I would say that, "Each counts for one," does mean a little more than just anonymity - after all, "Each counts for zero," also satisfies anonymity. So, "Each counts for one," is actually telling us two things: First, that everyone's lives count equally, and second, that everyone's lives count for something. Taurek's view may satisfy the first, but it violates the latter: After the first person in each group whose life is threatened, no one counts for anything if you accept Taurek's view.
In other words, "Each counts for one," is really Anonymity + Positive Responsiveness.
Also, it seems like it was meant less as a proof of number counting and more as a refutation of Taurek's claim that number counting does not reflect an equal concern for each person. Parfit's point is that Taurek is just factually wrong about that - number-counting manifestly does reflect equal concern, even if other views do as well, since it counts each person equally.
I think you’re making a lot of good points. Maybe we can interpret Parfit as saying that “each counts for one” means more than equality—it also includes positive responsiveness.
Though in that case, it’s still true that we can’t use “each counts for one” as a plausible way to argue against Taurek. Positive responsiveness is precisely what’s at issue! To assume it would be to make the argument circular.
Maybe, but like I said, I don't think it was meant as a refutation of Taurek's view, but as a counterargument to Taurek's claim that number-counting views treat people unequally.
If you do want to consider it as a positive argument in favor of number-counting, then you should probably think of it as just pointing out how obvious positive responsiveness is - What kind of ethical theory would deny that each person's life counts for something? Not one we want to endorse.
One problem for Parfit is that he doesn't accept positive responsiveness across the board. He thinks that when A and B are "imprecisely equal" in value, a slight improvement needn't break the tie.
To use an example in the style of On What Matters Vol. 1, suppose you can rush into a burning building to save a life. Parfit thinks the ("impersonal") reasons to rush in are roughly equal to the ("personal") reasons to stay out. But he thinks the same is true even if there's a *second* person in the building you could save.
(This wasn't a problem for him back in 1978 -- only in hindsight, given his later work.)
I agree with you that Parfit's got a good counterargument to Taurek. But in my defense, the ethics lore is that Parfit rekt Taurek, and if you look at the first few footnotes of "Each Counts for One," you'll find prominent applied ethicists saying "As Parfit showed, equality requires us to count the numbers" -- that's almost a direct quote!
I hadn’t seen that meme before—thanks for sharing!
A couple of potential replies;
1) Frances Kamm thinks that some rules would be chosen behind the veil but that, in reality, they don’t hold. (Like “don’t kill one person to redistribute their organs to save five lives.”)
2) Rahul Kumar and Kerah Gordon-Solmon argue that, even behind the veil, there’s more reason than you might think to choose a policy of not killing, because there might be deontological reasons against choosing the policy. (For example, “this policy would be an affront to our humanity.”)
My sense is that most deontologists go for a version of (1). They don’t think veil arguments have much force.
I think you're right but I'd come at it from a slightly different angle. "Each counts for one" -- clear as it may seem -- is ambiguous. Each *what* counts for one? Taurek could easily parry Parfit by saying that each group or cluster counts for one. And since he can save only one group or cluster, considerations of equality give him no more reason to save the one than the other. He'd then be logically committed (I think) to saying that more groups or clusters count for more, which would undermine his position. But I think the real lesson of the Parfit/Taurek debate is that, by itself, a principle of equality doesn't settle questions of individuation. Indeed, it shows that you have to settle on an individuation scheme -- on who or what is to count for one -- before matters of equality can be sensibly discussed.
Hah! I don't know how I'd never thought of it that way. "Each group counts for one" makes a lot of sense.
I do, however, wonder if Taurek would be okay with conceding that some individuals count for more than one, on his view. Maybe he would! But I was assuming he wouldn't.
I think this makes the connection to choice theory even more explicit. One critique of Arrow’s theorem is that it only applies to ordinal preferences/voting. This is, if we *could* make interpersonal utility comparisons as early welfare theorists wanted to, we could adopt some scoring system (rule) that would satisfy Arrow’s conditions (each *util* counts for one). Economists have almost universally conceded cardinal utility for ordinal utility (I’m not yet sure if this is for any more reason than that ordinal utility makes fewer, more plausible assumptions. Maybe these assumptions are *still* unjustified?).
Taking the May-ian formalization of Taurek, we can think of Taurek as going even further than ordinality and stating that we cannot even count up binary-rank-order preferences.
