Quotes from Derek Parfit

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

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

What am I more than elaborate sentience?

What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history. If there are no rational beings elsewhere, it may depend on us and our successors whether it will all be worth it, because the existence of the Universe will have been on the whole good.

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.

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

If there were no such normative truths, nothing would matter, and we would have no reasons to try to decide how to live. Such decisions would be arbitrary. We would not be the animals that can understand and respond to reasons. In a world without reasons, we would act only on our instincts and desires, living as other animals live. The Universe would not contain rational beings.

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.

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

This part of Kant's view is, I believe, a profound truth. We can be morally responsible in several other ways, or senses, but no one could ever be responsible, I believe, in any way that could make them deserve to suffer. Nor, I believe, does anyone deserve to be less happy.

No fui yo quien hizo esto, sino un yo anterior»