One does not envy an ideal circle. Nor an ideal square. One does admire the ideal, though, for everything else can be obtained as a convex combination of ideals.
Parfit was an ideal. His intensity seemed unnatural and inaccessible to most and threatening to some. It may be tempting---it seems to have been tempting to the book's author---to deflect the perceived threat by saying: "While Parfit has brilliant, he was incapable of happiness, for he did not gorge---perhaps, because incapable of gorging---on what the masses habitually gorge on. He was different, and, therefore, defective." This temptation deserves resistance. One does not take solace in the perceived unhappiness of a theorem. The appropriate response to an individual who---be it thanks to his intellect, wealth, physical prowess, or beauty---strikes one as almost alien is the same as to a theorem: "thank you."
The ideal circle cannot be accused of eccentricity.
At times, the entire philosophical community may seem like a sorority, an elitist club whose members are cool not because of what they say (for most of the time what they say is either trivial or false) but because of how they say it. At other times, philosophy seems like an incubator of apolitical political thought, an arena where future leaders seek to define and engage with fundamental questions. It is probably both.
It is not clear that the cultural enterprise requires a philosophical leadership (or any leadership at all). Science appears to be capable of guiding itself rather well, without supervision by the elites. It does not appear that philosophers or philosophies have much influence on arms control negotiations, nuclear energy policies, or pandemic management. Agitators for special interests do, and they need slogans. These slogans may as well come from philosophy. But to equate philosophy with a slogan factory is to equate the All Souls College with the Media Arts Lab (except that the All Souls places its output into the public domain). The choices of agitators are explained by political economy rather than philosophy, though.
Much of what Parfit says is either self-evident or incomprehensible. Of course, one ought to interrogate the widespread intuitive appeal of equality as a primitive desideratum. Of course, a life spent trying to reconcile conflicting moral intuitions---just like a life spent trying to aggregate disparate consumption tastes---is a life well lived. And surely it is a salubrious habit to challenge the logic of being upset about geopolitical developments today so much more than about the tragic events of the past. Perhaps, it is thanks to Parfit's work in the 1980s that these truisms are perceived as such today.
