There were brilliant philosophers of good faith in all three camps, he knew, so why were their disagreements so intractable? If philosophers just as clever and well versed as he was disagreed with him, how could he be sure he was right? What if he could prove that their differences were only an illusion of perspective—that at a certain point all three approaches converged, like climbers scaling different sides of a mountain and meeting at the summit? Then he would be able to feel much more confident in his conviction that moral truths existed and it was possible to discover them.

In 2002, he gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at U.C. Berkeley, proposing an early draft of his solution. He began circulating a book manuscript titled “Climbing the Mountain.” One of his moves was to point out the problems with so-called “act consequentialism” as opposed to “rule consequentialism.” Act consequentialists were purists: they believed that each action should be considered on its own merits, with the one simple idea of increasing well-being. But not only did this pose the considerable practical problem that most people would likely be pretty bad at anticipating the consequences of their actions; it would also make social life virtually impossible. It might make sense to lie to a murderer, but if there were no rules about lying it would be difficult to trust anyone—even the lie to the murderer would be ineffective. Similarly, it might in one case seem right for a mother to sacrifice her child so that ten strangers could live, but a society in which mothers were always eager to sacrifice their children for strangers would be dreadful, so better to have a rule favoring maternal love and let the occasional stranger perish.

Parfit’s main task, however, was to prove that Kantianism and rule consequentialism were not actually in conflict. To do this, he needed to perform surgery on Kant’s Formula of Universal Law, the formula that Kant had claimed to be the supreme principle of morality: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” Many Kantians had given up on this formula (Kant had many others), concluding that it simply didn’t help to distinguish right from wrong. But Parfit went to work on it, hacking off a piece here, suturing on a piece there, until he had arrived at a version that seemed to him to combine the best elements of Kantianism and contractualism: “Everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will.” He argued that these principles would be the same ones that were espoused by rule consequentialism. Then, at last, he was in a position to propose his top-of-the-mountain formula, which he called the Triple Theory:

An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.

The theory’s principles were consequentialist because they would lead to the best results (optimific); Kantian because they were universally willable; and contractualist because no person could reasonably reject them.

Parfit wanted his book to be as close to perfect as it could possibly be. He wanted to have answered every conceivable objection. To this end, he sent his manuscript to practically every philosopher he knew, asking for criticisms, and more than two hundred and fifty sent him comments. He labored for years to fix every error. As he corrected his mistakes and clarified his arguments, the book grew longer. He had originally conceived of it as a short book; it became a long book, and then a very long book supplemented by an even longer book—fourteen hundred pages in all. People began to wonder if he would ever finish.

With his Triple Theory, Parfit believed that he had achieved convergence between three of the main schools of moral thought, but even this didn’t satisfy him. There were still major philosophers outstanding whom he admired but whose views disturbed him. He marshalled every possible argument, however quixotic, to prove that what appeared to be irreconcilable differences were merely errors of little significance.

When Hume claims . . . that such preferences are not contrary to reason, he is forgetting, or mis-stating, his normative beliefs. We should distinguish between Hume’s stated view and his real view. Though Nietzsche makes some normative claims that most of us would strongly reject, some of these claims are not wholly sane, and others depend on ignorance or false beliefs about the relevant non-normative facts. And Nietzsche often disagrees with himself.

There were so many facts we did not yet know, Parfit felt, so many distorting influences of which we were not yet aware, and it was always so easy to make mistakes. However hopeless the situation might appear, it seemed to him that, in the end, humans converged toward moral progress.

When Parfit was young, one of the most dazzling figures on the philosophical scene was Bernard Williams. Williams was thirteen years older than Parfit and already had a formidable reputation. He was urbane, seductive, and witty—he was famous for his eviscerating put-downs and scathing repartee. He acknowledged the originality of Parfit’s work, but, socially, he was dismissive. Williams was a club man, a college man, full of High Table bonhomie; Parfit would gobble his dinner and, while other fellows met for brandies, dessert, and cigars, he would hurry back to his room.

“Come out with your hands up—you’re surrounded by men with megaphones.” Facebook

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Williams lived a rich, worldly life. He had flown Spitfires in the Air Force. He had lived for years in a large house in London with his first wife, the politician Shirley Williams, their daughter, and another couple. He had an affair with another man’s wife and left his wife for her; they married and had two sons. He sat on royal commissions and government committees, issuing opinions on pornography, drug abuse, private schools, and gambling. (He had done, he liked to say, all the vices.) He wrote about opera.

Williams had started out in classics, and his thinking was formed as much by Greek tragedy as by philosophy—he saw the world in terms of fate, shame, and luck. He thought most moral philosophy was empty and boring. He disdained both Kantianism and consequentialism, and devoted much of his career to destroying them. Both required you to think impersonally, impartially, out of duty, considering others to be as important as yourself; but we cannot and should not become impartial, he argued, because doing so would mean abandoning what gives human life meaning. Without selfish partiality—to people you are deeply attached to, your wife and your children, your friends, to work that you love and that is particularly yours, to beauty, to place—we are nothing. We are creatures of intimacy and kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world.