Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
On What Matters
Kantian ethics, contractualism, and rule-consequentialism climb the same mountain from different sides — and what we ought to do is independently real
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | On What Matters (Late (Parfit's final, three-decade-in-the-making work — his second after Reasons and Persons, 1984)) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Partial |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | None |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Reason |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
On What Matters
The temporal sweep — twenty-seven years between Reasons and Persons and On What Matters, three decades of revision behind the published trilogy.
Space
On What Matters
The space of analytic ethics — Oxford, Harvard, the Philosophy and Public Affairs community whose objections shape Volume III.
Matter
On What Matters
The biological-historical human agent whose moral life is the topic; Parfit's austere physicalism about the agent is inherited from Reasons and Persons.
Observer
On What Matters
The morally serious agent whose reasoning Parfit's philosophy aims to support; the philosopher who attends to where the great traditions actually meet.
Energy
On What Matters
The energies of careful argument — the book's thousands of pages of close engagement with objections.
Information
On What Matters
Normative truths as irreducible information — facts about what we ought to do that are not reducible to facts about what we want or what causes us to do things.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
The Triple Theory's convergence claim is contested at every level: Wood and Herman argue the Kantian peak Parfit reaches is not Kant's; Hooker accepts the rule-consequentialist peak; Scanlon partially accepts the contractualist peak but resists the convergence. The metaethical defense of non-naturalistic realism has won fewer adherents than Parfit hoped (Schroeder, Street, Enoch all wrote against it). Volume III's extensive replies remain incomplete on some issues — Parfit died before completing his planned response to climate-justice critics. The work's influence is more diffuse than Reasons and Persons but its place in twenty-first-century ethics is established.