H. L. Mencken

What is needed is a system (a) that does not depend for its execution upon the good-will of fellow jobholders, and (b) that provides swift, certain and unpedantic punishments, each fittet neatly to its crime.

I announce without further ado that such a system, after due prayer, I have devised. It is simple, it is unhackneyed, and I believe that it would work. It is divided into two halves. The first half takes the detection and punishment of the crimes of jobholders away from courts of impeachment, congressional smelling committees, and all the other existing agencies–i.e., away from other jobholders—and vest it in the whole body of free citizens, male and female. The second half provides that any member of that body, having looked into the acts of a jobholder and found him delinquent, may punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems appropriate and convenient—and that, in case this punishment involves physical damage to the jobholder, the ensuing inquiry by the grand jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question whether the jobholder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay or even lynch a jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined.

H. L. Mencken, ‘The Malevolent Jobholder’, The American Mercury, June 1924

Robert Nozick

I finished my doctoral dissertation when I was very young, at about the age of twenty-three. I thought I wanted to direct my philosophical work to questions that I really cared to answer. This is going to sound strange because one assumes that one will work on things that one cares to answer, but there are a lot of intellectually intriguing questions in philosophy: puzzles, paradoxes, little things that one can think about, especially in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, which were there for their own sake. I had a little imaginary experiment I haven’t thought about since then: if I were working on certain topics for two years, and if I were in an automobile accident that caused me to be in a coma, and then, when I came out of the coma, was told that somebody had solved this problem, but that it had been done in such a difficult way that I would have to spend a year of my life trying to understand the solution, would I still be interested in it?

Robert Nozick, in Giovanna Borradori (ed.), The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre and Kuhn, Chicago, 1994, p. 77

Jorge Luis Borges

Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara.

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Epílogo’, in El hacedor, Buenos Aires, 1960

John Broome

[Pain] is a bad thing in itself. It does not matter who experiences it, or where it comes in a life, or where in the course of a painful episode. Pain is bad; it should not happen. There should be as little pain as possible in the world, however it is distributed across people and across time.

John Broome, ‘More Pain or Less?’, Analysis, vol. 56, no. 2 (April, 1996), p. 117

Paul Feyerabend

Dear Imre,

If the worst comes to the worst, we have 8 days together. Now, let me suggest how to spend them. First day morning: my flat business in London; afternoon: Sussex. There remain seven days. Now I suggest that you send me (1) your MS of AM with all the cuts, changes etc. suggested by you and (2) as much as you have of the clean copy of my translation with your comments in the margin and suggestions for change, and dictionary. […] So by the time I come to London we shall not need more than two days to discuss what remains. […] There still remain five days. Now you may have finished MAM before I come. If there is still enough time to send it to me I shall have had time to read it and to make my first informal comments. I shall also have made a sketch of my answer. One day for discussing both. There remain four days to chase after girls—and this if the worst comes to the worst[.]

Paul Feyerabend, Letter to Imre Lakatos, July 19, 1972, in Matteo Motterlini (ed.), For and Against Method: Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, Chicago, 1999, p. 286

Richard Reeves

Mill’s sex life is important in terms of understanding him as a man, of course, but there are some philosophical implications too. Mill was his century’s pre-eminent thinker on the content of a good life—of which sex must surely form a part. More specifically, in his version of utilitarianism, Mill insisted that it was not only the quantity of pleasure that counted but its intrinsic quality. He distinguished between lower pleasures, defined as ‘animal appetites’ consisting of ‘mere sensation’ and ‘higher’ pleasures ‘of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments’. Mill suggested sampling, to see which was preferable: ‘Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.’ Mill’s view was that the majority of people who had experienced the pleasure of, say, having sex and reading poetry, would find the latter a more intrinsically valuable pleasure; but according to his own philosophical rules he would have been prohibited form making any such judgement unless he had himself experienced both.

Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, London, 2007, p. 154

Jon Elster

Because it is often easy to detect the operation of motivated belief formation in others, we tend to disbelieve the conclusions reached in this way, without pausing to see whether the evidence might in fact justify them. Until around 1990 I believed, with most of my friends, that on a scale of evil from 0 to 10 (the worst), Communism scored around 7 or 8. Since the recent revelations I believe that 10 is the appropriate number. The reason for my misperception of the evidence was not an idealistic belief that Communism was a worthy ideal that had been betrayed by actual Communists. In that case, I would simply have been victim of wishful thinking or self-deception. Rather, I was misled by the hysterical character of those who claimed all along that Communism scored 10. My ignorance of their claims was not entirely irrational. On average, it makes sense to discount the claims of the manifestly hysterical. Yet even hysterics can be right, albeit for the wrong reasons. Because I sensed and still believe that many of these fierce anti-Communists would have said the same regardless of the evidence, I could not believe that what they said did in fact correspond to the evidence. I made the mistake of thinking of them as a clock that is always one hour late rather than as a broken clock that shows the right time twice a day.

Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 136-137, n. 16

Jan Łukasiewicz

The principle of contradiction has, to be sure, no logical worth, since it is valid only as an assumption; but as a consequence it carries a practical-ethical value, which is all the more important. The principle of contradiction is the sole weapon against error and falsehood. Were we not to recognize this principle and hold joint assertion and denial to be possible, then we could not defend other propositions against false or deceitful propositions. One falsely accused of murder could find no means to prove his innocence before the court. At most, he could only manage to prove that he had committed no murder; this negative truth cannot, however, remove its contradictory positive from the world, if the principle of contradiction fails. If just one witness is found who (not shirking from committing perjury) implicates the accused, his false assertion can in no what be contradicted and the defendant is irretrievably lost.

Jan Łukasiewicz, ‘On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle’, Review of Metaphysics, vol. 24 no. 3 (1971), p. 508

John Skorupski

There can be an experience-oriented and a person-oriented version of hedonism. On the former view, it is the experience of happiness that is good, wherever it occurs; on the latter view what is good is that people are happy. On the former view people matter, so to speak, only as containers of happiness—it is the total quantity of happiness that really matters. On the latter view the starting point is impartial concern for the happiness of actual people. Real and important ethical differences can flow from this very deep contrast.

John Skorupski, ‘The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 1 (2007), p. 189

Stephen Stich

The idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But many contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and social sciences. If facts are needed, they rely on their “intuition”, or they simply invent them. The results of philosophy done in this way are typically sterile and often silly. There are no proprietary philosophical questions that are worth answering, nor is there any productive philosophical method that does not engage the sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals, language, culture and more. To make progress on them we need to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that works.

Stephen Stich, in Steve Pyke, Philosophers, Oxford, 2011, p. 192

Stephen Stich

Many of us care very much whether our cognitive processes lead to beliefs that are true, or give us power over nature, or lead to happiness. But only those with a deep and free-floating conservatism in matters epistemic will care whether their cognitive processes are sanctioned by the evaluative standards tat happen to be woven into our language.

Stephen Stich, ‘Reflective Equilibrium, Analytic Epistemology and the Problem of Cognitive Diversity’, Synthese, vol. 74, no. 3 (March, 1988), p. 109

John Stuart Mill

Everybody knows that the same sum of money is of much greater value to a poor man that to a rich one. Give £10 a year to the man who has but £10 a year, you double his income, and you nearly double his enjoyments. Add £10 more, you do not add to his enjoyments so much as you did by the first £10. The third £10 is less valuable than the second, and the fourth less valuable than the third. To the possessor of £1,000 a year the addition of £10 would be scarcely perceptible; to the possessor of £10,000 it would not be worth slooping for.

The richer a man is the less he is benefited by any further addition to his income. The man of £4,000 a year has four times the income of the man who has but £1,000; but does anybody suppose that he has four times the happiness?

John Stuart Mill, ‘Primogeniture’, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1988, vol. 26, p. 336

Jennifer Nagel

A more detailed understanding of the biases that afflict spontaneous epistemic judgments could assist philosophers wondering which epistemic intuitions to trust.

Jennifer Nagel, ‘Epistemic Intuitions’, Philosophy Compass, vol. 2, no. 6 (November, 2007), p. 814

Timothy Williamson

[P]hilosophers defending a given position against opponents have a powerful vested interest in persuading themselves that the intuitions that directly or indirectly favour it are stronger than they actually are. The stronger those intuitions, the more those who appeal to them gain, both psychologically and professionally. Given what is known of human psychology, it would be astonishing if such vested interests did not manifest themselves in at least some degree of wishful thinking, some tendency to overestimate the strength of intuitions that help one’s cause and underestimate the strength of those that hinder it.

Timothy Williamson, ‘Philosophical ‘Intuitions’ and Scepticism about Judgement’, Dialectica, vol. 58, no. 1 (March, 2004), p. 110

Alan Ryan

It is plausibly argued that, just as artistic and literary achievements flourish in a society held together by a good deal of political and religious repression, so the search for truth is effectively prosecuted in conditions where individual scientists feel as if they have no choice about the theories they accept; the totalitarian scientific community is an efficient device for, so to speak, launching the intellectual energies of individual scientists against the natural world.

Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill, London, 1974, p. 138

James Mill

The fact is, that good practice can, in no case, have any solid foundation but in sound theory. This proposition is not more important, than it is certain. For, What is theory? The whole of the knowledge, which we possess upon any subject, put into that order and form in which it is most easy to draw from it good practical rules. Let any one examine this definition, article by article, and show us that it fails in a single particular. To recommend the separation of practice from theory is, therefore, simply, to recommend bad practice.