This is what the Positive Responsiveness (monotonicity) assumption is getting at. That adding a vote must not decrease the probability of the outcome. In other words, two people voting for X must outweigh one voting for Y. This is the whole basis of welfare theory with ordinal preferences.
Isn’t this whole argument just about Positive Responsiveness (I guess that’s the lesson here)? Should the marginal vote for X make X more likely to be optimal? The answer is yes if each vote counts for one.
I was reading Arrow today and thought I’d add this quote:
“If we admit meaning to interpersonal comparisons of utility, then presumably we could order social states according to the sum of the utilities of individuals under each, and this is the solution of Jeremy Bentham, accepted by Edgeworth and Marshall. Even in this case we have a choice of different mathematical forms of the social utility function in terms of individual utilities; thus, the social utility might be the sum of the individual utilities or their product or the product of their logarithms or the sum of their products taken two at a time. So, as Professor Bergson has pointed out, there are value judgments implicit even at this level. The case is clearly much worse if we deny the possibility of making interpersonal comparisons of utility.
It was on the latter grounds that Professor Robbins so strongly attacked the concept that economists could make any policy recommendations, at least without losing their status as economists and passing over into the realm of ethics.”
How (or if) we choose to count up the numbers is fundamental!
> “Conjecture: there is no convincing argument for, or against, the view that the numbers count—there is only a clash of basic intuitions.”
Is there a convincing argument that should convince anyone who isn’t already inclined to accept an ethical principle? Let me suggest that there is no convincing argument for or against the view that murder is wrong. Suppose we come across a person who has the intuition that murder is right. When she reflects on the act of murder, it seems good and right to her. We point out the implications of this view to this person. If her view is correct, then it is permissible for us to kill her. If her view is correct, then school shooters act permissibly. But the murder-lover can simply accept these implications. She’s not even biting any bullets because she doesn’t agree with us that her view is implausible. I find the arguments against the permissibility of murder convincing because I am antecedently inclined to think that murder is wrong. But for someone who doesn’t share my inclination, I don’t see how you could convince that person. I question whether the fundamentality of aggregation is a unique thing. Why doesn’t this generalize to all ethical principles?
I left two comments on the New Work in Philosophy posting - let me know if I should move them here (I notice that Substack doesn't tend to get discussion).
Incidentally, how do you effectively navigate comments on your own posts in Substack? Do you use the app or the browser? For me, my own posts and comments on my own posts seem to function very differently in-browser from other people's posts and comments on other people's posts. When I click the "view comment" button in an e-mail, it takes me to a page with the first several lines of the comment, and a text box for me to write a reply, but I usually can't see the whole comment, and definitely can't see other replies to the comment.
I usuall find the emails useless except as a reminder that I wrote something recently. Most of my replies are in the app or just from the notifications I get while 'stacking on my laptop.
(Though admittedly I got to *this* comment via email...)
I've twice tried installing the app, because Substack is pushing it, but comment threads on other people's posts are much harder to deal with inside the app (both times I checked). Maybe I'll need one device that has the app, just for dealing with my own comment threads...
This is very interesting and I have not read the big kid version of the paper yet, but I'm resistant to the idea that aggregation is axiomatic. I think aggregation follows from equality and impartiality or at least something analogous to impartiality. Ultimately, it's a battle of the Kens. The conclusion that Taurek makes depends ultimately on the unanimity requirement—on each individual as a veto point. But if we use instead Arrow's Impossibility Theorem as the voting criteria (which only gets us into trouble in a negligible share of cases), we have a non-dictatorship requirement which seems much more consistent with equality. Non-dictatorship (or something like it, where no one vote is decisive) is incompatible with unanimity. And even though you (and Taurek) include a impartiality criteria, unanimity plus anonymity leads us to an arbitrariness that is morally comparable to partiality. Don't we have good non-axiomatic reasons for saying that non-dictatorship follows from equality and impartiality?
I agree that it seems like Unanimity rule might be inconsistent with Arrow’s nondictatorship. But in fact they’re consistent: under Unanimity rule, nobody always gets what they strictly prefer. (Since they can’t outvote everybody else, or indeed anybody else!)
