13 Quotes by Derek Parfit

Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

I believe that most of us have false beliefs about our own nature, and our identity over time, and that, when we see the truth, we ought to change some of our beliefs about what we have reason to do.

Philosophers should not only interpret our beliefs; when they are false, they should change them.

My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.

We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination.

No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing.

Normativity, I believe, is very different from motivating force. Neither includes, or implies, the other. Other animals can be motivated by their desires and beliefs. Only we can understand and respond to reasons.

We ought not to do to our future selves what it would be wrong to do to other people.

Criticizing himself again, Sidgwick writes: I am not an original man: and I think less of my own thoughts every day.