(These thoughts are prompted by Stephen Mulhall’s review of David Edmonds’ book, Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, but I have not read that biography or ever made a serious study of Derek Parfit.)

The word “philosophy” is ancient and contested and has labeled many activities and ways of life. Socrates practiced philosophy when he went around asking critical questions about the basis of people’s beliefs. Marcus Aurelius practiced philosophy when he meditated daily on well-worn Stoic doctrines of which he had made a personal collection. The Analects of Confucius may be “a record of how a group of men gathered around a teacher with the power to elevate [and] created a culture in which goals of self-transformation were treated as collaborative projects. These people not only discussed the nature of self-cultivation but enacted it as a relational process in which they supported one another, reinforced their common goals, and served as checks on each other in case they went off the path, the dao” (David Wong).

To practice philosophy, you don’t need a degree (Parfit didn’t complete his), and you needn’t be hired and paid to be a philosopher. However, it’s a waste of the word to use it for activities that aren’t hard and serious.

Today, most actual moral philosophers are basically humanities educators. We teach undergraduates how to read, write, and discuss texts at a relatively high level. Most of us also become involved in administration, seeking and allocating resources for our programs, advocating for our discipline and institutions, and serving as mentors.

Those are not, however, the activities implied by the ideal of analytic moral philosophy. In that context, being a “philosopher” means making arguments in print or oral presentations. A philosophical argument is credited to a specific individual (or, rarely, a small team of co-authors). It must be original: no points for restating what has already been said. It should be general. Philosophy does not encompass exercises of practical reasoning (deciding what to do about a thorny problem). Instead, it requires justifying claims about abstract nouns, like “justice,” “happiness,” or “freedom.” And an argument should take into consideration all the relevant previous points published by philosophers in peer-reviewed venues. The resulting text or lecture is primarily meant for philosophers and students of philosophy, although it may reach other audiences as well.

Derek Parfit held a perfect job for this purpose. As a fellow of All Souls College, he had hardly any responsibilities other than to write philosophical arguments and was entitled to his position until his mandatory retirement. He did not have to obtain support or resources for his work. He did not have to deliberate with other people and then decide what to say collectively. Nor did he have to listen to undergraduates and laypeople express their opinions about philosophical issues. (Maybe he did listen to them–I would have to read the biography to find out–but I know that he was not obliged to do so. He could choose to interact only with highly prestigious peers.)

Very few other people hold similar roles: the permanent faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study, the professors of the Collège de France, and a few others. Such opportunities could be expanded. In fact, in a robust social welfare state, anyone can opt not to hold a job and can instead read and write philosophy, although whether others will publish or read their work is a different story. But whether this form of life is worthy of admiration and social support is a good question–and one that Parfit was not obliged to address. He certainly did not have to defend his role in a way that was effective, persuading a real audience. His fellowship was endowed.

Mulhall argues that Parfit’s way of living a philosophical life biased him toward certain views of moral problems. Parfit’s thought experiments “strongly suggest that morality is solely or essentially a matter of evaluating the outcomes of individual actions–as opposed to, say, critiquing the social structures that deeply shape the options between which individuals find themselves having to choose. … In other words, although Parfit’s favoured method for pursuing and refining ethical thinking presents itself as open to all whatever their ethical stance, it actually incorporates a subtle but pervasive bias against approaches to ethics that don’t focus exclusively or primarily on the outcomes of individual actions.”

Another way to put this point is that power, persuasion, compromise, and strategy are absent in Parfit’s thought, which is instead a record of what one free individual believed about what other free individuals should do.

I am quite pluralistic and inclined to be glad that Parfit lived the life he did, even as most other people–including most other moral philosophers–live and think in other ways. Even if Parfit was biased (due to his circumstances, his chosen methods and influences, and his personal proclivities) in favor of certain kinds of questions, we can learn from his work.

But I would mention other ways of deeply thinking about moral matters that are also worthy and that may yield different kinds of insights.

You can think on your own about concrete problems rather than highly abstract ones. Typically the main difficulty is not defining the relevant categories, such as freedom or happiness, but rather determining what is going on, what various people want, and what will happen if they do various things.

You can introduce ethical and conceptual considerations to elaborate empirical discussions of important issues.

You can deliberate with other people about real decisions, trying to persuade your peers, hearing what they say, and deciding whether to remain loyal to the group or to exit from it if you disagree with its main direction.

You can help to build communities and institutions of various kinds that enable their members to think and decide together over time.

You can identify a general and relatively vague goal and then develop arguments that might persuade people to move in that direction.

You can strive to practice the wisdom contained in clichés: ideas that are unoriginal yet often repeated because they are valid. You can try to build better habits alone or in a group of people who hold each other accountable.

You can tentatively derive generalizations from each of these activities, whether or not you choose to publish them.

Again, as a pluralist, I do not want to suppress or marginalize the style that Parfit exemplified. I would prefer to learn from his work. But my judgment is that we have much more to learn from the other approaches if our goal is to improve the world. That is because the hard question is usually not “How should things be?” but rather “What should we do?”

See also: Cuttings: A book about happiness; the sociology of the analytic/continental divide in philosophy; does doubting the existence of the self tame the will?

