of the effective altruist movement. We mentioned this a little bit before. His nickname is EA. Although they have several strands to their pillars and their thinking and it's still an evolving movement, one strand is this idea of what we do over the future-- And some of it was in long-termism. Their version of long-termism can go thousands or millions of years. Most people, I guess, are thinking in five or 10 years. But I was wondering if you had a view as to how influential he was in the EA movement and whether you have a view on EA as it is today.
David (01:04:11):
So I think the father of the EA movement, philosophically speaking, is probably Peter Singer who writes a famous paper in 1971 to do with poverty and affluence and what our obligations are to people in need on the other side of the world. And that paper sits there not doing very much. I think the founders of the EA movement sort of come across it. It's a famous paper in philosophical circles, but they realized as Peter Singer always believed that it had practical implications, and effective altruism is born in whatever it is, 2009.
Interestingly, Peter Singer says that Derek Parfit is the only genius he has ever known. So Singer in a way is a disciple of Derek so-- I think Singer himself has been hugely influenced by Derek. So there's that effect of Derek through Peter Singer. The effective altruism movement gets going and for some years, its main focus as Peter Singer's main focus had been, is on poverty, global poverty, destitution. And then because Reasons and Persons is an important work for many of the people in effective altruism and because Derek is sort of obviously broadly sympathetic to the movement, they approach him and they say, "Derek, how about signing up to effective altruism and maybe signing the pledge? And the pledge says that people should commit to giving 10% of their salary, their future salary to those in need."
And Derek says, "Yep, he's in favor of effective altruism. He supports the movement." But then he quibbles about the pledge itself, and he quibbles on a number of grounds; some of them just kind of weird. So he doesn't want to call it a pledge, he wants to call it a promise. I have no idea why. I tried to get to the bottom of this. I couldn't work out whether a promise was supposed to be a deeper, more profound commitment than a pledge or I don't know. He didn't like the word give because he felt that that implied that it was ours to give, that we owned it in the first place. And in fact, he felt that we in the West were just lucky. We had been born into wealthy societies, coming from comfortable families, comfortable societies, and we had income that we could dispose of just out of luck. So he didn't like the word give.
He didn't like giving what we can because he felt that obviously we could give more than 10%. It wasn't giving what we can, we could surely give 50%, 60%, maybe 80%. But his most profound influence on the movement was that he wanted it to be an option that part of the money we dedicated from our 10% went not just to causes to do with poverty in global South, but could also be to causes that would affect people who are not yet born. And I think it there, and they negotiate over that and soon after you get a change in the pledge, and that really is the beginning of long-termism, I think, because they absorb that. If you then accept that that's an option, then you get into issues about pandemic research and AI and so on. So that's why he's so important to the movement. I mean, of course there's another area, animal rights, which also becomes something one can devote one's 10% to, and that's much more directly influenced by Peter Singer than it is by Derek. But I think Derek is important in shifting it in into this long termist direction.
Ben (01:08:49):
Now, that's a very fascinating story to seeing that and the kind of importance of the personal connection. And actually, I guess still the relevance of moral philosophy today. I guess putting it all together, what do you think is perhaps most misunderstood then about Derek?
David (01:09:12):
Gosh, that's a very good question. I don't think there's much that's misunderstood about him, actually, if I can avoid the question, but that's a virtue. That really is a virtue. There's no time to talk about personal identity, but that's a big area that Derek writes about. And he changes his mind about personal identity in ways we shouldn't get into because it's too technical. Some people get him wrong now because they don't get his mature views right. But that's a very sort of technical answer to your question. On the whole, people don't get anything wrong about Derek and that is why Derek is so great, because he made it totally clear what he was getting at; the sort of motivation for his arguments, the logic, the reason, all the objections to his arguments which he tackles. He's as transparent a philosopher, I think, as it is possible to be. Peter Singer is another one who writes very, very clearly. It is impossible, I think really if you are honest and you sort of read Peter fairly, it's impossible to misinterpret Peter because he's very, very straightforward as a philosopher. And I think that's true of Derek as well. So I think if you are an honest reader of Derek, it's very difficult to misunderstand him.
Ben (01:10:54):
That seems fair. A bit of an unfair question on that, so feel free to dodge it. I guess one lingering thought I had-- and I'm not sure it matters absolutely, is that when I'm reading it, I definitely would put Derek in what I would call an autistic cognitive profile-- call it that way because I don't think terminology is quite settled on that. I think it explains some aspects and some aspects of behavior, but I'm not sure it entirely matters. Although I think in some ways it matters that it can show that people with this type of profile can do extraordinary things and thinking. For instance, I would also say that Tyler Cowen-- I think he says it as well, has an autistic cognitive profile. So it is quite wide for lots of things there and I think it explains it.
