ABSTRACT
Kant’s Ideal—a powerful, indispensable concept—is not quite the same as what one might call Parfit’s Ideal; that is the burden of this and the next chapter. The Consent Principle is stated and critically evaluated. It is argued that if we take Parfit’s objectivism seriously, then the Consent Principle is redundant or “superfluous.” The Consent Principle is looked at through the eyeglass of that redundancy objection. Parfit’s distinction between actual and possible consent is drawn and The Actual Consent Principle is postulated, a postulate that is cardinal in Parfit’s moral theory, one that is nicely connected to Parfit’s Actual Reasons Principle (argued for in the last chapter). But the Actual Consent Principle sits ill with what has been called Parfit’s Possible, Rational Consent Principle. Moreover, these two versions of the Consent Principle would give profoundly different portraits of morality and Kant’s Ideal. The Rights Principle (a much weaker version of the Veto Principle) is explored and its consequences for Kant’s Ideal and Parfit’s Ideal are sketched.