You probably saw that coming, hence the comment about “something like” nondictatorship. As I might put it, Unanimity rule ensures that everybody is a kind of negative dictator, in the sense that nobody’s veto can be overruled. (If I strictly prefer A to B, then society can’t strictly prefer B to A.) But this is really a “dictatorship” in name only, since everybody can be “negative” dictators at the same time. It doesn’t create some kind of hierarchy between the people just based on who they are. By contrast, Arrovian dictators are singled out and elevated above everyone else just based on who they are.
So while I think you can argue that Unanimity rule gives people too much veto power, I don’t think you can say that it gives any one person more veto power than anybody else. In that sense, it’s an impartial rule. So if there’s an objection to it, it will have to be on something other than purely egalitarian grounds.
Positive responsiveness to voters views is a substantive principle. But positive responsiveness in the context of ethics seems pretty self-explanatory, doesn’t it? It’s better to save a life than not to save a life, because it’s better to do a good thing than not to do a good thing. Is there more to it than that?
Great question! I think there is something more to it: "It's better to save a life" can be true even without positive responsiveness.
The principle that "saving a life is better, other things being equal" is basically what philosophers and economists call "the Pareto principle," after the economist Vilfredo Pareto. This principle doesn't actually entail positive responsiveness, since it doesn't entail anything whatsoever in cases of tradeoffs, whereas positive responsiveness (with other very minimal conditions like anonymity) requires us to make lots of tradeoffs -- better to save 101 of these people rather than 100 of those, for example.
It seems like the veto condition violates anonymity. Consider if saving anonymized Al can veto saving an anonymized life it can veto saving anonymized Al (to save Al I failed to save Al) which is just a contradiction. If I don't know who I'm saving I can't reliably say "I'm not going to save this anonymous person I'm going to save Al" since what if the anonymous person is Al? If you could know that (that the person is Al) then that just violates anonymity premised and so on.
I see that by anonymization one probably actually means something by indifference, but the paradox remains. The indifference is something like "I can save anyone instead of Al", but anyone includes Al, if one makes it "anyone else" it's not indifferent to Al-ness, Al-ness is now given special status by "else" and so on.
I suspect you need some kind of anonymization by commodification to achieve actual practical anonymization for these sorts of scenarios. So although you could describe saving one as vetoing saving the other two (in a situation where 3 are in peril and you may only save one), if you are anonymizing by commodification what you are doing is trying to maximize the magnitude of commodified saved lives. So in the scenario that maximum is 1 and is achieved by saving any one of the individuals, but it can not distinguish between saving them, the 3 units are truly indistinguishable, you can't call it vetoing saving the other two because the 3 units of utility are a continuous magnitude or something like this.
It seems clear to me Taurek's sort of argument is an argument against anonymity of the kind we see in commodification. Al's Al-ness is always a special particular reason to save him, it's a kind of particularism and you can't cash it out as a general equality or anonymity style principle beyond whatever demarcates particularism from non-particularist views (maybe I have only the most passing familiarity with particularism).
It occurs to me that commodification raises another Parfittian dilemma (in sufficiently "weird" circumstances). In a strange science fiction future, a surgeon arrives on the scene of a horrible accident, three people have been reduced essentially to brains, given time and other resources the surgeon can save any one of the brains, or he can save half of one brain and half of another and combine them or save 1/3 of each brain and combine them into one functioning brain. Assume division is such that if the surgeon saves half a brain we should consider that the individual associated with that brain 50% survives on, a Parfit type view anyway. So the surgeon could save A or B or C or AB or AC or BC or ABC (where AB is brain half A and half B etc., I'm assuming AB is equivalent to BA although in fact presumably there might be a difference and indeed an infinite number of ways to save 50% A and 50% B in a new amalgam) and should be indifferent between each of them on the commodification of life saving.
Anyway that's my initial reaction to all that (having only read like one paper by Parfit and some general discussions of such things over the years).
" But the contributions from Shelly Kagan and Tom Hurka are worth your time, for sure." Just going to say that even though I have not read the anthology I'm going to echo this because in my limited interaction with Tom Hurka at public talks and the like at UofT he is a great guy and a pretty incisive thinker.
I would say that, "Each counts for one," does mean a little more than just anonymity - after all, "Each counts for zero," also satisfies anonymity. So, "Each counts for one," is actually telling us two things: First, that everyone's lives count equally, and second, that everyone's lives count for something. Taurek's view may satisfy the first, but it violates the latter: After the first person in each group whose life is threatened, no one counts for anything if you accept Taurek's view.
In other words, "Each counts for one," is really Anonymity + Positive Responsiveness.