The narrowing over time is also quite interesting within that and how that's enabled. But I do think there's aspects you could either call atypical or not. I still can't really decide. I've seen some commentary as to whether it kind of impacts his philosophy, whether his own sense of person or his own cognitive thinking therefore influences some unusual thought because it's away from the typical person. But perhaps we can't really have a counterfactual on that. Have on reflection on that and your writing of the book come to any other views than the ones that you express there?
David (01:12:37):
Well, firstly, I think it's obvious that people who are atypical in this neurological way can achieve great intellectual accomplishments. So I've also written a book about the chess player, Bobby Fisher, and he's a much more straightforward case than Derek. It's obvious from a very young age that Bobby Fisher is neurologically atypical. I mean, Asperger's didn't exist as a diagnosis on people so Fisher would never have been called Asperger's because when he was playing chess, there was no Asperger's diagnosis. And now it's no longer a diagnosis, people talk about the autistic spectrum. So as you say, the terminology is complicated. People talk about some people being on the spectrum. So Derek, was he on the spectrum? Well, I'm ambivalent about it. It seems to me like he was. The problem is that his early life provides evidence that counters that diagnosis because he does have this narrowing and it's so much more obvious later on in his life.
The relationship between his atypical neurological setup and his philosophy, I think you can draw lots of connections. I think he had dispositions that many of us don't have. I think he was a natural consequentialist. I talk a bit about this in the book. I think he found it quite natural to regard the lives of strangers, even the lives of people who aren't yet born or people who've died, he found it as easy to feel emotionally engaged in their lives as he did with his nearest and dearest, which is a very consequentialist way of looking at the world. Consequences might say that what matters is how much benefit you create in the world, how much wellbeing or flourishing you get in the world. And it doesn't matter where it comes from, as it were. So Derek was, I think a natural consequentialist.
There's a further question, which is, well, if that's how he was naturally, and that kind of explains how he reaches some of his conclusions, or why he was inclined to reach some of his conclusions, why some of his conclusions seems so intuitively plausible to him, more plausible than they do to us. Whether that undermines the arguments themselves because you could argue it both ways. You could say, "Well, of course Derek would say that." Of course he would say that because he's not built like the rest of us. Of course he would think that's a perfectly plausible conclusion because that conclusion comes naturally to us. To the rest of us, we find that conclusion abhorrent, disgusting, repugnant. But of course he would find it perfectly acceptable.
On the other hand, we might say, "Well, who cares how he reached? Who cares what the conclusion is? What we should look at is the quality of the arguments." And if Derek comes up with robust arguments that are totally compelling and convincing, well, we've got to go with that. Insofar as Derek's arguments were ingenious and brilliant and reached certain conclusions, well, those conclusions are compelling if the argument is compelling. So those are the two ways you can argue the connection between character and philosophical conclusion.
Ben (01:17:01):
That's expressed very well. I think I probably sway to the latter. There's so much more we could discuss on Derek, but I wonder whether I could turn to you a little bit, as in, I think you are uniquely placed as a biographer in terms of your place in philosophy, your relationship to some of the main characters in this story. So I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on that and whether also I would sort of highlight just how beautifully written I think the book is in terms of this narrative that you bring to the non-fiction. I wonder whether it helps knowing some of the characters or not. But is there anything within your writing process that you would highlight? And I think having read now a number of your books, there is a certain style. But the story element in this book and the style of that writing I think has got a particular clarity and joy to read, which I think is extremely well done. So I'd be interested if there is anything in the process of that which you think is a little bit different, and then your place in this world as a biographer.
David (01:18:23):
Well, I was in a good position to write it because Derek was my BPhil supervisor. My BPhil dissertation was on future people. Then later on I did a PhD and my main supervisor was a woman called Janet Radcliffe Richards, and she became Derek's wife. So there is nobody else in the world who was taught by both of them. So I was in a good position to write it and many of the characters in the book I knew, and that helped in two ways. Firstly, it just logistically made it a lot easier because I could approach them and could extract information from them very easily. And secondly, of course, because I knew them, I had some insights into their characters as well. I could tell the story. I could be confident that I was telling the right story. I wasn't sure when I started the book what sort of book I would get, and the first half of the book came as a complete surprise to me.
