Author Archives: Pablo Stafforini

G. E. Moore

My dear sirs, what we want to know from you as ethical teachers, is not how people use a word; it is not even, what kind of actions they approve, which the use of this word ‘good’ may certainly imply: what we want to know is simply what is good.

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge, 1903, chap. 1, sect. 11

Alfred Hitchcock

To put a situation into a film simply because you yourself can vouch for its authenticity, either because you’ve experienced it or because you’ve hear of it, simply isn’t good enough. You may feel sure of yourself because you can always say, “This is true, I’ve seen it.” You can argue as much as you like, but the public or critics still won’t accept it. So we have to go along with the idea that truth is stranger than fiction.

Alfred Hitchcock, in François Truffaut, Hitchcock, New York, 1985, p. 203

Everett Mattlin

According to this theory, sleep was probably “invented” some two hundred million years ago when sea creatures crawled up on the shore. Land dwellers developed the habit of sleeping as a safety measure. During the day they had to be alert and ready to run away from danger. At night they couldn’t be seen, but they could be heard, so the best thing to do was to stay still and quiet and out of the way. The rest would help them to run faster and farther the next day, and while they were resting they also ensured their inconspicuousness by staying asleep.

Everett Mattlin, Sleep Less, Live More, New York, 1979, p. 67-68

Manfred Kuehn

Maxims do not merely express what kind of a person one is; they constitute that person, in some sense. They constitute the person as character. In other words, to have a certain set of maxims and to have character (or to be a person) is one and the same thing. This is perhaps the most important point of Kant’s anthropological discussion of maxims. Maxims are character-constituting principles. They make us who we are, and without them we are, at least according to Kant, nobody.

Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, Cambridge, 2001, p. 146

George Bernard Shaw

Man is not yet an ideal creature. At his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature, also called Providence, holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment.

George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, London, 1945, preface

Xul Solar

Me oprimen vagas asfixias de deseos, como nieblas enemigas que rivalizan, mortíferas; en medio de mi agitación mi espíritu revolotea por los espacios buscando ayuda para hacerme huir, no sé hacia donde. Desgranarse de olas oigo entre el pedal del mar y siento brisas refrescantes; pero se desvanecen las flotas nocturnas de barcas peregrinas al llamarlas; cabalgatas de adustos gigantes pasan silenciosas por los lejanos desiertos del aire ocultando la color-ceñida luna, pero su alma inferior no me comprende; fantasmas, cosas veladas llenan la atmósfera y ágiles movimientos oídos me atraen fatalmente, mientras como serpientes las nieblas se disipan. Visiones claras en la noche, rítmicos suspiros musicales de la selva florida, variados arrullos de aguas que van danzando y el aliento-perfume de la primavera adolescente que juega y me rodea como llamas deliciosas, en fiebre delirante me anonadan, oh!, y en un grupo movido de doncellas delicadas y magníficas sirenas!

Pero sus danzas y cercanas palabras no entiendo, con la más bella junto a mí, y el cansador deleite me adormece dolorosamente, ocultando las nieblas tristes el cuadro, digno de eternizarse en su juvenil vida.

—Oh! qué manos, qué llamadas, me llevarán al aire puro, al sol radioso y al satisfecho mediodía? En esta lucha angustiosa me haré veterano; con mis manos, mis ojos y oídos divinos, con mi ardiente é hirviente cerebro encontraré el camino, si no lo hay, si no hay país sin angustia para mí, todo yo, dentro de mis pensamientos, para mis hermanos, me haré un mundo!

Xul Solar, ‘Noche’, Buenos Aires, 1910

Genaro Carrió

[La] tendencia a vestir los enunciados emotivos con el ropaje de los enunciados referenciales es endémica en los trabajos de filosofía, sociología y teoría jurídica. Tal como este tipo de literatura tiende a confundir las proposiciones de hecho con definiciones, así también tiende a confundir las proposiciones de hecho con juicios de valor.

Genaro Carrió, ‘Lenguaje, interpretación y desacuerdos en el terreno del derecho’, in Notas sobre derecho y lenguaje, Buenos Aires, 1965, cap. 3, notas y comentarios, sect. 11

Jane Austen

[S]he found—what has been sometimes found before—that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire did not, in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present, and prepare for another disappointment.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813, chap. 42

Robert Fisk

There was always, in the past, a limit to […] hatred. Letters would be signed with the writer’s address. Or if not, they would be so ill-written as to be illegible. Not any more. In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling me the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me.

