Quotes

[M]aximization of DNA survival is not a recipe for happiness. So long as DNA is passed on, it does not matter who or what gets hurt in the process. Genes don’t care about suffering, because they don’t care about anything.

Richard Dawkins, God's utility function, Scientific American, vol. 273, no. 5, 1995, pp. 80–85, p. 85

When our interests or the interests of those we care for will be hurt, we do not recognize a moral obligation to “let nature take its course,” but when we do not want to be bothered with an obligation, “that’s just the way the world works” provides a handy excuse.

Steve F. Sapontzis, Predation, Ethics and animals, vol. 5, no. 2, 1984, pp. 27–38, p. 29

In the Affair of so much Importance to you, wherein you ask my Advice, I cannot for want of sufficient Premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please I will tell you how.

When these difficult Cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under Consideration all the Reasons pro and con are not present to the Mind at the same time; but sometimes one Set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of Sight. Hence the various Purposes or Inclinations that alternately prevail, and the Uncertainty that perplexes us.

To get over this, my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two Reasons con equal to some three Reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies; and if after a Day or two of farther Consideration nothing new that is of Importance occurs on either side, I come to a Determination accordingly.

And tho’ the Weight of Reasons cannot be taken with the Precision of Algebraic Quantities, yet when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less likely to take a rash Step; and in fact I have found great Advantage from this kind of Equation, in what may be called Moral or Prudential Algebra.

Benjamin Franklin, , 1772

It is usually stated that 20,000 persons attended Beethoven’s funeral, and the figure is supported by contemporary accounts. But the population of Vienna at the time of Beethoven’s death was about 320,000, and it is hardly likely that one person out of every sixteen, including children, gathered to pay tribute to the dead master. I have therefore replaced 20,000 by the non-committal “hundreds.” On the other hand, the famous account of Beethoven’s dying during a violent storm has been triumphantly confirmed. I have obtained from the Vienna Bureau of Meteorology an official extract from the weather report for March 26, 1827, stating that a thunderstorm, accompanied by strong winds, raged over the city at 4:00 in the afternoon.

Nicolas Slonimsky and Laura Kuhn (eds.), Baker's biographical dictionary of musicians, New York, 2001, p. xii

Classical scholars have, I believe, a general principle, difficilior lectio potior–the more difficult reading is to be preferred–in textual criticism. If the Archbishop of Canterbury tells one man that he believes in God, and another that he does not, then it is probably the second assertion which is true, since otherwise it is very difficult to understand why he should have made it, while there are many excellent reasons for his making the first whether it be true or false. Similarly, if a strict rahmin like Ramanujan told me, as he certainly did, that he had no definite beliefs, then it is 100 to 1 that he meant what he said.

G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work, Cambridge, 1940, p. 4

Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla, Madrid, España, 1912

I have experienced pains no more severe than a broken wrist, torn ankle ligaments, or an abscess in a tooth. These were pretty bad, but I have no doubt that a skilled torturer could make me experience pains many times as bad.

Alastair Norcross, Comparing harms: headaches and human lives, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 26, no. 2, 1997, pp. 135–167, p. 146

A few extra people now means some extra people in each generation through the future. There does not appear to be a stabilizing mechanism in human demography that, after some change, returns the population to what it would have been had the change not occurred.

John Broome, Should we value population?, Journal of political philosophy, vol. 13, no. 4, 2005, pp. 399–413, pp. 402-403

Estoy convencido de que la subsistencia de la controversia entre positivistas jurídicos e iusnaturalistas a través del tiempo se debe a las confusiones que contaminan esta polémica y que impide percibir con claridad qué tesis defiendedn los contrincantes. En realidad, debo ser más drástico, ya que me parece que muchos participantes en esta polémica no tienen mucha claridad sobre las tesis que ellos mismos defienden.

Carlos Santiago Nino, Derecho, moral y política: una revisión de la teoría general del derecho, Barcelona, 1994, p. 17

There was a faint air of sadness about him now. He enjoyed the change. He imagined that he looked like a young man who had had an unhappy love affair or some kind of emotional disaster, and was trying to recuperate in a civilized way, by visiting some of the more beautiful places on Earth.