So the sort of narrative arc that we end up getting, I didn't predict. And I think people underestimate the amount of luck there is in the writing process. There were good writers and there were bad writers, but sometimes you can just be lucky. And I think with Derek, I was kind of lucky because I knew that he would be, in some ways an easy character to write about because he was so eccentric and so on. But I didn't foresee the story I would end up with, and that was really a question of luck. I like storytelling so I spent half my life as a philosopher and half my life as a journalist. A central part of journalism is storytelling. You explain what's going on in the world with stories. So I like bringing those two aspects of my life together. And they came together I think quite nicely with this book. It was a total, total joy to write. It really was.
Ben (01:20:52):
And is there anything unusual in your writing process or writing day or you sit down, gather your materials, write a thousand words a day and a year or two, you have a book?
David (01:21:04):
Well, a bit like that, except I'm not nearly as productive as that. And actually at the moment I'm being very-- I've spent my life being quite productive and actually I'm going through an unproductive period. I don't really know what to do about it. I need to get back on a kind of productive track. I'm sure it's just partly sort of habit. So I tend to work quite hard. I'm very slow. The writing process is not at all natural to me. I read about some authors who get up early and write 4,000 words before breakfast. I'm really not like that, but I'm very disciplined and I tend to write an early draft quite early. So I'm not one of those authors who waits till they've got all their notes before they start writing.
I start writing quite early and then I'm constantly tampering and tinkering with it so that everything goes through multiple, multiple, multiple drafts. If I end up with 350 words in a day-- And actually, if there are 350 words I'm quite content with, that's not a terrible day for me because my advice for all bloody authors, it's that you just got to stick with it and do it every single day because 350 words is nothing. You can really write 350 words quite quickly if the words are coming to you. That can take me 45 minutes to an hour and then I can struggle for the rest of time. But if you can write 350 words a day every day, you've got a book in a year and a half, or two years; you've got a substantial book. So I think my single virtue as a writer is that I'm quite disciplined, but I try and work every day and not take much time off.
Ben (01:23:06):
So keep at it. What do you do with critical reviews? Do they bother you at all? One of my first plays back in 2003, got two stars in The Guardian. And the fact that I remember that obviously has had a thing. They've been mostly very positive reviews, but I did pick up a critical one, more critical I think of the philosophy than of the writing. But you just put it down? You know you're not going to convince everyone and we just move on or do they live with you?
David (01:23:38):
Well, no, on the whole, they live with you. My first book was called Wittgenstein's Poker, and that was very well reviewed, but there were a few negative reviews and those are the ones I remember better than the positive ones. I'm definitely more thick skinned than I used to be so they don't affect me so much anymore. And Parfit has been very nicely reviewed apart from this one. I think it depends how it's written actually. So sometimes negative reviews can be extremely constructive. There was one by Simon Blackburn, which it was very nice about the book, but then took issue with Derek's philosophy. I know Simon doesn't like his philosophy, but actually I thought it engaged with the biography and had some criticisms about philosophy. That was fine. There was one negative review, which is the one you're referring to. And that actually did annoy me because for one thing, it just gets Derek's philosophy so badly wrong. It's amazing that actually it got published. It talks about Derek trying to reconcile Aristotle and Mill and Kant. And he doesn't even mention Aristotle. It's as though the reviewer hadn't even read Derek.
Review is written from such a great height, it's so pompous. So I did find that slightly annoying. But I think there was a backlash to that particular one because it was kind of over the top and silly. But on the whole, I'm much more thick skinned than I used to be. And I can see the virtue that often they will contain things which you think, "Yeah, I got that wrong, or if I was to do it again, I would do it again slightly different way. Or, oh yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of that perspective." So they can be very helpful, but sometimes they're not
Ben (01:25:52):
Yeah, I get that. Actually, in my review there was a little positive comment and it was written also in good faith. I think that's the like, "I'll take it in good faith if I think they've engaged with the work, but not if I think they're something else." Okay. I've just got a few handful of quicker, more fun questions to end with the podcast. So feel free to just either pass or do little answers or whatever. So you are going to play Magnus Carlsen. What chess opening do you use and why?
David (01:26:32):
Well, if I'm white, I would play e4 because I've played hundreds of thousands of chess games or tens of thousands of chess games in my life, and many of them speed chess. I played very seriously until I was kind of 17 or 18 and then haven't really played professionally since. But I spent a year in Chicago where I had a chess buddy and we played thousands of one minute games. We would play 30 games or 40 games of an evening. So I would definitely play e4 because I've spent my life playing e4. I wouldn't know what to do with D4 or other openings so I would start with e4 and I would hope actually he would play the Sicilian, which is c5.