Robert Fisk, ‘Why Does John Malkovich Want to Kill Me?’, in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (eds.), The Politics of Anti-Semitism, Oakland, 2003, p. 59

Martín Esslin

MartinWalking through any town or village in Britain on a summer evening when the windows are open one can see the bluish sheen of the television screen in almost any house. It is therefore easily possible, if o n e knows which programmes are at that moment being broadcast o n the three available channels, to know what are the only three possible contents at that moment occupy- ing the minds of the people inside the houses in that street. In times past an- other person’s thoughts were one of the greatest of mysteries. Today, during television peak hours in one of the more highly developed countries, the contents of a very high proportion of other people’s minds have become highly predictable.

Indeed, if we regard the continuous stream of thought and emotion which constitutes a human being’s conscious mental processes as the most private sphere of his individuality, we might express the effect of this mass communications medium by saying that for a given number of hours a day—in the United Kingdom between two and two and a half hours—twentieth- century man switches his mind from private to collective consciousness. It is a staggering and, in the literal sense of the word, awful thought.

Martin Esslin, ‘Television: Mass Demand and Quality’, Impact of Science on Society, vol. 20, no. 3 (1970), pp. 207–218

David Edwards

[C]ertainly [people do not opt out of the system] because they’re smarter than other people. Maybe it’s courage, being willing to face the possibility that your life so far has been a waste of time. Maybe it’s faith in the idea that truth—however frightening it might seem—will always bring benefits.

David Edwards, ‘Nothing To Lose But Our Illusions’, The Sun, June 2000

Frederick Douglass

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass, ‘The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies’, Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, New Haven, 1985

Robert Paul Wolff

In politics, as in life generally, men frequently forfeit their autonomy. There are a number of causes for this fact, and also a number of arguments which have been offered to justify it. Most men, as we have already noted, feel so strongly the force of tradition or bureaucracy that they accept unthinkingly the claims to authority which are made by their nominal rulers. It is the rare individual in the history of the race who rises even to the level of questioning the right of his masters to command and the duty of himself and his fellows to obey.

Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, New York, 1970, p. 16

Gary Francione

I find it ironic that vivisectors, and others who exploit animals, call people like me irrational or emotional and then they hold themselves up as rational. They’re not rational. They’re, in fact, defending a world view that is part and parcel of virgin births and holy spirits and all that stuff. Which is fine if they want to believe that. But they hold up the basis of their views as scientific. It’s not scientific at all. It’s based totally on religious views.

Gary Francione, ‘Do Animals Have Rights?’ Interview with Kate Kempton

Bernard Williams

In one, and the most obvious, way, direct utilitarianism is the paradigm of utilitarianism—it seems, in its blunt insistence on maximizing utility and its refusal to fall back on rules and so forth, of all utilitarian doctrines the most faithful to the spirit of utilitarianism, and to its demand for rational, decidable, empirically based, and unmysterious set of values.

Bernard Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 19

Enrique Marí

Como no he encontrado en el ejercicio de mi profesión razonamientos lógicos ni menos aún verificaciones empíricas del Derecho, me hallo en tren—bajo sugerencia de Hume—de arrojar sin conmiseración mi diploma a la hoguera, por no contener otra cosa que sofística e ilusión.

Enrique Marí, ‘¿Computadoras jurídicas o jibarismo social?, Nueva Ciencia, mayo, 1973

Mario Bunge

No es por casualidad que la mayoría de los economistas neoclásicos son profesores, y que en cambio los expertos en administración no usan la economía neoclásica y se inclinan frecuentemente por la escuela institucionalista, la que preconiza la intervención redistribuidora, moderadora y reguladora del Estado.

Mario Bunge, ‘Hayek: ¿economista o ideólogo?, in Elogio de la curiosidad, Buenos Aires, 1998, pp. 75-76

José Nun

No pocos economistas latinoamericanos se entusiasmaron en su momento con la idea del llamado trickle down effect. En inglés, el sustantivo trickle designa un chorrito de líquido; y el verbo to trickle, eso que denominamos gotear. La idea del trickle down effect seduce por su sencillez: postula que el crecimiento económico, más tarde o más temprano, acaba beneficiando también a los de abajo porque gotea a través de mayores empleos, ingresos y posibilidades de consumo.