James Mill, ‘Government’, in Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, London, 1825, intro.

John Maynard Keynes

[P]rofessional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, London, 1936, chap. 12, sect. 5

Stephen Grover

We know that the Null Possibility does not obtain, but the fact that it is a possibility deprives us of our best opportunity for claiming that the Maximal Possibility obtains instead. Because there could have been nothing we have little reason to believe that there is everything. Instead, there is just something.

Stephen Grover, ‘Cosmological Fecundity’, Inquiry, vol. 41, no. 3 (September, 1998), p. 295

Jon Elster

In Marxist writings on education, bureaucracy and indeed on most topics there seems to be an implicit regulative idea that ‘Every institution or behavioural pattern in capitalist society serves the interests of capitalisms and is maintained because it serves those interests.’ Marxists seem to have lost their sense of the ironies of history, whereby societies can generate patterns that lead to their own destruction. In order to substantiate this naïve brand of functionalism Marxists have invented a special gimmick, which is to manipulate the time perspective. If, say, the actions of the State go counter to short-term capitalist interests, this has the function of safeguarding long-term capitalist interests; heads I win, tails you lose. […] Now this is not only an arbitrary procedure, because ‘any argument can be turned to any effect by juggling with the time scale’. It is also a theoretically inconsistent one, because functional analysis cannot invoke indirect strategies […]. To the extent that the state is maintained through the effects of its actions on the capitalist class, the negative short-term effects should make it disappear (or change) before the long-term positive effects come to be felt. Only intentional actors are capable of taking one step backwards in order to take two steps forwards later on, so that the short-term/long-term distinction logically leads to a conspiratorial interpretation of history, given the absence of empirical evidence for such intentions.

Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality, rev. ed., Cambridge, 1984, pp. 34-35.

V. S. Ramachandran

Every scientist knows that the best research emerges from a dialectic between speculation and healthy scepticism. Ideally the two should co-exist in the same brain, but they don’t have to. Since there are people who represent both extremes, all ideas eventually get tested ruthlessly.

V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of Mind, London, 2005, p. xvi

Gregory Clark

Since we are for the most part the descendants of the strivers of the pre-industrial world, those driven to achieve greater economic success than their peers, perhaps these findings reflect another cultural or biological heritage from the Malthusian era. The contented may well have lost out in the Darwinian struggle that defined the world before 1800. Those who were successful in the economy of the Malthusian era could well have been driven by a need to have more than their peers in order to be happy. Modern man might not be designed for contentment. The envious have inherited the earth.

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton, 2007, p. 16

Lee Smolin

When I think of our relationship to string theory over the years, I am reminded of an art dealer who represented a friend of mine. When we met, he mentioned that he was also a good friend of a young writer whose book I had admired; we can call her “M.” A few weeks later, he called me and said, “I was speaking to M. the other day, and, you know, she is very interested in science. Could I get you two together sometime?” Of course I was terribly flattered and excited and accepted the first of several dinner invitations. Halfway through a very good meal, the art dealer’s cell phone rang. “It’s M.,” he announced. “She’s nearby. She would love to drop by and meet you . Is that OK?” But she never came. Over dessert, the dealer and I had a great talk about the relationship between art and science. After a while, my curiosity about whether M. would actually show up lost to my embarrassment of over my eagerness to meet her, so I thanked him and went home.A few weeks later he called, apologized profusely, and invited me to dinner again to meet her. Of course I went. For one thing, he ate only in the best restaurants; it seems that the managers of some art galleries have expense accounts that exceed the salaries of academic scientists. But the same scene was repeated that time and at several subsequent dinners. She would call, then an hour would go by, sometimes two, before his phone rang again: “Oh, I see, you’re not feeling well” or “The taxi driver didn’t know where the Odeon is? He took you to Brooklyn? What is this city coming to? Yes, I’m sure, very soon…” After two years of this, I became convinced that the picture of the young woman on her book jacket was a fake. One night I told him that I finally understood: He was M. He just smiled and said, “Well, yes… but she would have so enjoyed meeting you.”

The story of string theory is like my forever postponed meeting with M. You work on it even though you know it’s not the real thing, because it’s as close as you know how to get. Meanwhile the company is charming and the good is good. From time to time, you hear that the real theory is about to be revealed, but somehow that never happens. After a while, you go looking for it yourself. This feels good, but it, too, never comes to anything. In the end, you have little more than you started with: a beautiful picture on the jacket of a book you can never open.

Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, Boston, 2006, pp. 147-148

Max Black

Let us grant that a linguist, qua theoretical and dispassionate scientist, is not in the business of telling people how to talk; it by no means follows that the speakers he is studying are free from rules which ought to be recorded in any faithful and accurate report of their practices. A student of law is not a legislator; but it would be a gross fallacy to argue that therefore there can be no right or wrong in legal matters.

