If a philosophy professor convinces you in a seminar that nobody is in pain and that no physical object is solid, you will forget both the moment you stub your toe on the doorframe as you leave the room.
Daniel Stoljar, Physicalism, New York, 2010, pp. 14-15
There is not something or someone experiencing experience! You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling. “I feel fine” means that a fine feeling is present. It does not mean that there is one thing called an “I” and another separate thing called a feeling, so that when you bring them together this “I” feels the fine feeling. There are no feelings but present feelings, and whatever feeling is present is “I.” No one ever found an “I” apart from some present experience, or some experience apart from an “I”—which is only to say that the two are the same thing.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, New York, 1951, pp. 85-86.
Shortly after Charles Spearman’s key work in 1904, intelligence became the best-studied, best-established trait in psychology. Higher intelligence predicts higher average success in every domain of life: school, work, money, mating, parenting, physical health, and mental health. It predicts avoiding many misfortunes, such as car accidents, jail, drug addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, and jury duty. It is one of the most sexually attractive traits in every culture studied, for both sexes. It is socially desired in friends, students, mentors, co-workers, bosses, employees, housemates, and especially platoon mates. It remains ideologically controversial because its predictive power is so high, and its distribution across individuals is so unequal.
Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, New York, 2009, pp. 144-145
Have you ever experienced a pain so sharp in your heart that it’s all you can do to take a breath? It’s a pain you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy; you wouldn’t want to pass it on to anyone else for fear he or she might not be able to bear it. It’s the pain of being betrayed by the person with whom you’ve fallen in love. It’s not as serious as death, but it feels a whole like it, and as I’ve come to learn, pain is pain any way you slice it.
Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands, New York, 2005, p. 46
[N]othing impresses me so much about Wittgenstein as the impression which he made on such fine characters and such eminent philosophers as, e.g., Moore and von Wright.
C. D. Broad, review of Norman Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Universities Quarterly, vol. 13 (1959), p. 304
[C]onsequentialists generally have not systematically elaborated how an ideal moral system should be specified; instead, they have tended to be reactive, offering rationalizations of existing moral rules or responses to particular conundrums put forward by critics. For example, consequentialists sometimes invoke various assumptions about human nature to explain certain imperfections in the moral system or to make sense of particular, problematic examples. Yet, no matter how plausible such arguments are in a given context, one is left wondering whether the consequentialist’s assumptions are employed consistently across contexts, and, more fundamentally, what would be the conclusions if one thoroughly investigated the assumptions’ implications.
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, ‘Human Nature and the Best Consequentialist Moral System’, Discussion Paper No. 349, Harvard Law School, p. 3
Richard Dawkins (one of my very favourite writes) has written an entire book called The God Delusion to refute the claims of religion. His arguments strike me as quite unnecessary, because nobody believes those claims anyway. (Do we need a book called The Santa Claus Delusion?) Indeed, Dawkins undercuts his own position when he points to statistics showing that, at least on a state-by-state basis, there is no correlation between religiosity and crime. His point is that religion does not make people better; but he misses the larger point that if religion doesn’t make people better, then most people must not be terribly religious.
Steven Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics, New York, 2009 , p. 58
Can you think of any earlier moment in history in which you would prefer to live your life? One’s initial reaction may be to answer yes. The thought of living in Renaissance Florence or Samuel Johnson’s London or Paris in La Belle Époque is seductive. But then comes the catch: In whatever era you choose, your station in life will be determined by lottery, according to the distribution of well-being at that time—which means that in Renaissance Florence you are probably going to be poor, work hard at a menial job, and find an early grave.
Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, New York, 2003, p. xix
Suppose that for twenty-eight years in a row, Consumer Reports rates itself as the #1 consumer ratings magazine. A picky reader might complain to the editors:
You are evenhanded and rigorous when rating toasters and cars. But you obviously have an ad hoc exception to your standards for consumer magazines. You always rate yourself #1! Please apply your rigorous standards across the board in the future.
