Check out Jonathan Dancy’s short intellectual biography of the late great Derek Parfit (pictured below), an Anglo moral philosopher who developed a new field of “meta-ethics.” Here is an excerpt from Dancy’s tribute to Parfit: “But by the end of the century Parfit’s interests had moved to a focus on two main themes. The first theme is the question of whether three great philosophical understandings of ethics—consequentialism, contractualism, and Kantianism—could not in the end be shown to be different expressions of the same position…. The second theme is an uncompromising realism about the moral and more generally the normative, as evidenced in the title he chose for his great three-volume work On What Matters.” Hat tips: Brian Leiter/Tyler Cowen.