Derek Parfit’s name is not widely known even though he was probably the most important moral philosopher of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a quintessential academic philosopher, he never sought the limelight and seldom gave interviews or engaged in public debate. However, he is in the news now, six years after his death, because of a major new biography of him by David Edmonds, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality (Princeton, 2023), recently reviewed by Stephen Mulhall in the London Review of Books. Parfit’s life is in some respects as interesting as his writings, largely because of his gruelling, unremitting work practices. He lived for his work to the extent that he always ate the same food and wore the same outfit of which he kept duplicates (a white shirt and black trousers) to avoid wasting time making choices. He read while brushing his teeth, though he could also occasionally be seen brushing his teeth as he cycled through Oxford.
Yet, he was also generous with his time provided it involved philosophy. Countless scholars who sent him drafts of articles or books on which they were working would receive back comments and suggestions that were often longer than the draft itself. He was a committed member of the effective altruism movement which entails giving 10% of one’s income to charity.
Parfit’s reputation rests largely on two books, published 30 years apart, though he produced dozens of articles as well. The first book, Reasons and Persons, published in 1984, secured him a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College Oxford, probably the most prestigious academic position in the world, and also the most advantageous (no teaching or examining, unless one wishes to engage in those activities). Then, there was the long wait (much to the exasperation of some of his All Souls colleagues, by all accounts) for the second book, On What Matters, which finally appeared in two volumes in 2011. A third volume, published shortly after his death, brought the entire work to almost 2,000 densely argued pages. Large chunks of it had already been in circulation for years before its publication.
Here, I want to refer to one passage in Reasons and Persons. Now, I should clarify that I have not read the book in its entirety and probably never will. It is not even on the retirement list (the retirement having begun last Thursday); re-reading the entire works of Jane Austen, P.G. Wodehouse and, hopefully, P.D. James takes priority there. Reasons and Persons, is by any standards, a very complex work, but one its central concerns is the question of personal identity. Is John, at the age of 70, the same person as he was at the age of 7, 17 or 27? Of course, he can possibly be said to be same person physically, allowing for obvious and natural physical changes through aging. But is he the same person mentally, psychologically, emotionally? People can undergo profound changes in these respects. At one point (p. 326) of Reasons and Persons, Parfit writes:
“When some convict is now less closely connected to himself [as he was] at the time of his crime, he deserves less punishment. If the connections are very weak, he may deserve none. This claim seems plausible. It may give one of the reasons why we have Statutes of Limitations, fixing periods of time after which we cannot be punished for our crimes. [Suppose that a man aged ninety, one of the few rightful holders of the Nobel Peace Prize, confesses that it was he who, at the age of twenty, injured a policeman in a drunken brawl. Though this was a serious crime, this man may not now deserve to be punished.]
This claim should be distinguished from the idea of diminished responsibility. It does not appeal to mental illness, but instead treats a criminal’s later self as like a sane accomplice. Just as someone’s deserts correspond to the degree of his complicity with some criminal, so his deserts now, for some past crime, correspond to the degree of psychological connectedness between himself now and himself when committing the crime.”
This is an important consideration when dealing with so-called historic offences which are almost invariably sexual in nature. Suppose Matthew committed an offence of some kind, perhaps a sexual offence, in 1980 when he was 17 years. He died in 2020, two years before the offence came to light as a result of a report made by the victim. Matthew is now dead, but his twin brother Mark is still alive. Should we prosecute and punish Mark for Matthew’s misconduct? Obviously, we would not dream of doing so, because Mark is not the person who engaged in that conduct. But suppose, instead, that Matthew is still alive. Is he the same person who committed the crime when he was a teenager more than 40 years earlier? Or, to use Parfit’s language, how closely, if at all, is the now 60-year-old Matthew psychologically connected to the 17-year-old Matthew who committed the crime? If the connection is only very tenuous, or even non-existent, can we truly claim to be punishing the person who committed the crime?
This difficult and uncomfortable question is seldom considered when people are charged with having committed offences decades earlier, and especially when they were still young at the time of the alleged offences. Bear in mind that modern research shows that people do not usually reach full psychosocial maturity until they are in their early to mid-twenties. The Parfit thesis, as we might call it, gets some implicit recognition at sentencing where youth at the time of the offending reduces culpability, and abstention from further criminal conduct, together with being of general good character, since that time is treated as another mitigating factor.
Yet, it is a question that is seldom considered when deciding if a a person in these circumstances should be prosecuted or convicted, although it is equally relevant at those points in the process. Instead, when a person charged with a so-called historic offence seeks to have the trial prohibited, the question nowadays (especially in the wake of S.H. v DPP [2006] 3 I.R. 575) is whether the delay is such as give rise to a real and unavoidable risk of an unfair trial, with the burden of proof on the accused. It now seems rare in the extreme for prohibition to be granted on grounds of complainant delay, the general policy being to leave such matters to the trial courts. Yet, the courts need to think much harder than they currently do about this problem. Framing the question in terms of whether the person can still get a fair trial is really dancing around the issue. Where there has been a very long interval between offence and charge, as there frequently is, the more fundamental question should be who exactly is this “person” who is facing trial, and how closely is he (and it usually is a he) connected to the person who allegedly committed the offences. Are we really as distant from punishing Mark for the crimes of his dead brother Matthew as we like to think we are?
Of course, the Parfit thesis is also troublesome. For instance, his 90-year-old Nobel Prize winner is clearly someone who has changed, even been transformed, for the better. But what if he had changed for the worse? Even then, we have to ask if he is the same person as the one who committed the crime. If it is decided to prosecute him, he should be judged in terms of who and what he was a the time of the offence. His record in the meantime is of dubious relevance. Courts are sometimes inclined to treat convictions accumulated since the commission of the offence as an aggravating factor. Whether previous convictions, whether accumulated before or after the current offence, is itself a very troublesome question, and we will leave it for another day.
However, I thought I would mention the Parfit thesis just to get you thinking and talking!
Sentencing, Crime and Justice 