This complaint has no force. The editors should reply:
To put forward our recommendations about toasters and cars is to put them forward as good recommendations. And we can’t consistently do that while also claiming that contrary recommendations are superior. So our always rating ourselves #1 does not result from an arbitrary or ad hoc exception to our standards. We are forced to rate ourselves #1 in order to be consistent with our other ratings.
Adam Elga, ‘How to Disagree about How to Disagree’, in Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement, Oxford, 2010
The continued hostility of Freudians to all forms of criticism, however well-informed, and to the formulation and existence of alternative theories, however well-supported, does not speak well for the scientific spirit of Freud and his followers. For any judgement of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, these points must constitute strong evidence against its acceptance.
Hans Eysenck, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, New York, 1985, pp. 13-14
[I]f you want to make a perfect duplicate of something, all you need to do is to put identical parts in identical structure. The principle is the metaphysical underpinning of industrial mass production; to make another ’01 Ford Explorer, all you need to do is to assemble identical parts in identical structural configurations.
Jaegwon Kim, ‘Supervenience, Emergence, Realization, Reduction’, in Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, Oxford, 2003, p. 567
[C]ritics have complained that contractarians fail to provide any good reason for thinking that acts prohibited by the norms agreed on by the hypothetical contractors must be wrong. It would be absurd, they argue, to suggest that this is because hypothetical contracts (that is, contracts that one has not in fact made but would have made under certain circumstances) are somehow morally binding. Contractarian constructivism is clearly not committed to such an absurd view. Although it makes the wrongness of lying a consequence of the fact that lying would be prohibited by the norms agreed on by the contractors, this is not because an obligation to refrain from lying is created by such an agreement in the way that promises create obligations. Rather, the wrongness of lying (like the wrongness of breaking a promise) is a consequence of this agreement simply in the sense that being prohibited by such an agreement is what its moral wrongness consists in.
Ronald Milo, ‘Contractarian Constructivism’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 92, no. 4 (April, 1995), p. 196
The differences between the lives of the lucky and unlucky people are as consistent as they are remarkable. Lucky people always seem to be in the right place at the right time, fall on their feet, and appear to have an uncanny ability to live a charmed life. Unlucky people are the exact opposite. Their lives tend to be a catalogue of failure and despair, and they are convinced that their misfortune is not of their own making. One of the unluckiest people in the study is Susan, a 34-year-old care assistant from Blackpool. Susan is exceptionally unlucky in love. She once arranged to meet a man on a blind date, but her potential beau had a motorcycle accident on the way to their meeting, and broke both of his legs. Her next date walked into a glass door and broke his nose. A few years later, when she had found someone to marry, the church in which she intended to hold the wedding was burnt down by arsonists just before her big day. Susan has also experienced an amazing catalogue of accidents. In one especially bad run of luck, she reported having eight car accidents in a single fifty-mile journey.
Richard Wiseman, Quirkology: the Curious Science of Everyday Lives, London, 2007, pp. 26-27
Why do we need the notion of the phenomenal character of experience? We have to loot at the role that the notion plays in our reflective thinking, we have to ask what the point is of the notion. For example, if we are presented with an analysis of the phenomenal character of pain, we have to remember that pain is awful: we have to remember that pain is a source of concern and that we think it right to try to nullify pain where we can. If we are told, for instance, that being in pain is a matter of being in a particular kind of representational state, we have to ask why being in such a representational state should be awful; we have to ask what it is about this kind of representational state that means we should try to nullify it.
John Campbell, Reference and Consciousness, Oxford, 2002, p. 138
The work announces that there is someone among us who is absolutely special, who has no peers, or “no neighbors” as Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it, by way of describing solipsism. The character of this person’s mental life is graced by a feature—“presence”—found in the mental life of no other.