When they played e5, I used to play this opening, it's called the Vienna; Knight c3. It's a terrible opening. It's a fantastic opening if you're playing people who can't play chess. If you're playing bad chess players, then it's a brilliant opening because it's kind of got lots of traps. But if you're playing anybody who knows about chess, it's a disaster. So it served me very well until the age of kind of 15. And then from that moment on, it was a major handicap for me. I was a very lazy chess player when I was growing up and I didn't study it the way I should have studied and I didn't have a big portfolio of openings. Now, if somebody played e4 e5, I would play now Knight f3 which is the kind of standard way of proceeding.
Ben (01:28:17):
You think out of a hundred games, you might get one draw out of Magnus?
David (01:28:21):
No, not a chance. Absolutely not. Out of a million games I wouldn't get a single draw.
Ben (01:28:26):
I think you’ve maybe been to 64 countries I overheard, but anyway...
David (01:28:33):
64 countries with the BBC, actually. I think I've been to 82, 84.
Ben (01:28:41):
Which of these would you most like to go back to?
David (01:28:44):
I'll tell you the country I most want to go to that I haven't been to which is Burma. When I left Oxford, I worked briefly for a think tank, and it was the time of the Burmese Revolution uprising in 1988. I knew everything about Burma. I read every day the wires, and I could name all the Burmese general. So I knew everything there was to know about Burma. I've been very sort of interested in Burma ever since, but I've never been to Burma. So Burma is number one of the places that I'd like to go to that I haven't been to. Of the countries that I've been to-- I mean, I've been back eight times or so, but there's still vast waves of India that I haven't seen. India has changed a lot now so that if my kids were to go to India, they wouldn't see the India that I spent a couple of months going around India in my year off between school and university. And thank God there isn't the extent of poverty in India now that there was 40 years ago. So it's a very different country. But when I first arrived, it totally sort of blew my mind. The assault on the senses when I first arrived; the smells and the noise and the sounds. I'd love to see a lot more of India. I loved India.
Ben (01:30:12):
India, great. And then last in this sequence, who would write your biography? Who would you get to write your biography?
David (01:30:21):
So Martin Amis has just died. Many of my close friends love Amis' novels and I don't. I quite enjoyed the Rachel Papers, which was his first, and then the characters become quite cartoonish for me. But he wrote a book called "Experience," which was his own sort of autobiography. It's a fantastic, fantastic book. I always tell that about Julian Barnes as well, his friend, that I thought sometimes his non-fiction was better than his fiction. So if I could bring Martin Amis back to life, I would get him to write my biography. The only thing is I think he might be quite cruel so I wouldn't want to be around to read it.
Ben (01:31:31):
Yeah, that's very fair. Great. And then last question, are there any current projects you'd like to highlight? Although you mentioned that perhaps in a little bit of a rut, and maybe if you have any advice or thoughts? I guess we've covered a lot. So obviously you've done your BBC presenting, you've done moral philosophy and things, but if you sum that up, I don't know if you've got any thoughts on life advice or current projects you want to highlight?
David (01:32:03):
Well, current projects, I'm hoping to do something about Peter Singer and a famous thought experiment of his which was something he comes up with in 1971. And actually, we sort of mentioned it in passing eventually kicks off the effective altruism movement. But I'm being very slow about that. Life advice, I don't know. I do think when you make these decisions when you are young and you are sort of 18 or you are coming out of university and you are working out what to do with your life, it's not as bad these days because people, I think find it easier to move from career to career. But nonetheless, there's this kind of sliding doors period where you pick a career and you think it sounds interesting, but actually you're kind of stuck with it really for the rest of your life. It is quite an important decision to work out what is important to you, what matters to you.
One of the difficulties of course, is that it's very difficult to foresee what's going to be important to you in 20, 30 years’ time. Material possessions for example is something that young people probably underplay their importance in that once you get married and with kids and so on, those things can become more important to you than they were when you were 18. But then, you may want to commit yourself when you're 18. You may want to think, "Well I've got my principles right now and I don't want to be an old fuddy- duddy and kind of reject them when I'm middle-aged." I don't think I did think about them very much. I had various options and one seemed a bit more appealing than another, and I went down one route rather than down another route. I could have gone down these very different routes. I don't think I was thinking 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years down the track. But I guess my advice would be-- and there is an organization in effective altruism called 80,000 hours. Think quite deeply about what it is you want out of life because those decisions are more important than you realize.
Ben (01:34:47):
Well, that seems to me very good advice. Think more deeply. Well, I guess that's more thinking deeply about your own long term. So I will recommend the book, "Parfit" that David Edmonds has written. So please do look out for it. David, thank you very much.
David (01:35:07):
Thanks for having me, Ben. I've enjoyed it.