No deseo discutir ahora la plausibilidad misma de esta proposición sino el modo en que ha sido utilizada entre nosotros. Es que, obviamente, cuando se respeta su traducción literal, el modesto enunciado del efecto no les podía parecer demasiado cautivante a políticos ansiosos por captar el apoyo de quienes menos tienen en un contexto tan castigado como el de América Latina. Intervinieron entonces propagandistas vernáculos del neoliberalismo que no dudaron en valerse de un truco y simplemente le modificaron el nombre al efecto para volverlo así más atractivo: en vez de goteo pasaron a hablar de derrame. Hay que achicar el Estado, abrir sin retaceos la economía, desregular los mercados y hacer desaparecer el déficit fiscal para que lo demás se solucione por añadidura, gracias a un aumento sostenido del producto bruto que derramará sus mieles sobre la sociedad en su conjunto y hará a todos felices. En el piano retórico, fue una maniobra eficaz; a nivel de los resultados concretos, ya vimos lo que sucedió.

José Nun, Democracia: Gobierno del pueblo o gobierno de los politicos, Buenos Aires, 2000, pp. 140-141

Robyn Dawes

Smith and Glass’s meta-analysis not only presented impressive evidence about the efficacy of psychotherapy; it concluded that three factors that most psychologists believed influenced this efficacy actually did not influence it.

First, they discovered that the therapists’ credentials—Ph.D., M.D., or no advanced degree—and experience were unrelated to the effectiveness of therapy.

Second, they discovered that the type of therapy given was unrelated to its effectiveness, with the possible exception of behavioral techniques, which seemed superior for well-circumscribed behavioral problems. They also discovered that length of therapy was unrelated to its success.

Robyn Dawes, House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, New York, 1994, p. 52

Thomas Nagel

One summer more than ten years ago, when I taught at Princeton, a large spider appeared in the urinal of the men’s room in 1879 Hall, a building that houses the Philosophy Department. When the urinal wasn’t in use, he would perch on the metal drain at its base, and when it was, he would try to scramble out of the way, sometimes managing to climb an inch or two up the porcelain wall at a point that wasn’t too wet. But sometimes he was caught, tumbled and drenched by the flushing torrent. He didn’t seem to like it, and always got out of the way if he could. But it was a floor-length urinal with a sunken base and a smooth overhanging lip: he was below flöor level and couldn’t get out.

Somehow he survived, presumably feeding on tiny insects attracted to the site, and was still there when the fall term began. The urinal must have been used more than a hundred times a day, and always it was the same desperate scramble to get out of the way. His life seemed miserable and exhausting.

Gradually our encounters began to oppress me. Of course it might be his natural habitat, but because he was trapped by the smooth porcelain overhang, there was no way for him to get out even if he wanted to, and no way to tell whether he wanted to. None of the other regulars did anything to alter the situation, but as the months wore on and fall turned to winter I arrived with much uncertainty and hesitation at the decision to liberate him.

Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, New York, 1986, pp. 208-209

Noam Chomsky

One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there’s been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost—and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about “The End of Socialism,” and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, “Yes, it’s true, socialism has lost because Russia failed.” I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you’re not supposed to do in our culture, but let’s try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that “socialism” failed, why don’t they say that “democracy” failed?—and the proof that “democracy” failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves “democratic”—in fact, they called themselves “People’s Democracies,” real advanced forms of democracy. So why don’t we conclude that “democracy” failed, not just that “socialism” failed? Well, I haven’t seen any articles anywhere saying, “Look, democracy failed, let’s forget about democracy.” And it’s obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn’t mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right?

Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, New York, 2002, p. 145

MTD de Solano y Colectivo Situaciones

[Y]o no sé si el fenómeno comunista ruso fue alguna vez comunista, sino más bien la reproducción del capitalismo. Porque de última terminó siendo tan gorila y tan hijo de puta como el propio capitalismo. Porque cuando hay alguien que piensa por vos, se está reproduciendo el capitalismo. Es un verso más, aunque le pongas el título que le pongas. Porque estás cambiando el nombre de “capitalismo”, nada más.

