We shouldn’t be afraid of difficult films, we shouldn’t be afraid not to be entertained. The viewer pays a high price for a film. And not in money. Viewers spend their time, a piece of their lives—an hour and a half to two hours. A bad film, an aggressive film, takes several centuries of life from humanity.
Aleksandr Sokurov, Interview with Edward Guthman, The San Francisco Chronicle, February 2, 2003
After-the-fact interpretation is appropriate for some historical and literary scholars, which helps explain Freud’s lingering influence on literary criticism. But in science as in horse racing, bets must be placed before the race is run.
David Myers, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, New Haven, 2002, p. 23
Depending on where along the political spectrum power is situated, apostates almost always make their corrective leap in that direction, discovering the virtues of the status quo. “The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,” Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler’s seizure of power. “You always wore it the ‘right’ way around.” If apostasy weren’t conditioned by power considerations, one would anticipate roughly equal movements in both directions. But that’s never been the case. The would-be apostate almost always pulls towards power’s magnetic field, rarely away.
Norman Finkelstein, ‘Fraternally Yours, Chris’
Es común que se diga […] que los argentinos no desaprobamos socialmente [la evasión impositiva], y me parece que ello ocurre en parte porque no se percibe el carácter socialmente dañoso que ella tiene. La respuesta de muchos es que “no vale la pena pagar impuestos, porque ellos solo sirven para que se los roben los funcionarios, o para pagar la ineficiencia estatal”. Es obvio que esta respuesta carece de base racional: por más corrupción que haya o por más ineficiencia que afecte a la administración pública, ella solo puede incidir en una proporción marginal en el destino de los impuestos. Que una parte importante de las contribuciones tienen un destino de bien público lo atestigua la existencia en el ámbito público de escuelas, universidades, bibliotecas, fuerzas de seguridad y de defensa, calles y rutas, parques, etcétera. Parece que la desconfianza al Estado que se da típicamente en nuestro país obnubilara la relación causal entre las contribuciones de los ciudadanos y los servicios públicos que los mismos ciudadanos utilizan. Es como si aquellas contribuciones las absorbiera el Estado para beneficio de los funcionarios, y los servicios se financiaran con maná del cielo. Es muy difícil encontrar a alguien que perciba en la evasión impositiva de otro un daño directo para sus intereses.
Carlos Santiago Nino, Un país al margen de la ley: estudio de la anomia como componente del subdesarrollo argentino, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 188-189
When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology.
Noam Chomsky, ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, The New York Review of Books, vol. 8, no. 3 (February 23, 1967)
[W]e live in an age when only unnecessary things are absolutely necessary to us.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, London, 1891
La concepción más divulgada en la actualidad presenta la vida política como una lucha entre facciones contrarias, en la que únicamente hay lugar para los juegos estratégicos y los cálculos en torno a pérdidas y ganancias. […] A ello se ha sumado en la última década una presión incontenible del capital financiero internacional que por la vía de la ampliación o de la restricción del crédito público somete a los poderes elegidos democráticamente a un Diktat, tanto más efectivo cuanto más impersonal y neutro sea su maquillaje. De este modo se ha producido una extraordinaria confluencia de tradiciones provenientes de polos opuestos en el comienzo del siglo XX, que hoy festejan su connubio en un clima de fervor casi dionisiaco. En efecto, tanto el autoritarismo de origen nietzscheano, el postmarxismo y el postestructuralismo, por un lado, como el nuevo libertarismo, de procedencia básicamente anglosajona y austriaca, por el otro, han coincidido en sostener una misma concepción tanto en la teoría como en los hechos, según la cual los derechos auoproclamados de libertad individual sin control por parte del Estado están por encima de cualquier regulación jurídica o moral.
Osvaldo Guariglia, Una ética para el siglo XXI, México, 2001, pp. 140-141
What principles should govern human action? As rational beings, we should act rationally. As moral beings, we should act morally. What, in each case, are the principles involved? What is it to act rationally, or morally? It is often thought, or said, that philosophers are preeminently the people who have (and have neglected) a moral obligation to apply their rational skills to these great questions.
