El frío de la tristeza es como un cosquilleo en el estómago que me recorre la columna, las piernas, y por fin se instala cómodo en el pecho, en la garganta. El sol comienza a bajar y sé que es la señal.
Leonardo Favio, ‘Recuerdos del amor (autobiografía en relatos)’, in Adrián Cangi (ed.), Favio: sinfonía de un sentimiento, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 30
The unpleasantness of a toothache and the pleasantness of a beautiful view are not likely to coexist—not so much because the two hedonic tones have opposite signs, but rather because the two underlying experiences or attitudes are incompatible. The pain so “absorbs me” that I cannot give myself over to the view enough really to enjoy it, or, on the other hand, the view may absorb me away from the pain. For two attitudes or absorptions thus to detract from each other, it is not at all necessary that the two hedonic tones be opposite. I have made experiments like the following: while listening to the marche funèbre in Beethoven’s Seventh, I ate a piece of delicious candy and observed whether I could maintain the two enjoyments unimpaired alongside each other. It was impossible.
Karl Duncker, ‘On Pleasure, Emotion, and Striving’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 1, no. 4 (June, 1941), p. 409
The [current] system [of licensing medicines] was created to deal with traditional medicine which ais to prevent, detect, cure, or mitigate diseases. In this framework, there is no room for enhancing medicine. For example, drug companies could find it difficult to get regulatory approval for a pharmaceutical whose sole use is to improve cognitive functioning in the healthy population. To date, every pharmaceutical on the market that offers some potential cognitive enhancement effect was developed to treat some specific disease condition (such as ADHD, narcolepsy and Alzheimer’s disease). The enhancing effects of these drugs in healthy subjects is a serendipitous unintended effect. As a result, pharmaceutical companies, instead of aiming directly at enhancements for healthy people, must work indirectly by demonstrating that their drugs are effective in treating some recognised disease. One perverse effect of this incentive structure is the medicalization and “pathologization” of conditions that were previously regarded as part of the normal human spectrum. If a significant fraction of the population could obtain certain benefits from drugs that improve concentration, for example, it is currently necessary to categorize this segment of people as having some disease in order for the drug to be approved and prescribed to those who could benefit from it. It is not enough that people would like to be able to concentrate better when they work; they must be stamped as suffering from attention0deficit hyperactivity disorder: a condition now estimated to affect between 3 and 5 percent of school-age children (a higher proportion among boys) in the US. This medicalizatoin of arguably normal human characteristics not only stigmatizes enhancers, it also limits access to enhancing treatments; unless people are diagnosed with a condition whose treatment requires a certain enhancing drug, those who wish to use the drug for its enhancing effects are reliant on dinging a sympathetic physical willing to prescribe it (or finding other means of procurement). This creates inequities in access, since those with high social capital and the relevant information are more likely to gain access to enhancement than others.
Nick Bostrom and Rebecca Roache, ‘Ethical Issues in Human Enhancement’, in Jesper Ryberg, Thomas S. Petersen, and Clark Wolf (eds.), New Waves in Applied Ethics, New York, 2007
[T]he Utilitarian cannot confine himself to a single mind; he has to consider what he calls “the total happiness of a collection of minds”. Now this is an extremely odd notion. It is plain that a collection cannot literally be happy or unhappy. The oddity is clearly illustrated if we […] use the analogy of greyness. Suppose that a number of different areas, which are not adjoined to each other, all go through successive phases of greyness. What could we possibly mean by “the total whiteness of this collection of areas”?
C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, London, 1930, pp. 248-249
Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in favour of it. But why not begin on yourself? From a purely selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than trying to improve others—yes, and a lot less dangerous.
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, rev. ed., New York, 1936, chap. 1
Se podría decir que hay anomia cuando la observancia contrafáctica […] de una determinada norma en un cierto grupo social sería eficiente en el sentido de que ese estado de observancia sería Pareto-óptima respecto de cualquier otra situación posible, incluyendo a la situación real de inobservancia, o sea en ese estado nadie estaría peor y alguno por lo menos estaría mejor. […] Sin embargo, este criterio no es operativo si tomamos […], como parte del grupo social relevante y como partícipes en la acción colectiva, a individuos que tienen propósitos lógicamente incompatibles con los de los demás. Por ejemplo, supongamos que algunos disfruten del caos de las calles porteñas, ya que lo consideran un sustituto gratuito del juego de los autos chocadores de los parques de diversiones.