Also, it seems like it was meant less as a proof of number counting and more as a refutation of Taurek's claim that number counting does not reflect an equal concern for each person. Parfit's point is that Taurek is just factually wrong about that - number-counting manifestly does reflect equal concern, even if other views do as well, since it counts each person equally.
I think you’re making a lot of good points. Maybe we can interpret Parfit as saying that “each counts for one” means more than equality—it also includes positive responsiveness.
Though in that case, it’s still true that we can’t use “each counts for one” as a plausible way to argue against Taurek. Positive responsiveness is precisely what’s at issue! To assume it would be to make the argument circular.
Maybe, but like I said, I don't think it was meant as a refutation of Taurek's view, but as a counterargument to Taurek's claim that number-counting views treat people unequally.
If you do want to consider it as a positive argument in favor of number-counting, then you should probably think of it as just pointing out how obvious positive responsiveness is - What kind of ethical theory would deny that each person's life counts for something? Not one we want to endorse.
One problem for Parfit is that he doesn't accept positive responsiveness across the board. He thinks that when A and B are "imprecisely equal" in value, a slight improvement needn't break the tie.
To use an example in the style of On What Matters Vol. 1, suppose you can rush into a burning building to save a life. Parfit thinks the ("impersonal") reasons to rush in are roughly equal to the ("personal") reasons to stay out. But he thinks the same is true even if there's a *second* person in the building you could save.
(This wasn't a problem for him back in 1978 -- only in hindsight, given his later work.)
I agree with you that Parfit's got a good counterargument to Taurek. But in my defense, the ethics lore is that Parfit rekt Taurek, and if you look at the first few footnotes of "Each Counts for One," you'll find prominent applied ethicists saying "As Parfit showed, equality requires us to count the numbers" -- that's almost a direct quote!
Speaking of Trolley Problem Memes, I've yet to see a good counterargument to this meme re: aggregation. https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-06-01-1464822100-6800400-Screenshot20160601at16.00.34.png
I think it presents the case very cleanly, simply, and intuitively
I hadn’t seen that meme before—thanks for sharing!
A couple of potential replies;
1) Frances Kamm thinks that some rules would be chosen behind the veil but that, in reality, they don’t hold. (Like “don’t kill one person to redistribute their organs to save five lives.”)
2) Rahul Kumar and Kerah Gordon-Solmon argue that, even behind the veil, there’s more reason than you might think to choose a policy of not killing, because there might be deontological reasons against choosing the policy. (For example, “this policy would be an affront to our humanity.”)
My sense is that most deontologists go for a version of (1). They don’t think veil arguments have much force.
I think you're right but I'd come at it from a slightly different angle. "Each counts for one" -- clear as it may seem -- is ambiguous. Each *what* counts for one? Taurek could easily parry Parfit by saying that each group or cluster counts for one. And since he can save only one group or cluster, considerations of equality give him no more reason to save the one than the other. He'd then be logically committed (I think) to saying that more groups or clusters count for more, which would undermine his position. But I think the real lesson of the Parfit/Taurek debate is that, by itself, a principle of equality doesn't settle questions of individuation. Indeed, it shows that you have to settle on an individuation scheme -- on who or what is to count for one -- before matters of equality can be sensibly discussed.
Hah! I don't know how I'd never thought of it that way. "Each group counts for one" makes a lot of sense.
I do, however, wonder if Taurek would be okay with conceding that some individuals count for more than one, on his view. Maybe he would! But I was assuming he wouldn't.
I think this makes the connection to choice theory even more explicit. One critique of Arrow’s theorem is that it only applies to ordinal preferences/voting. This is, if we *could* make interpersonal utility comparisons as early welfare theorists wanted to, we could adopt some scoring system (rule) that would satisfy Arrow’s conditions (each *util* counts for one). Economists have almost universally conceded cardinal utility for ordinal utility (I’m not yet sure if this is for any more reason than that ordinal utility makes fewer, more plausible assumptions. Maybe these assumptions are *still* unjustified?).
Taking the May-ian formalization of Taurek, we can think of Taurek as going even further than ordinality and stating that we cannot even count up binary-rank-order preferences.
This is what the Positive Responsiveness (monotonicity) assumption is getting at. That adding a vote must not decrease the probability of the outcome. In other words, two people voting for X must outweigh one voting for Y. This is the whole basis of welfare theory with ordinal preferences.
