Edmonds writes that...
he grew increasingly upset that many serious philosophers believed that there was no objective basis for morality. He felt that he had to demonstrate that secular morality - morality without God - was objective and that it had rational foundations....He genuinely believed that if he failed to show this his existence would have been futile. And not just his existence. If morality was not objective, all of our lives are meaningless.It strikes me as very odd that Parfit was so concerned about moral questions and wrote about them extensively, since he was a determinist who denied the existence of free will and a materialist who disbelieved in an afterlife and moral accountability. Given those two beliefs it's hard to see how morality can be anything other than an illusion, as many of his fellow materialists have claimed.
But Parfit clung to the hope that his life was not meaningless, that somehow moral values and duties enjoyed objective reality and were binding upon us. He went to his grave in 2017 believing this even though despite his prodigious academic output, he never really succeeded in making his case.
Edmonds' biography (Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality) is very well-written and - for philosophers, anyway - very interesting. I'm sure I'll have more to say about Parfit in future posts, but today I'd like to tease out a few of the implications of materialistic determinism for morality.
For instance, if materialism (i.e. atheism) is true then it follows that in human beings there's no immaterial substance such as mind or soul, and it follows from this that there's no free will since we'd just be collocations of atomic particles which are individually and collectively governed by physical laws. There's no freedom in, or control over, the molecular reactions that occur in our brains which produce our choices.
Moreover, if there's no mind/soul it's difficult to see what makes us the same person who was conceived in our mother's womb. We've certainly changed since then, we're made of more and different cells and we have no memory of our conception, so in what sense are we that person? Indeed, in what sense are we the same person we were just ten or twenty years ago?
And if we're not the same person who, let's say, took out a house mortgage twenty years ago, why should we be obligated to pay it back now?
Additionally, if there's no free will then it's hard to see how we can have moral obligations since an obligation presupposes the ability to perform it. I can't have a duty to do something that's impossible for me to do, and if my will is not in some sense free then it's impossible for me to do other than what I've been determined by my genes and/or environment to do.
The feeling that I can freely choose at this moment to either keep writing or take a break really is just an illusion.
Furthermore, if there's no free will and if there's no soul it's hard to see how there can be any dignity in being human. Our dignity derives, in part, from our ability to choose. It's one of the qualities that make us different from other animals. If we can't choose then we're simply flesh and bone robots and there's no particular dignity in that.
Likewise, if there's no free will and no soul then there's no accountability for how we act. What sense does it make to say that we have a duty to be kind, for example, if there's no ultimate sanction for being cruel? Why is cruelty "wrong"? What does the word "wrong" even mean, anyway?
Finally, if we have no free will, if everything is determined by forces beyond our control, then our belief in determinism is the product, not of its truth, but of our childhood experiences or a gene we inherited from our great grandfather. Why then should we believe it? Why, for that matter, should we believe anything? How do we avoid surrendering to nihilism?
If, on the other hand, both materialism and determinism are false, if there's something else about us that transcends our physical being but somehow works in conjunction with our brain, all of these questions may have at least a partial resolution.
The mind/soul may persist beyond the death of the material body and may be the seat and source of both the continuity of the self and human freedom. There may be a transcendent moral authority which holds our soul (i.e. us, our essence) accountable for the choices that it facilitates in this life. If so, then Parfit's belief that there are objective moral norms would be true, even if he himself had no good basis for thinking it was, and there's no need to surrender to nihilism.
But all of this depends upon materialism, determinism and atheism being false. Parfit wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to hold to the belief they're true and still insist that moral duties are objective and external to ourselves.
Parfit was not unique in being a moral philosopher who also believed that determinism, materialism and atheism were all true, but even though the combination isn't unique, it's still very strange.