- Lived:
- 1942–2017 · born Chengdu, China; lived almost his whole life in Oxford, England
- Tradition:
- Analytic moral philosophy; personal identity, population ethics, the theory of reasons
- The Big Idea:
- The "self" you are so anxious to preserve is not a deep, separate fact — and once you see that, what matters shifts from me surviving to experiences, connections, and the well-being of everyone who will ever live.
- In their words:
- "Identity is not what matters."
- If you remember one thing:
- He argued that you are not a soul-like ego but a stream of overlapping psychological connections — and said that realizing this consoled him about death and made other people matter more.