In the week after Sam Bankman-Fried (known as “SBF”) lost his whole $16 billion fortune, I’m sure that everyone who was already skeptical about crypto, Silicon Valley, boy geniuses, billionaires of all ages, political donors, and Effective Altruists is now piling on. Schadenfreude flows palpably through the world’s social networks–flawed as they may be.

I don’t know whether personal attacks are merited. SBF had explicitly committed to making high-risk bets with relatively low odds of success, because he thought that was his moral duty. Even if he deserves to be denounced, I’m not interested in celebrating anyone’s failure or reinforcing my prior assumptions.

But Adam Fisher’s beautifully written pre-collapse profile of SBF supplies quotations that illustrate why I have always resisted Effective Altruism, as a matter of principle.

I believe:

1. The world gets better when people have the capacity to define, analyze, and address their own problems.
2. Being happy, in a worthy sense of that word (“eudaimonic,” if you prefer), is hard and rare. Most of us live lives of quiet desperation. Material conditions help but are insufficient. We must accomplish worthwhile happiness ourselves. To the extent that we can help others to flourish, it’s by sharing insights and developing relationships.

These two points are distinct, but they intersect because working with others to shape our world is a path to inner happiness. It is not the only path, and it’s often a fraught one, but it must be kept open. By exchanging proposals and then acting together with people whom we view as equals, we can broaden our thinking and enrich our inner lives.

In contrast, utilitarianism “in its purest—Benthamite—form” (Fisher’s description of SBF’s philosophy) presumes that we can and must make other people happy by acting on or for them at a distance. We can calculate the best decision privately and then just do it.

SBF asks Fisher to imagine a world in which many people resemble his description of himself. They take risks to make money that they then give away to assist the world’s poorest. Some succeed and some fail, but whether you are one of the successful shouldn’t matter much to you, because you are just one person among billions. “The starving child doesn’t give a shit about which person it is who does that good. So why are you concerned about this little term in the equation?”

“This little term” is a way of expressing altruism: each of us counts for almost nothing. But note that SBF’s mind goes to a child who is starving. Children only gradually develop agency. Babies cannot analyze or affect the larger social world. They cannot do better than receiving benevolence, although they need loving relationships as well as nutrients.

To treat adults like needy infants is paternalism, in the root sense of that word. If you recognize adults as fellow human beings, then you must not affect them without asking them what they think, making yourself accountable to them, and allowing them to affect you back.

Unless they are at death’s door, adults typically do care about who is claiming to help them, and why. That is because we want to choose and shape our relationships. We do not want someone else to have a purely discretionary choice about whether and how to affect us, even if that person happens to be benign. Discretionary power is domination, and domination is a basic evil.

Frank Lovett summarizes the classical republican argument (which is as old as Cicero): “to have a master with an exceptionally benevolent disposition is to be reasonably secure in one’s expectation that one will not often be adversely interfered with—but it is to have a master nonetheless. The republican idea of freedom specifically instructs us not to make our master a better person (the goal of the old ‘mirror for princes’ literature), but to render him less of a master.”

Can a financial donor dominate people? I would say absolutely, if the money affects people and the choice of whether and how to give is the donor’s alone. Effective Altruism seeks to make rich people better, much like renaissance books with titles like A Mirror for Princes that aimed to improve monarchs. The point, however, should be to do without masters.

My second concern involves the difficulty of achieving happiness. SBF devotes no evident attention to his inner life. Fisher reports, “SBF spends nothing, it would seem, pursuing his own pleasure. It’s not just that great books aren’t worthwhile. The great movies aren’t worth watching. … Food gets the same treatment. … SBF’s rejection of pleasure is so profound it got me wondering if that absence of pleasure—as opposed to his philosophy—was the key to understanding him. Is he so deep in his head that he’s incapable of feeling pleasure?”

SBF says, “I would never read a book. … I’m very skeptical of books.” Although he is entitled to his preference in media, there’s one book that he should definitely read now that he has some time on his hands: The Autobiography of John Stewart Mill.

SBF would recognize the author’s situation. Mill was a famous young prodigy raised by utilitarians. His father arranged a powerful position for him as an administrator of British India. Thus Mill had “what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” Likewise, SBF was raised by utilitarian law professors and accumulated billions with which to affect countries like India.

I don’t know SBF’s current mental state, but in the India Office, Mill fell into a deep depression. He asked himself :

“Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

SBF presents himself, like the young Mill, as someone who ignored his personal well-being to enhance others’. That verdict may be complicated by SBF’s 1,500 square-foot condo in the Bahamas, “with six bedrooms and spectacular views out every window,” and the possibility that he diverted his investors’ money. But even if SBF was sincere, he was making a fundamental mistake if happiness depends on wisdom, because then we must each learn to be wise. Mill wrote:

the important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances. …

Mill became a great proponent of the arts, of liberty as a personal accomplishment as well as a lack of censorship, and of representative government. He continued to make utilitarian arguments, but now refracted through an understanding that people must have power over their own lives, individually and collectively.

See also Mill’s question: If you achieved justice, would you be happy?; qualms about Effective Altruism; how we use Kant today; wicked problems, and excuses; how to think about other people’s interests: Rawls, Buddhism, and empathy; introducing republicanism; citizens against domination; etc.