Isn’t this whole argument just about Positive Responsiveness (I guess that’s the lesson here)? Should the marginal vote for X make X more likely to be optimal? The answer is yes if each vote counts for one.
I was reading Arrow today and thought I’d add this quote:
“If we admit meaning to interpersonal comparisons of utility, then presumably we could order social states according to the sum of the utilities of individuals under each, and this is the solution of Jeremy Bentham, accepted by Edgeworth and Marshall. Even in this case we have a choice of different mathematical forms of the social utility function in terms of individual utilities; thus, the social utility might be the sum of the individual utilities or their product or the product of their logarithms or the sum of their products taken two at a time. So, as Professor Bergson has pointed out, there are value judgments implicit even at this level. The case is clearly much worse if we deny the possibility of making interpersonal comparisons of utility.
It was on the latter grounds that Professor Robbins so strongly attacked the concept that economists could make any policy recommendations, at least without losing their status as economists and passing over into the realm of ethics.”
How (or if) we choose to count up the numbers is fundamental!
Superb connection!
> “Conjecture: there is no convincing argument for, or against, the view that the numbers count—there is only a clash of basic intuitions.”
Is there a convincing argument that should convince anyone who isn’t already inclined to accept an ethical principle? Let me suggest that there is no convincing argument for or against the view that murder is wrong. Suppose we come across a person who has the intuition that murder is right. When she reflects on the act of murder, it seems good and right to her. We point out the implications of this view to this person. If her view is correct, then it is permissible for us to kill her. If her view is correct, then school shooters act permissibly. But the murder-lover can simply accept these implications. She’s not even biting any bullets because she doesn’t agree with us that her view is implausible. I find the arguments against the permissibility of murder convincing because I am antecedently inclined to think that murder is wrong. But for someone who doesn’t share my inclination, I don’t see how you could convince that person. I question whether the fundamentality of aggregation is a unique thing. Why doesn’t this generalize to all ethical principles?
I left two comments on the New Work in Philosophy posting - let me know if I should move them here (I notice that Substack doesn't tend to get discussion).
Sorry, I didn't see those because I don't get notifications for it! I'll respond over there :)
Incidentally, how do you effectively navigate comments on your own posts in Substack? Do you use the app or the browser? For me, my own posts and comments on my own posts seem to function very differently in-browser from other people's posts and comments on other people's posts. When I click the "view comment" button in an e-mail, it takes me to a page with the first several lines of the comment, and a text box for me to write a reply, but I usually can't see the whole comment, and definitely can't see other replies to the comment.
I usuall find the emails useless except as a reminder that I wrote something recently. Most of my replies are in the app or just from the notifications I get while 'stacking on my laptop.
(Though admittedly I got to *this* comment via email...)
I've twice tried installing the app, because Substack is pushing it, but comment threads on other people's posts are much harder to deal with inside the app (both times I checked). Maybe I'll need one device that has the app, just for dealing with my own comment threads...
This is very interesting and I have not read the big kid version of the paper yet, but I'm resistant to the idea that aggregation is axiomatic. I think aggregation follows from equality and impartiality or at least something analogous to impartiality. Ultimately, it's a battle of the Kens. The conclusion that Taurek makes depends ultimately on the unanimity requirement—on each individual as a veto point. But if we use instead Arrow's Impossibility Theorem as the voting criteria (which only gets us into trouble in a negligible share of cases), we have a non-dictatorship requirement which seems much more consistent with equality. Non-dictatorship (or something like it, where no one vote is decisive) is incompatible with unanimity. And even though you (and Taurek) include a impartiality criteria, unanimity plus anonymity leads us to an arbitrariness that is morally comparable to partiality. Don't we have good non-axiomatic reasons for saying that non-dictatorship follows from equality and impartiality?
Thanks for the pushback, Thersitism!
I agree that it seems like Unanimity rule might be inconsistent with Arrow’s nondictatorship. But in fact they’re consistent: under Unanimity rule, nobody always gets what they strictly prefer. (Since they can’t outvote everybody else, or indeed anybody else!)
You probably saw that coming, hence the comment about “something like” nondictatorship. As I might put it, Unanimity rule ensures that everybody is a kind of negative dictator, in the sense that nobody’s veto can be overruled. (If I strictly prefer A to B, then society can’t strictly prefer B to A.) But this is really a “dictatorship” in name only, since everybody can be “negative” dictators at the same time. It doesn’t create some kind of hierarchy between the people just based on who they are. By contrast, Arrovian dictators are singled out and elevated above everyone else just based on who they are.