Peter Strawson, ‘The Parfit Connection’, The New York Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 10 (June 14, 1984)
Professional philosophers […] have been more interested in using the issue of famine relief as a club with which to beat utilitarianism over the head for its allegedly extreme demandingness than they have been in upholding the moral necessity of doing far more than most of us do now to aid those in distress—or in exploring why our culture is resistant to that message.
William Shaw, Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, p. 287
In the mid-1980s I attended a series of graduate seminars, run by Derek Parfit, on Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics. Parfit began the first seminar by claiming that the Methods was the greatest book on ethics ever written.
Roger Crisp, ‘Sidgwick and the Boundaries of Intuitionism’, in Philip Staton-Lake (ed.), Ethical Intuitionisms: Re-Evaluations, Oxford, 2003, p. 56
I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level—there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy. In this sense, I would describe myself as a libertarian socialist—I’d love to see centralized power eliminated, whether it’s the state or the economy, and have it diffused and ultimately under direct control of the participants. Moreover, I think that’s entirely realistic. Every bit of evidence that exists (there isn’t much) seems to show, for example, that workers’ control increases efficiency. Nevertheless, capitalists don’t want it, naturally; what they’re worried about is control, not the loss of productivity or efficiency.
Noam Chomsky, ‘One man’s view: Noam Chomsky. Are universities too conservative? Do they collude with corporations to obscure the way power works in our society? Noam Chomsky thinks so and explains why’, Business Today, May, 1973
The intuitions which many moral philosophers regard as the final court of appeal are the result of their upbringing—i.e. of the fact that just these level-1 principles were accepted by those who most influenced them. In discussing abortion, we ought to be doing some level-2 thinking; it is therefore quite futile to appeal to those level-1 intuitions that we happen to have acquired. It is a question, not of what our intuitions are, but of what they ought to be.
R. M. Hare, ‘Abortion and the Golden Rule’, in Essays on Bioethics, Oxford, 1999, chap. 10
At its best, utilitarianism is a strong weapon against prejudice and superstition, providing a standard and a procedure that challenge those who claim authority over us in the name of morality.
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford, 1991, p. 11
Th[e] compartmentalization of academic disciplines is the product of corporate interests rather than scientific and intellectual necessities or practical convenience.
Jorge Malem Seña, ‘Carlos Santiago Nino: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch’, Inter-American Law Review, vol. 27, no. 1 (1995), p. 46, n. 2
Celebrating power may be the world’s oldest profession among poets and men of letters.
Norman Birnbaum et al., ‘An Appeal from United States Citizens to Friends in Europe’
Reports show that the combined Gross Domestic Product of forty-eight countries is less than the wealth of the three richest people in the world. Fifteen billionaires have assets greater than the total national income of Africa, south of the Sahara. Thirty-two people own more than the annual income of everyone who lives in South Asia. Eighty-four rich people have holdings greater than the GDP of China, a nation with 1.2 billion citizens.
Ken Coates, ‘Post-Labour’s New Imperialism’, The Spokesman, no. 79 (July, 2002), p. 39
Why do we fear the wrong things? Why do so many smokers (whose habit shortens their lives, on average, by about five years) fret before flying (which, averaged across people, shortens life by one day)?
David Myers, ‘Do We Fear the Right Things?’
I am a utilitarian. I am also a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian because I am a utilitarian.
Peter Singer, ‘Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 9, no. 4 (Summer, 1980), p. 325
[Henry] Spira has a knack for putting things plainly. When I asked him why he has spent more than half a century working for the causes I have mentioned, he said simply that he is on the side of the weak, not the powerful; of the oppressed, not the oppressor; of the ridden, not the rider. And he talks of the vast quantity of pain and suffering that exists in our universe, and of his desire to do something to reduce it. That, I think, is what the left is all about. There are many ways of being on the left, and Spira’s is only one of them, but what motivates him is essential to any genuine left. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain life at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that that is just the way the world is, and always will be, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation.
Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left, New Haven, 1999, pp. 8-9
Surely if we have learned anything from the history of morals it is that the thing to do with a moral quandary is not to hide it. Like nettles, the occasions when life forces us to choose between the lesser of two evils must be grasped with the consciousness that they are what they are. The vice of this use of the principle that, at certain limiting points, what is utterly immoral cannot be law or lawful is that it will serve to cloak the true nature of the problems with which we are faced and will encourage the romantic optimism that all the values we cherish ultimately will fit into a single system, that no one of them has to be sacrificed or compromised to accommodate another.
H. L. A. Hart, ‘Separation of Law and Morals’, in Ronald Dworkin (ed.), The Philosophy of Law, Oxford, 1977, p. 33
[Lo dicho no] es una aceptación de la ironía moral de sesgo rortiano-posmodernista. Después del holocausto, de la ignominia del terrorismo de Estado impuesto en Argentina por Videla y sus secuaces, de las tragedias colectivas provocadas por el regionalismo nacionalista en la Europa finisecular y ante la injusticia institucionalizada que padece buena parte de la población de nuestra América, la ironía moral es sólo obsceno cinismo.
Ernesto Garzón Valdés, Instituciones suicidas: estudios de ética y política, México, 2000, p. 208
The retributive theory allows criminals to be punished without reference to the social consequences of punishment. But suppose that, for a variety of reasons, punishment significantly increases the crime rate rather than reduces it. Mentally unstable persons might be attracted by the prospect of punishment. Punishment might embitter and alienate criminals from society and increase their criminal activities. If punishment had these and other bad effects, utilitarians would renounce punishment in favour of some other more effective approach for dealing with offenders. But retributivists are still committed to punishing criminals. The effect of retributive punishment in such a situation is that there will be an increase in the number of innocent victims of crime. For whose benefit is punishment to be instituted? Surely not for the benefit of law-abiding citizens who run an increased risk of being victims of crime. Why should innocent people suffer for the sake of dispensing retributive justice?
C. L. Ten, ‘Crime and Punishment’, in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics, Oxford, 1991, p. 369
The rule-bound or superstitious person may adhere to the rule for its own sake, but the rational person would not.
Conrad Johnson, ‘The Authority of the Moral Agent’, in Samuel Scheffler (ed.), Consequentialism and its Critics, Oxford, 1988, p. 262
Curiosamente, un defensor coherente del valor de la diversidad debería estar dispuesto a admitir como algo valioso la peculiaridad cultural de los etnocentristas.
Ernesto Garzón Valdés, Instituciones suicidas: estudios de ética y política, México, 2000, p. 208
One of my favorite demonstrations is to take a string of such generally true statements drawn from horoscope books and offer them to my students as “personalized feedback” following a little personality test:
You have a strong need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept other opinions without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extraverted, affable, sociable; at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
Nearly all my students state such stock comments as “good” or “excellent”—a phenomenon called the “Barnum effect” in honor of P. T. Barnum’s dictum “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Some students even express amazement at the astonishing insights gleaned by my remarkable (pseudo) test. “It’s astonishing how well that test pegged me.”
French psychologist Michel Gaugelin had fun with the Barnum effect. He placed an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free personal horoscope. Ninety-four percent of those receiving the horoscope later praised the description as accurate. Actually, every single one had received the horoscope of Dr. Petiot, France’s notorious mass murderer.
David Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness, New York, 1992, pp. 93-94
There is a sense of ‘utilitarianism’, associated with architects and cabinet-makers, which equates it to the ‘functional’ and makes it the enemy of the excellent and the beautiful. Yet therein lies one of the great advantages of utilitarianism as a theory of the good: by running everything through people’s preferences and interests more generally, it is non-committal as between various more specific theories of the good that people might embrace, and it is equally open to all of them.