Max Black, The Labyrinth of Language, New York, 1968, p. 70

Robert Kennedy

[T]he gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our passion nor our devotion to our country.

It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America—except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Robert Kennedy, speech delivered at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, March 18, 1968

Derek Parfit

Venetian Memories. Jane has agreed to have copied in her brain some of Paul’s memory-traces. After she recovers consciousness in the post-surgery room, she has a new set of vivid apparent memories. She seems to remember walking on the marble paving of a square, hearing the flapping of flying pigeons and the cries of gulls, and seeing light sparkling on green water. One apparent memory is very clear. She seems to remember looking across the water to an island, where a white Palladian church stood out brilliantly against a dark thundercloud.

Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, 1984, p. 220

Arthur Cecil Pigou

[T]here is wide agreement that the State should protect the interests of the future in some degree against the effects of our irrational discounting and of our preference for ourselves over our descendants. The whole movement for ‘conservation’ in the United States is based on this conviction. It is the clear duty of Government, which is the trustee for unborn generations as well as for its present citizens, to watch over, and, if need be, by legislative enactment, to defend, the exhaustible natural resources of the country from rash and reckless spoliation.

Arthur Cecil Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed., London, 1932, pp. 29-30

Martin Rees

The first aquatic creatures crawled onto dry land in the Silurian era, more than three hundred million years ago. They may have been unprepossessing brutes, but had they been clobbered, the evolution of land-based fauna would have been jeopardised. Likewise, the post-human potential is so immense that not even the most misanthropic amongst us would countenance its being foreclosed by human actions.

Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century—On Earth and Beyond, New York, 2003, p. 183

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

[T]he general term [‘pleasure’] does not appear to call up with equal facility all the particulars which are meant to be included under it, but rather the grosser feelings than for instance the ‘joy and felicity’ of devotion.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, London, 1881, pp. 56-57

John Barrow

Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe’s properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings.

John Barrow, Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation, Oxford, 1991, p. 11

Peter van Inwagen

Let us suppose, unrealistically, that IQ tests really measure intellectual ability. Let us in fact assume, even more unrealistically, that they measure the intellectual abilities that are relevant to success in metaphysics. Why should we suppose that a species with a mean IQ of 100—our own species—is able to solve the problems of metaphysics? Pretty clearly a species with a mean IQ of 60 wouldn’t be in a position to achieve this. Pretty clearly, a species with a mean IQ of 160 would be in a better position than we to achieve this. Why should we suppose that the “cut-off-point” is something like 90 or 95? Why shouldn’t it be 130 or 170 or 250? The conclusion of this meditation on mystery is that if metaphysics does indeed present us with mysteries that we are incapable of penetrating, this fact is not itself mysterious. It is just what we should expect, given that we are convinced that beings only slightly less intellectually capable than ourselves would certainly be incapable of penetrating these mysteries. If we cannot know why there is anything at all, or why there should be rational beings, or how thought and feeling are possible, or how our conviction that we have free will could possibly be true, why should that astonish us? What reason have we, what reason could we possibly have, for thinking that our intellectual abilities are equal to the task of answering these questions?

Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, Boulder, Colorado, 1993, p. 201

John Barrow

The constants of Nature give our Universe its feel and its existence. Without them, the forces of Nature would have no strengths; the elementary particles of matter no masses; the Universe no size. The constants of Nature are the ultimate bulwark against unbridled relativism. They define the fabric of the Universe in a way that can side-step the prejudices of a human-centred view of things. If we were to make contact with an intelligence elsewhere in the Universe we would look first to the constants of Nature for common ground. We would talk first about those things that the constants of Nature define. The probes that we have dispatched into outer space carrying information about ourselves and our location in the Universe pick on the wavelengths of light that defined the hydrogen atom to tell where we are and what we know. The constants of Nature are potentially the greatest shared physical experience of intelligent beings everywhere in the Universe. Yet, as we have followed the highways and by-ways of the quest to unravel their meaning and significance, we have come full circle. Their architects saw them as a means of lifting our understanding of the Universe clear from the anthropomorphisms of human construction to reveal the otherness of a Universe not designed for our convenience. But these universal constants, created by the coming together of relativistic and quantum realities, have turned out to underwrite our very existence in ways that are at once mysterious and marvellous. For it is their values, measured with ever greater precision in our laboratories, but still unexplained by our theories, that make the Universe a habitable place for minds of any sort. And it is through their values that the uniqueness of our Universe is impressed upon us by the ease with which we can think of less satisfactory alternatives.

John Barrow, The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega, London, 2002, pp. 290-291