So while I think you can argue that Unanimity rule gives people too much veto power, I don’t think you can say that it gives any one person more veto power than anybody else. In that sense, it’s an impartial rule. So if there’s an objection to it, it will have to be on something other than purely egalitarian grounds.
Yeah that makes sense, though unanimity does leave open a kind of unsatisfying room for arbitrary outcomes, like what you say in note 4
I respect anyone critiquing Parfitt. I haven’t seen that much.
Still thinking on this piece.
Positive responsiveness to voters views is a substantive principle. But positive responsiveness in the context of ethics seems pretty self-explanatory, doesn’t it? It’s better to save a life than not to save a life, because it’s better to do a good thing than not to do a good thing. Is there more to it than that?
Great question! I think there is something more to it: "It's better to save a life" can be true even without positive responsiveness.
The principle that "saving a life is better, other things being equal" is basically what philosophers and economists call "the Pareto principle," after the economist Vilfredo Pareto. This principle doesn't actually entail positive responsiveness, since it doesn't entail anything whatsoever in cases of tradeoffs, whereas positive responsiveness (with other very minimal conditions like anonymity) requires us to make lots of tradeoffs -- better to save 101 of these people rather than 100 of those, for example.
It seems like the veto condition violates anonymity. Consider if saving anonymized Al can veto saving an anonymized life it can veto saving anonymized Al (to save Al I failed to save Al) which is just a contradiction. If I don't know who I'm saving I can't reliably say "I'm not going to save this anonymous person I'm going to save Al" since what if the anonymous person is Al? If you could know that (that the person is Al) then that just violates anonymity premised and so on.
I see that by anonymization one probably actually means something by indifference, but the paradox remains. The indifference is something like "I can save anyone instead of Al", but anyone includes Al, if one makes it "anyone else" it's not indifferent to Al-ness, Al-ness is now given special status by "else" and so on.
I suspect you need some kind of anonymization by commodification to achieve actual practical anonymization for these sorts of scenarios. So although you could describe saving one as vetoing saving the other two (in a situation where 3 are in peril and you may only save one), if you are anonymizing by commodification what you are doing is trying to maximize the magnitude of commodified saved lives. So in the scenario that maximum is 1 and is achieved by saving any one of the individuals, but it can not distinguish between saving them, the 3 units are truly indistinguishable, you can't call it vetoing saving the other two because the 3 units of utility are a continuous magnitude or something like this.
It seems clear to me Taurek's sort of argument is an argument against anonymity of the kind we see in commodification. Al's Al-ness is always a special particular reason to save him, it's a kind of particularism and you can't cash it out as a general equality or anonymity style principle beyond whatever demarcates particularism from non-particularist views (maybe I have only the most passing familiarity with particularism).
It occurs to me that commodification raises another Parfittian dilemma (in sufficiently "weird" circumstances). In a strange science fiction future, a surgeon arrives on the scene of a horrible accident, three people have been reduced essentially to brains, given time and other resources the surgeon can save any one of the brains, or he can save half of one brain and half of another and combine them or save 1/3 of each brain and combine them into one functioning brain. Assume division is such that if the surgeon saves half a brain we should consider that the individual associated with that brain 50% survives on, a Parfit type view anyway. So the surgeon could save A or B or C or AB or AC or BC or ABC (where AB is brain half A and half B etc., I'm assuming AB is equivalent to BA although in fact presumably there might be a difference and indeed an infinite number of ways to save 50% A and 50% B in a new amalgam) and should be indifferent between each of them on the commodification of life saving.
Anyway that's my initial reaction to all that (having only read like one paper by Parfit and some general discussions of such things over the years).
" But the contributions from Shelly Kagan and Tom Hurka are worth your time, for sure." Just going to say that even though I have not read the anthology I'm going to echo this because in my limited interaction with Tom Hurka at public talks and the like at UofT he is a great guy and a pretty incisive thinker.
I’d consider rewriting this, something along the lines of “I love Parfit but he got one thin wrong”.
The biggest part of your article was kind of buried imo
Fair point! I was trying to advertise the paper while still giving a flavor of the main idea, but I can see why that might read like a buried lede.