Robert Goodin, ‘Utility and the Good’, in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics, Oxford, 1991, p. 242
Quizá las posiciones escépticas, relativistas y subjetivistas sobre la justicia están determinadas por la preocupación pre-teórica por la intolerancia, el fanatismo y el autoritarismo a los que suelen conducir posiciones éticas absolutistas. Como Trotsky le recordaba a Kautsky, “la aprehensión de verdades relativas nunca le da a uno el coraje de usar la fuerza y de derramar sangre”. Sin embargo, esta prevención quizá tenga su ámbito de satisfacción, no en el plano ontológico de constitución de principios de justicia (en el que se enfrenta con la posibilidad de que el relativismo se aplique al mismo ideal de tolerancia), sino en el plano espistémico, o sea, en el plano del conocimiento de los principios de justicia: lo que conduce a la tolerancia es una posición falibilista sobre si estamos acertados en nuestras creencias sobre lo que es justo, no nuestra supuesta certeza de que no hay nada que conocer. Ese falibilismo puede conducir a desconfiar de las intuiciones individuales sobre la justicia—dada la variedad de condicionamientos a que cada uno de nosotros se ve sometido—y a confiar más, en cambio, en el resultado del proceso colectivo de discusión como el que se organiza a través del procedimiento democrático.
Carlos Santiago Nino, ‘Justicia’, in Ernesto Garzón Valdés and Francisco J. Laporta (eds.), El derecho y la justicia, Madrid, 1996, p. 471
If you’re the egalitarian who wrote ‘If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?’, how come you‘re so rich?
G. A. Cohen, ‘If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?’, in Horacio Spector and Guido Pincione (eds.), Rights, Equality, and Liberty, Dordrecht, 2000, p. 4, n. 8
En [1935] el mundo industrializado contaba más de treinta millones de desocupados. Al perder el trabajo habían quedado prácticamente fuera de la economía de mercado, y muchos había perdido la confianza en el capitalismo. La solución, para un número creciente, era el socialismo, fuese rosado o rojo. Hoy día hay casi el mismo número de desocupados en la misma área geográfica, pero la clase trabajadora no se radicaliza ni moviliza, y los partidos socialistas pierden terreno a menos que se tornen conservadores. […]
Hoy todos los países industrializados tienen dos instituciones que explican la diferencia. Una es el régimen de seguridad social, la otra es la televisión masiva. La primera le ha robado el viento a las velas de la nave socialista. La segunda hace más llevadera la pobreza e invita a la inacción. Entre las dos han causado una de las revoluciones sociales más profundas de la historia, y la única que no ha derramado ni una gota de sangre.
Mario Bunge, ‘Socialismo y televisión’, in Cápsulas, Barcelona, 2003, p. 206
Many religious persons think that the highest reason for doing anything is that it is God’s Will: while to others ‘Self-realisation’ or ‘Self-development’, and to others, again, ‘Life according to nature’ appear the really ultimate ends. And it is not hard to understand why conceptions such as these are regarded as supplying deeper and more completely satisfying answers to the fundamental question of Ethics, than those before named: since they do not merely represent ‘what ought to be’, as such; they represent it in an apparently simple relation to what actually is. God, Nature, Self, are the fundamental facts of existence; the knowledge of what will accomplish God’s Will, what is, ‘according to Nature’, what will realise the true Self in each of us, would seem to solve the deepest problems of Metaphysics as well as of Ethics. But […] [t]he introduction of these notions into Ethics is liable to bring with it a fundamental confusion between “what is” and “what ought to be”, destructive of all clearness in ethical reasoning: and if this confusion is avoided, the strictly ethical import of such notions, when made explicit, appears always to lead us to one or other of the methods previously distinguished.
Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., London, 1907, bk. 1, chap. 6, sect. 1
The goal of ‘disappearing’ the indigenous Arab population points to a virtual truism buried beneath a mountain of apologetic Zionist literature: what spurred Palestinians’ opposition to Zionism was not anti-Semitism, in the sense of an irrational or abstract hatred of Jews, but rather the prospect—very real—of their own expulsion.
Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, London, 2003, pp. xii-xiii
Write about the things that truly inspire you, and do it for the benefit of others—to reduce their suffering and to increase their happiness. That’s my advice. If you do that you will achieve real ‘success’, real passion, enthusiasm and fulfilment, with or without money and status.