Carlos Santiago Nino, Un país al margen de la ley: estudio de la anomia como componente del subdesarrollo argentino, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 37-38
Eloquence and substance are what we should strive for in any form of expression.
John Schaefer, The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques of Photography, rev. ed., Boston, 1999, p. 5
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, 1854
The mind of the opposite sex is an exotic dark continent at age 15, a partly-explored colony at age 35, and an over-familiar garden at age 55.
Geoffrey Miller, ‘Mating Intelligence: Frequently Asked Questions’, in Glenn Geher and Geoffrey Miller (eds.), Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Mind’s Reproductive System, New York, 2008, p. 378
It seems to me that there is a quality, which we cannot define but are perfectly well acquainted with, which may be called “Hedonic Tone”. It has the two determinate forms of pleasantness and unpleasantness.
C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, London, 1930, p. 229
Temperamentally, I am strongly inclined toward materialist reductive explanation, and I have no strong spiritual or religious inclinations. For a number of years, I hoped for a materialist theory; when I gave up on this hope, it was quite reluctantly. It eventually seemed plain to me that these conclusions were forced on anyone who wants to take consciousness seriously. Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.
By now, I have grown almost happy with these conclusions. They do not seem to have any fearsome consequences, and they allow a way of thinking and theorizing about consciousness that seems more satisfactory in almost every way. And the expansion in the scientific worldview has had a positive effect, at least for me: it has made the universe seem a more interesting place.
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford, 1996, p. xiv
It is an ironic fact that the felt qualities of conscious experience, perhaps the only things that ultimately matter to us, are often relegated in the rest of philosophy to the status of ‘secondary qualities,’ in the shadowy zone between the real and the unreal, or even jettisoned outright as artifacts of confused minds.
Jaegwon Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Princeton, 2005, p. 12
[W]hile no one who is sane will deny that an experience of pain has certain relational features (e.g. other things being equal, one who is experiencing pain will act for the purpose that the pain be mitigated), no one who is sane will hold that an experience of pain is nothing more than its relational features. After all, pain feels a certain way. It has an intrinsic nature for which the only adequate description is that it hurts. And it is precisely because pain has this kind of intrinsic nature that it also has the relational features that it has. It is this irreducible, intrinsic qualitative nature of pain that modern philosophical orthodoxy is intent on either reducing to something else or outright eliminating. Were their efforts to prove successful, there would be no problem of evil because there would be no quale that is evil.
Stewart Goetz, ‘The Argument from Evil’, in William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Oxford, 2009, pp. 449-450
Consistent with Bentham’s ideal of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, the quality of our world or universe (QW) could be assessed in terms of the ratio or quotient of the magnitude of the sum total of the subjective well-being (SWB) scores of everyone in the world or universe divided by the standard deviation of the distribution of all of the SWB scores.
In a similar way as the Dow Jones Index provides a means of assessing broad-based economic strength, this ratio, the QW, would provide a means of assessing broad-based (ideally universal) happiness and other aspects of SQB. It might also serve as a means of determining whether or not the lot of humankind were actually improving over time, that is, whether or not the changes which will come about in the world will actually be constructive. The larger the value of QW, the more worthwhile, humanistic, and heavenly we could consider our world to be.
Lewis Mancini, ‘Brain Stimulation to Treat Mental Illness and Enhance Human learning, Creativity, Performance, Altruism, and Defenses Against Suffering’, Medical Hypotheses, vol. 21, no. 2 (October, 1986), p. 217
Just as it is possible to dissociate energy growth from GNP growth, it is possible to dissociate GNP growth from welfare growth. The latter separation could be brought about by the abolition of the positional goods that are so important in modern economies. If everyone is motivated by the desire to be ahead of the others, then everybody will have to run as fast as they can in order to remain at the same place. Without any change in preferences, welfare levels could be raised if everyone agreed to abstain from this course. By contrast, most proposals to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘false’, or ‘natural’ and ‘social needs’, imply that preferences should be changed—which immediately raises the spectre of paternalism. One should not confuse the needs that are social in their object (positional goods) with needs that are social in their origin.