MTD de Solano y Colectivo Situaciones, La hipótesis 891: más allá de los piquetes, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 76

Juan José Sebreli

[L]o que se presenta hoy como post sólo es un pre. Jurgen Habermans […] sostiene que los posmodernos no hacen sino renovar los viejos ataques del prerromanticismo y del romanticismo del siglo XIX a la Ilustración y al Iluminismo.

Es curioso que esta corriente de pensamiento tenga su centro de difusión en París y sus principales representantes se consideren pensadores de avanzada, de izquierda, rebeldes y hasta revolucionarios, pero su fuente de inspiración es la vieja filosofía alemana de la derecha no tradicional. También Habermas observó la paradoja de que, cuando, por primera vez y como consecuencia de la derrota del nazismo, el pensamiento alemán abandonó sus tendencias antioccidentales y aceptó abiertamente el racionalismo y la modernidad, le llegó desde París, presentado como la última novedad, el retorno de las ideas autóctonas de las que trataba de alejarse. Los alemanes debían ahora volver a Nietzsche y a Heidegger, traducidos del francés.

Juan José Sebreli, El asedio a la modernidad, Buenos Aires, 1991, p. 14

Bertrand Russell

To all th[e] champions of the oppressed he set an example of courage, humanity, and single-mindedness. When public issues were involved, he forgot personal prudence. The world decided, as it usually does in such cases, to punish him for his lack of self-seeking; to this day his fame is less than it would have been if his character had been less generous.

Bertrand Russell, ‘The Fate of Thomas Paine’, in Why I am not a Christian, London, 1957, p. 147

Friedrich Nietzsche

Kommt es denn darauf an, die Anschauung über Gott, Welt und Versöhnung zu bekommen, bei der man sich am bequemsten befindet, ist nicht viel mehr für den wahren Forscher das Resultat seiner Forschung geradezu etwas Gleichgültiges? Suchen wir denn bei unserem Forschen Ruhe, Friede, Glück? Nein, nur die Wahrheit, und wäre sie höchst abschreckend und häßlich.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Brief an Elisabeth Nietzsche, Bonn, 11. Juni 1865

Peter Singer

Natural law ethicists are kept constantly squirming between the underlying idea that what is natural is good, and the need to make some ethical distinctions between different forms of behavior that are, in biological terms, natural to human beings. This wasn’t an insoluble problem for Aristotle, who believed that everything in the universe exists for a purpose, and has a nature conducive to that purpose. Just as the purpose of a knife is to cut, and so a good knife is a sharp one, so Aristotle seems to have thought that human beings exist for a purpose, and their nature accords with their purpose. But knives have creators, and, unless we assume a divine creation, human beings do not. For the substantial proportion of natural law theorists who work within the Roman Catholic tradition, the assumption of a divine creator poses no problem. But to the others, and indeed to anyone who has accepts a modern scientific view of our origins, the problem is insoluble, for evolutionary theory breaks the link between what is natural and what is good. Nature, understood in evolutionary terms, carries no moral value.

Peter Singer, ‘A Reply to Martha Nussbaum’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 2002

Martin Gardner

[Wilbur Glenn] Voliva was a paunchy, baldish, grim-faced fellow who wore a rumpled frock coat and enormous whit cuffs. Throughout his life he was profoundly convinced that the earth is shaped like a flapjack, with the North Pole in the center and the South Pole distributed around the circumference. For many years, he offered $5,000 to anyone who could prove to him the earth is spherical, and in fact made several trips around the world lecturing on the subject. In his mind, of course, he had not circumnavigated a globe; he had merely traced a circle on a flat surface.

Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, New York, 1957, p. 14

Arthur Koestler

From a purely psychological point of view, the introduction of new hypotheses and of new terms would appear justified if it led to a system free of contradictions, and to predictions verifiable by experiment. But, to take the latter test first, analysts of the orthodox Freudian, Jungian, and Adlerian schools all achieve some therapeutical results which seem to confirm prediction by experiment, though the theories on which the predictions are based are sometimes diametrically opposed to each other. The reason for this, and for the indecisive nature of the purely psychological approach in general, is the metaphorical character of psychological terms like “repression,” “censor,” super-ego,” inferiority complex,” and so forth, and the tautologies to which their manipulation often leads.

Arthur Koestler, Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art, and Social Ethics, 1949, New York, p. ix