David Edwards, ‘Outside the Machine: How to be an Ethical Writer’
Only the willfully blind could miss noticing that Israel’s March-April invasion of the West Bank, ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, was largely a replay of the June invasion of Lebanon. To crush the Palestinians’ goal of an independent state alongside Israel—the PLO’s ‘peace offensive’—Israel laid plans in September 1981 to invade Lebanon. In order to launch the invasion, however, it needed the green light from the Reagan administration and a pretext. Much to its chagrin and despite multiple provocations, Israel was unable to elicit a Palestinian attack on its northern border. It accordingly escalated the air assaults on southern Lebanon and after a particularly murderous attack that left two hundred civilians dead (including sixty occupants of a Palestinian children’s hospital), the PLO finally retaliated, killing one Israeli. With this key pretext in hand and a green light now forthcoming from the Reagan administration, Israel invaded. Using the same slogan of ‘tooting our Palestinian terror’, Israel proceeded to massacre a defenseless population, killing some 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese between June and September 1982, almost all civilians. One might note by comparison that, as of May 2002, the official Israeli figure for Jews ‘who gave their lives for the creation and security of the Jewish State’—that is, the total number of Jews who perished in (mostly) wartime combat or in terrorist attacks from the dawn of the Zionist movement 120 years ago until the present day—comes to 21,182.
Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, London, 2003, p. xxiii
When you visited me in Laos in 1970, I was at a real low point, anguished by the bombing and feeling almost totally isolated. Your passion, commitment and shared pain about the need to stop the bombing, and warm, personal support and caring, meant more to me than you will ever know. It also meant alot to me for reasons I can’t quite explain that of the dozens and dozens of people I took out to the camps to interview the refugees from the bombing you were the only one, besides myself, to cry. Your subsequent article for the New York Review of Books and all the other writing and speaking you did on Laos, was also the only body of work that got it absolutely right. It has given me a little more faith in the species ever since to know that it has produced a Being of so much integrity, passion and intellect. I feel a lot of love for you on your birthday—and shake my head in amazement knowing that you’ll never stop.
Fred Branfman, ‘Message for Noam Chomsky on his 70th birthday’
“I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind o existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.
Julian Huxley, ‘Transhumanism’, in New Bottles for New Wine, London, 1957, p. 17
A morality is not incoherent simply because, in its own terms, it would be better not propagated.
Jonathan Glover, “It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 49 (1975), pp. 171-190
Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, London, 1949, pt. 1
We all know the impression of a very heavy flash of lightning in the night. Within a second’s time we see a brad landscape, not only in its general outlines but with every detail. Although we could never describe each single component of the picure, we feel that not even the smallest leaf of grass escapes our attention. We experience a view, immensely comprehensible and at the same time immensely detailed, that we never could have under normal daylight conditions, and perhaps not during the night either, if our senses and nerves were not strained by the extraordinary suddenness of the event.
Compositions must be conceived the same way. If we cannot, in the flash of a single moment, see a composition in its absolute entirety, with every pertinent detail in its proper place, we are not genuine creators.
Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1952, pp. 60-61
Des barbares saisissent ce chien, qui l’emporte si prodigieusement sur l’homme en amitié ; ils le clouent sur une table, et ils le dissèquent vivant pour te montrer les veines mésaraïques. Tu découvres dans lui tous les mêmes organes de sentiment qui sont dans toi. Réponds-moi, machiniste, la nature a-t-elle arrangé tous les ressorts du sentiment dans cet animal, afin qu’il ne sent pas ? a- t- il des nerfs pour être impassible ? Ne suppose point cette impertinente contradiction dans la nature.
Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, Amsterdam, 1764
[I]t is impossible to rationalise to oneself why you should have a meaningful and satisfying life, and these people have to endure a meaningless and horrifying life. It is impossible to rationalise, unless you consider yourself a superior human being and deserve better[.]
Norman Finkelstein, ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’, Counterpunch, December 13, 2001