As it turns out, we readers are particularly fortunate in that the author Caspar Hare, is ideally well placed to describe the special one whose experiences are the only experiences that are present. For, as it happens, Caspar Hare himself is the special one.
Mark Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in Caspar Hare, On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects, Princeton, 2009, p. xi
Perhaps accepting [nihilism] would make us less selfish. At any rate it would mean that self-interest was not a rational motive for action. How could it be, if there is no “self” to have any interests? If there are no such beings are myself or others, there can be no reason to put my interests above those of others. Nihilism might imply that all interests are of equal value. We might find that liberating.
Eric Olson, What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Oxford, 2007, p. 203
Rather than harming one person as a means of saving five others through transplants, the surgeon decides to let the five die. Some days later, a utilitarian friend asks why he responded in this way. Blushing, he replies, ‘Had I been alone, I’d have had little compunction about removing the one’s organs to save the five. But I was with a senior colleague who is a staunch defender of the Doctrine of Double Effect. I thought I’d stand a better chance at promotion if she didn’t think I had acted wrongly.’
Sophia Reibetanz, ‘A Problem for the Doctrine of Double Effect’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 98, no. 2 (1998), p. 219-220
The manifest world of our common lived experience is not shown to be mere maya or entangling illusion by being shown to be a world with many boundaries that correlate not with the metaphysical joints, but only with our deepest practical concerns. When those concerns stand the test of criticism, the boundaries marked by differences at the level of ordinary supervening facts are as “deep” as anything ever gets.
Mark Johnston, ‘Reasons and Reductionism’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 101, no. 3 (July, 1992), p. 618
[I]t is quite true that it is logically possible that the subjective concern, the activity of valuing or of thinking things wrong, should go on in just the same way whether there are objective values or not. But to say this is only to reiterate that there is a logical distinction between first and second order ethics: first order judgments are not necessarily affected by the truth or falsity of a second order view. But it does not follow, and it is not true, that there is no difference whatever between these two worlds. In the one there is something that backs up and validates some of the subjective concern which people have for things, in the other there is not. Hare’s argument is similar to the positivist claim that there is no difference between a phenomenalist or Berkeleian world in which there are only minds and their ideas and the commonsense realist one in which there are also material things, because it is logically possible that people should have the same experiences in both. If we reject the positivism that would make the dispute between realists and phenomenalists a pseudo-question, we can reject Hare’s similarly supported dismissal of the issue of the objectivity of values.
J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, London, 1977, pp. 19-20
On all plausible theories, everyone’s well-being consists at least in part in being happy, and avoiding suffering.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 1, Oxford, 2011, p. 101
Suffering is an evil in itself for whatever or whoever undergoes it[.]
Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community, New York, 1987, p. 224
If it is suggested that there is no evidence that the universe is working towards a good end, the doubter is reminded of the limitations of his intellect, and on account of this is exhorted to banish his doubts from his mind, and to believe firmly that the universe is directed towards a good end. And stronger instances can be found. An apologist may admit, for example, that for our intellects the three facts of the omnipotence of a personal God, the benevolence of a personal God, and the existence of evil, are not to be reconciled. But we are once more reminded of the feebleness of our intellects. And we are invited to assert, not only that our conclusions may be wrong, not only that the three elements may possibly be reconciled, but that they are reconciled. There is evil, and there is an omnipotent and benevolent God.
This line of argument has two weaknesses. The first is that it will prove everything—including mutually incompatible propositions—equally well. It will prove as easily that the universe is tending towards a bad end as that it is tending towards a good one. There may be as little evidence for the pessimistic view as for the optimistic. But if our intellects are so feeble that the absence of sufficient evidence in our minds is no objection to a conclusion in the one case, then a similar absence can be no objection to a conclusion in the other. Nor can we fall back on the assertion that there is less evidence for the pessimistic view than for the optimistic, and that, therefore, we should adopt the latter. For if our intellects are too feeble for their conclusions to be trusted, our distrust must apply equally to their conclusion on the relative weight of the evidence in the two cases.
John McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, London, 1906, pp. 67-68
If well-being is limited in its extent, then it may also be limited in its significance.
Shelly Kagan, ‘The Limits of Well-Being’, Social Philosophy & Policy, vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer, 1992), p. 189
If we compare McTaggart with the other commentators on Hegel we must admit that he has at least produced an extremely lively and fascinating rabbit from the Hegelian hat, whilst they have produced nothing but consumptive and gibbering chimeras. And we shall admire his resource and dexterity all the more when we reflect that the rabbit was, in all probability, never inside the hat, whilst the chimeras perhaps were.
C. D. Broad, ‘Introduction’, in John McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, London, 1930, p. xxxi
So far as punishment is vindictive, it makes a wicked man miserable, without making him less wicked, and without making any one else less wicked or less miserable. It can only be justified on one of two grounds. Either something else can be ultimately good, besides the condition of conscious beings, or the condition of a person who is wicked and miserable is better, intrinsically and without regard to the chance of future amendment, than the condition of a person who is wicked without being miserable. If either of these statements is true—to me they both seem patently false—then vindictive punishment may be justifiable both for determinists and indeterminists. If neither of them is true, it is no more justifiable for indeterminists than it is for determinists.
John McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, London, 1906, p. 163
Suffering is bad primarily because of its intrinsic nature: it is bad in itself. Suffering of a certain intensity and duration is equally bad, or almost equally bad, wherever it occurs.
Jeff McMahan, ‘Animals’, in R. G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics, Malden, Massachusetts, 2003, p. 529
The idea that it is wrong to cause suffering, unless there is a sufficient justification, is one of the most basic moral principles, shared by virtually anyone.
James Rachels, ‘Animals and Ethics’, in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London, 1998, sect. 3
[T]here is something odd about maintaining that pain and suffering are morally significant when felt by a human but not when felt by an animal. If a child burns a hamster alive, it seems quite incredibile to maintain that what is wrong with this act has nothing essentially to do with the pain and usffering the hamster feels. To maintain that the act was wrong because it might encourage the chid to burn other children or encourage anti-social behaviour, because the act failed to exhibit this or that virtue or violated some duty to be kind to animals—to hold these views seems almost perverse, if they are taken to imply that the hamster’s pain and suffering are no central data bearing upon the morality of what was done to it. For us, pain and suffering are moral-bearing characteristics, so that, whether one burns the child or the child burns the hamster, the moralità of what is done is determined at least in part by the pain and suffering the creature in question undergoes. Singer’s utilitarianism picks this feature up quite nicely, and it seems to me exactly right. Of course, there may be other moral-beraing characteristics that apply in the case, but the fact in no way enables us to ignore, morally, the hamster’s pains.
R. G. Frey, ‘Animals’, in Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics, Oxford, 2003, p. 170
Pain […] may not be the only evil, but it cannot be denied to be evil.
John McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, London, 1906, p. 15
Much of the moral progress of civilization can be understood as the furtherance of concern for “up to usness”, the recognition of its moral importance, and the implementation of arrangements that are based upon this recognition.
Saul Smilansky, Free Will and Illusion, Oxford, 2000, p. 21
Only the most reckless poet would attempt [to describe the sensation of an orgasm under LSD]. I have to say to you, “What does one say to a little child?” The child asks, “Daddy, what is sex like?” and you try to describe it, and then the little child says, “Well, is it fun like the circus?” and you say, “Well, not exactly like that.” And the child says, “Is it fun like chocolate ice cream?” and you say, “Well, it’s like that but much, more more than that.” And the child says, “It is fun like the roller coaster, then?” and you say, “Well, that’s part of it, but it’s even more than that.” In short, I can’t tell you what it’s like, because it’s not like anything that’s ever happened to you—and there aren’t words adequate to describe it, anyway. You won’t know what it’s like until you try it yourself and then I won’t need to tell you.
Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy, rev. ed., Oakland, California, 1998, pp. 128-129
Inner experiences are not the only things that matter, but they do matter. We would not plug into an experience machine, but we would not plug into an anesthetizing machine either.
Robert Nozick, ‘Emotions’, in The Examined Life, New York, 1989, p. 90
There are many different techniques for collecting, interpreting, and analyzing facts, and different techniques often lead to different conclusions, which is why scientists disagree about the dangers of global warming, the benefits of supply-side economics, and the wisdom of low-carbohydrate diets. Good scientists deal with this complication by choosing the techniques they consider most appropriate and then accepting the conclusions that these techniques produce, regardless of what those conclusions might be. But bad scientists take advantage of this complication by choosing techniques that are especially likely to produce the conclusions they favour, thus allowing them to reach favoured conclusions by way of supportive facts. Decades of research suggests that when it comes to collecting and analyzing facts about ourselves and our experiences, most of us have the equivalent of an advanced degree in Really Bad Science.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, New York, 2005, p. 164
“[N]o-nonsense” materialism, as I understand it, is characterized not so much by what it asserts, namely the identity of conscious states and processes with certain physiological states and processes, but by an accompanying failure to appreciate that there is anything philosophically problematic about such an identification.
Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain, and the Quantum: The Compound ‘I’, Oxford, 1989, p. 2
Sometimes in therapy when a person has difficulty accepting some feeling, I will ask if he or she is willing to accept the fact of refusing to accept the feeling. I asked this once of a client, Victor, a clergyman, who had difficulty in owning or experiencing his anger, but who was a very angry man. My question disoriented him. “Will I accept that I won’t accept my anger?” he asked me. I smiled and said, “That’s right.” He thundered, “I refuse to accept my anger and I refuse to accept my refusal!”
Nathaniel Branden, How to Raise Your Self-Esteem, New York, 1987, p. 56
Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a ‘machine’ with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.
Greg Egan, Permutation City, London, 1994, p. 286
[D]o not be oppressed by the frightful sum of human suffering; there is no sum; two lean women are not twice as lean as one, and two fat women are not twice as fat as one. Poverty and pain are not cumulative; you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that it is.
George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, London, 1828, sect. 84
Immediately before taking up woodwork, he’d passionately devoured all the higher mathematics texts in the central library, run all the tutorial software, and then personally contributed several important new results to group theory—untroubled by the fact that none of the Elsyan mathematicians would ever be aware of his work. Before that, he’d written over three hundred comic operas, with librettos in Italian, French and English—and staged most of them, with puppet performers and audience. Before that, he’d patiently studied the structure and biochemistry of the human brain for sixty-seven years; towards the end he had fully grasped, to his own satisfaction, the nature of the process of consciousness. Every one of these pursuits had been utterly engrossing, and satisfying, at the time.
Greg Egan, Permutation City, London, 1994, p. 277
–¿Qué haría usted si supiera con seguridad que un día determinado acaba el mundo?
–No diría nada, por causa de las criaturas–respondió Ramírez–, pero dejaría anotado en un papelito que en el día de la fecha era el fin del mundo, para que vieran que yo lo sabía.
Adolfo Bioy Casares, ‘Tema del fin del mundo’, in Guirnalda con amores, Buenos Aires, 1959, p. 99
That we could not consistently deny our existence without going mad is no evidence for the claim that we do exist—any more than the impossibility of denying consistently that we have free will without going mad is evidence for our actually having it. Why should the truth be believable? For all we know, the true account of what we are might be pathological. That would be a truly absurd situation. It is one thing to accept humbly that our metaphysical nature might remain forever beyond our intellectual grasp. It would be a nasty surprise indeed if we could work out our metaphysical nature all right, but the knowledge of it would inevitably result in madness.
Eric Olson, What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology, Oxford, 2007, p. 210