Jon Elster, ‘Risk, Uncertainty and Nuclear Power’, Social Science Information, vol. 18, no. 3 (June, 1979), p. 378
Let us not think in the authoritarian terms of some individuals genetically engineering the characteristics of others. Instead, let us think in the egalitarian terms of each individual genetically re-engineering herself/himself according as s(he) pleases. What is being suggested here is that in the distant future, by means of in vivo genetic transformation techniques effected with recombinant DNA or some other biotechnological tool(s), it will be possible for any person (or other kind of organism) to be an introverted, academically-oriented, purple-haired, orange-eyed, 10 foot tall white male with an IQ of 160 on any given day and a party-going, humorous, green-haired, green-eyed, three foot tall green female with an IQ of 200 on the next day. Stated in more general terms, it will become possible for each one of us (that is, anyone alive during the future era in question) to be whatever we want to be whenever we want to be.
Lewis Mancini, ‘Riley-Day Syndrome, Brain Stimulation and the Genetic Engineering of a World without Pain’, Medical Hypotheses, vol. 31, no. 3 (March, 1990), pp. 206-207
Many believers in animal rights and the relevance of animal welfare do not critically examine their basic assumptions […]. Typically these individuals hold two conflicting views. The first view is that animal welfare counts, and that people should treat animals as decently as possible. The second view is a presumption of human non0interference with nature, as much as possible. […] [T]he two views are less compatible than is commonly supposed. If we care about the welfare and rights of individual animals, we may be led to interfere with nature whenever the costs of doing so are sufficiently low.
Tyler Cowen, ‘Policing Nature’, Environmental Ethics, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer, 2003)
In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least-the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. The two times, brought about by the same technology, coincide—a few centuries in the history of a 4.5-billion-year-old planet. If you were somehow dropped down on the Earth randomly at any moment in the past (or future), the chance of arriving at this critical moment would be less than 1 in10 million. Our leverage on the future is high just now.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, New York, 1994, p. 305
Parecen ignorarse, uno al otro, pero sin furia ni irritación: más bien como si la larga convivencia los hubiera ido cerrando tanto a cada uno en sí mismo que ponen al otro en completo olvido y si casi siempre dicen los dos lo mismo no es porque se influyan mutuamente sino porque reflexionan los dos por separado a partir del mismo estímulo y llegan a la misma conclusión.
Juan José Saer, El limonero real, Buenos Aires, 1974, pp. 52-53
One way to see the unacceptability of welfare-independent rights is to ask the question ‘why Right X?’ to a very ultimate level. If the answer is ‘Right X because Y’, then one should ask ‘Why Y?’ For example, if the answer to ‘why free speech?’ is that people enjoy free speech, it is already not welfare-independent. If the answer is free speech deters dictatorship’, then we should ask, ‘Why is it desirable to deter dictatorship?’ If one presses hard enough with such questions, most people will eventually come up with a welfare-related answer.
Yew-Kwang Ng, ‘Welfarism and Utilitarianism: A Rehabilitation’, Utilitas, vol. 2, no. 2 (November, 1990), p. 180
Nozick’s “happiness machine” problem is a popular among academics, who generally fail to consider three things. First, who says that no one would want to be hooked up? The world is full of people who want happiness and don’t care one bit about whether it is “well deserved.” Second, those who claim that they would not agree to be hooked up may already be hooked up. After all, the deal is that you forget your previous decision. Third, no one can really answer this question because it requires them to imagine a future state in which they do not know the very thing they are currently contemplating.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, New York, 2005, p. 244, n. 16
Until we have settled the question of whether moral beliefs necessarily have motivational force, for example, we are in no position to say whether it is a point in favor of a given account of our moral practice that it endows them with such a force; and until we have decided whether mathematical beliefs can be known a priori, we will be unable to say whether it is a point in favor of an account of our mathematical practice that it allows them to have such a status. A realist or antirealist conclusion therefore represents the terminus of philosophical inquiry into a given area rather than its starting point; and so it is hardly surprising that such slight progress has been made within realist metaphysics, even by comparison with other branches of philosophy.
Kit Fine, ‘The Question of Realism’, Philosophers’ Imprint, vol. 1, no. 1 (June, 2001), p. 25
My students often ask me if I think their parents did wrong to pay the $44,000 per year that it costs to send them to Princeton. I respond that paying that much for a place at an elite university is not justified unless it is seen as an investment in the future that will benefit not only one’s child, but others as well. An outstanding education provides students with the skills, qualifications, and understanding to do more for the world than would otherwise be the case. It is good for the world as a whole if there are more people with these qualities. Even if going to Princeton does no more than open doors to jobs with higher salaries, that, too, is a benefit that can be spread to others, as long as after graduating you remain firm in the resolve to contribute a percentage of that salary to organizations working for the poor, and spread this idea among your highly paid colleagues. The danger, of course, is that your colleagues will instead persuade you that you can’t possibly drive anything less expensive than a BMW and that you absolutely must live in an impressively large apartment in one of the most expensive parts of town.
Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, London, 2009, pp. 138-139
[T]he much-vaunted analogy with natural kinds is of little help, and actually stands in the way of seeing what the mechanism might be. For our beliefs concerning natural kinds are not in general independent of perceptual experience. If we were to learn that most of our perceptual experience was non-veridical, then little would be left of our knowledge of natural kinds. The brain-in-the-vat is at a severe epistemic disadvantage in coming to any form of scientific knowledge; and if there really were an analogy between our understanding of scientific and of ethical terms, then one would expect him to be at an equal disadvantage in the effort to acquire moral wisdom. It is for this reason that the continuity in moral and scientific inquiry so much stressed by writers such as Boyd and Railton appears entirely misplaced. A much better analogy is with our understanding of mathematical terms, for which the idea of a hookup with the real world is far less plausible.
Kit Fine, ‘The Varieties of Necessity’, in Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers, Oxford, 2005, p. 258
En alguna ocasión sobreviví precisamente porque sabía cómo suicidarme si las cosas empeoraban.
Roberto Bolaño, Entre paréntesis: ensayos, artículos y discursos (1998-2003), Barcelona, 2004, p. 340
[Una] forma tentadora de confrontar las restricciones propias de la escasez es apelar al hecho de que el Gobierno es ineficiente, corrupto, o ambas cosas. […] La idea sería que, en vez de aceptar que los recursos son escasos, deberíamos concentrarnos en erradicar estos males públicos. Ahora bien, este planteo presupone que no podemos afirmar que los recursos son escasos porque en un escenario contrafáctico en el que los funcionarios fueran más honestos y diligentes, los recursos públicos alcanzarían tanto para proveer el medicamento a Beviacqua como para brindar cobertura médica básica a los carenciados. El problema es que especular acerca de lo que pasaría en un universo paralelo de poco nos sirve a la hora de decidir cómo asignar los recursos existentes en este. Es innegable que la corrupción y la ineficiencia son problemas mayúsculos que merecen ser enfrentados con tesón, pues ellos son las causas de muchas carencias sociales, pero quejarnos acerca de su incidencia no nos librara de las restricciones concretas que la escasez impone.
Lucas Grosman, Escasez e igualdad: Los derechos sociales en la Constitución, Buenos Aires, 2008, p. 62
Las primeras tres cuadras las recorrí a toda velocidad. Después fui aminorando la marcha. A la quinta o sexta cuadra, andaba lo más tranquilo. La ciudad era un cementerio, y salvo las luces débiles de las esquinas, el resto estaba enterrado en la oscuridad. Cuando me puse a cruzar una esquina en diagonal, bajo la luz que dejaba ver las masas blanquecinas de la llovizna suspendidas en el aire, vi venir una figura humana en mi dirección. Fue emergiendo lentamente de la oscuridad, y al principio apareció borrosa por la llovizna, pero después fue haciéndose más nítida. Era un hombre joven, vestido con un impermeable que me resultó familiar. Era igual al mío. Venía tan derecho hacia mí que nos detuvimos a medio metro de distancia. Exactamente bajo el foco de la esquina. Traté de no mirarle la cara, porque me pareció saber de antemano de quién se trataba. Por fin alcé la cabeza y clavé la mirada en su rostro. Vi mi propio rostro. Era tan idéntico a mí que dudé de estar yo mismo allí, frente a él, rodeando con mi carne y mis huesos el resplandor débil de la mirada que estaba clavando en él. Nunca nuestros círculos se habían mezclado tanto, y comprendí que no había temor de que él estuviese viviendo una vida que a mí me estaba prohibida, una vida más rica y más elevada. Cualquiera hubiese sido su círculo, el espacio a él destinado a través del cual su conciencia pasaba como una luz errabunda y titilante, no difería tanto del mío como para impedirle llegar a un punto en el cual no podía alzar a la llovizna de mayo más que una cara empavorecida, llena de esas cicatrices tempranas que dejan las primeras heridas de la comprensión y la extrañeza.
Juan José Saer, Cicatrices, Buenos Aires, 1969, pp. 93-94
One of the paradoxes of science is that its very greatness as an intellectual adventure is perversely mirrored by a crippling diminution of what it is to be human.
Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Cambridge, 2003, p. 22
What is inconsistent with the universal applicability of quantum mechanics is not out ordinary experience as such, but the common-sense way of interpreting it. And I am bound to say that, in this area, I cannot see that common sense has any particular authority, given that our intuitions have evolved within a domain in which characteristically quantum-mechanical effects are scarcely in evidence.
Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain, and the Quantum: The Compound ‘I’, Oxford, 1989, p. 224
At yet another party he had befriended [fashion designer Fernando] Sanchez. Ayer was now standing near the entrance to the great white living-room of Sanchez’s West 57th Street apartment, chatting to a group of young models and designers, when a woman rushed in saying that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer went to investigate and found Mike Tyson forcing himself on a young south London model called Naomi Campbell, then just beginning her career. Ayer warned Tyson to desist. Tyson: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer stood his ground. “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.” Ayer and Tyson began to talk. Naomi Campbell slipped out.
Ben Rogers, A. J. Ayer: A Life, London, 1999, p. 344
Once we acknowledge the risk/uncertainty distinction, it is natural to think that our default state is uncertainty. Getting to a position where we can legitimately treat a proposition as risky is a cognitive achievement. Traditional indifference principles fail because they trivialise this achievement.
Brian Weatherson, ‘Should We Respond to Evil with Indifference?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 70, no. 3 (May, 2005), p. 624
Utilitarianism is almost certainly much more demanding than Mill allows. It is tempting to think, in fact, that Mill is deliberately being disingenuous here. He was quite aware of how much further there was to go before customary morality became ideal, and that the route to that ideal would seem demanding to many. The rhetoric to encourage people on that road comes in chapter 3 of Utilitarianism, especially in the closing paragraphs. Here, he may be more concerned to allay doubts. Better to persuade a reader to become a feeble utilitarian than put them off entirely by stressing the demandingness of utilitarian morality.
Roger Crisp, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Mill on Utilitarianism, London, 1997, p. 115
Mankind are always predisposed to believe that any subjective feeling, not otherwise accounted for, is a revelation of some objective reality.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1988, vol. 10, p. 240
If you postulate ‘intuitions’ as states which play a certain sort of role in a theory of beliefs about value, then the term ‘intuition’ is really just a place-holder for any state satisfying the demands of that theory.
Graham Oddie, Value, Reality, and Desire, Oxford, 2005, p. 41
It is not the case that whenever an argument deploys a premise that directly and obviously contradicts an opponent’s position, the argument begs the question. Still less is it true that whenever a consistent opponent would reject at least one of an argument’s premises, the argument begs the question.
Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2005, p. 69
Our duty to objectivity must not be misunderstood as a license to ignore de se clues.
Nick Bostrom, ‘Self-Locating Belief in Big Worlds: Cosmology’s Missing Link to Observation’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 99, no. 12 (December, 2002), p. 622
We are far too apt to think of Mill as a technically philosophical writer, because we cannot help thinking of him as the author of the Logic, and to forget that he, no less than Bentham and the other utilitarians, is primarily dominated by the practical interest of the social reformer. He is really far more interested in the question of how, “once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard,” this ideal is to be practically realized, than in the question of the ethical criterion and its proof.
James Seth, ‘The Alleged Fallacies in Mill’s “Utilitarianism”‘, The Philosophical Review, vol. 17, no. 5, p. 478
Often when reading philosophy one gets the feeling that the writer cares more deeply about his or her conclusion than about the argument, so that if the argument can be shown to fail, the philosopher whose argument it is will simply proceed to look for other arguments rather than take back his or her commitment to the conclusion.
David Enoch, ‘An Outline of an Argument for Robust Metanormative Realism’, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 2 (2007), p. 23
Naturalism and Non-Cognitivism are both […] close to Nihilism. Normativity is either an illusion, or involves irreducibly normative facts.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, chap. 24, sect. 82
While the objective in going to certain bars and dance clubs appears to be getting drunk and hooking up, how many of the people crowding in are actually driven by a deeper craving for human connection that they simply don’t know how to pursue?
John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, New York, 2009, p. 37