Patricia Highsmith, The talented Mr. Ripley, New York, 1955, p. 186

If happiness be one of the major goals of living, if not the only consciously acceptable end of life itself (most people in practice behave as though they were hedonists or eudaemonists), surely an analysis of the conditions fostering or hindering its attainment is an intellectual obligation of the first order, since upon it rests the merit of all other human and social values.

G. W. Hartmann, Personality traits associated with variations in happiness, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 29, no. 2, 1934, pp. 202–212, p. 203

It seems to me that many theories of the universe may be dismissed at once, not as too good, but as too cosy, to be true. One feels sure that they could have arisen only among people living a peculiarly sheltered life at a peculiarly favourable period of the world’s history. No theory need be seriously considered unless it recognises that the world has always been for most men and all animals other than domestic pets a scene of desperate struggle in which great evils are suffered and inflicted. No theory need be seriously considered unless it recognises how utterly alien most of the non-human life even on this small planet is to man and his ideals; how slight a proportion ostensibly living matter bears to the matter which is ostensibly inanimate; and that man himself can live and thrive only by killing and eating other living beings, animal or vegetable. Any optimism which is not merely silly and childish must maintain itself, if it can, in spite of and in conscious recognition of these facts.

C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart's philosophy, Cambridge, 1938, p. 774

In the controversies of party politics, which move at the intellectual level of a preparatory school, it is counted a score against a man if he can be shown ever to have altered his mind on extremely difficult questions in a rapidly changing world. In the less puerile realm of science and philosophy it is not considered disgraceful to learn as well as to live, and this kind of stone has no weight and is not worth throwing.

C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart's philosophy, Cambridge, 1938, p. lxxiii

Why ought I to do what I know that I ought to do?

[…] I might ask [this] if I knew that I ought to do something, but I didn’t know, or had forgotten, what made this true. Such cases raise no puzzle. Suppose next that, though I know both that and why I ought to do something, I ask why I ought to do this thing. The only puzzle here would be why I asked this question. When we know why something is true, we don’t need to ask why this thing is true.

Derek Parfit, On what matters, Oxford, 2011

[T]he history of thought […] reveal[s] discrepancy between the intuitions of one age and those of a subsequent generation. But where the conflicting beliefs are not contemporaneous, it is usually not clear that the earlier thinker would have maintained his conviction if confronted by the arguments of the later. The history of thought, however, I need hardly say, affords abundant instances of similar conflict among contemporaries; and as conversions are extremely rare in philosophical controversy, I suppose the conflict in most cases affects intuitions—what is self-evident to one mind is not so to another. It is obvious that in any such conflict there must be error on one side or the other, or on both. The natural man will often decide unhesitatingly that the error is on the other side. But it is manifest that a philosophic mind cannot do this, unless it can prove independently that the conflicting intuitor has an inferior faculty of envisaging truth in general or this kind of truth; one who cannot do this must reasonably submit to a loss of confidence in any intuition of his own that thus is found to conflict with another’s.

Henry Sidgwick, Further on the criteria of truth and error, in Marcus G. Singer (ed.) Essays on ethics and method, Oxford, 2000, pp. 166–170, p. 168

A crucial determinant of the character of analytic philosophy—and a piece of luck as far as I am concerned—is the unimportance, in the English-speaking world, of the intellectual as a public figure. Fame doesn’t matter, and offering an opinion about practically everything is not part of the job. It is unnecessary for writers of philosophy to be more “of their time” than they want to be; they don’t have to write for the world but can pursue questions inside the subject, at whatever level of difficulty the questions demand. If the work is of high quality, they will receive the support of a large and dedicated academy that is generally independent of popular opinion. This is an enviably luxurious position to be in, by comparison to writers who depend for their status and income on the reaction of a broader public. Of course, there are plenty of silly fashions and blind spots inside the academic community, but in philosophy, at least, their effect has not been as bad as the need to compete for wider literary fame would be. I think arid technicalities are preferable to the blend of oversimplification and fake profundity that is too often the form taken by popular philosophy. A strong academy provides priceless shelter for the difficult and often very specialized work that must be done to advance the subject.

Thomas Nagel, Other minds: Critical essays, 1969-1994, Oxford, 1995, pp. 8-9

By now you’ve probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you’re reading this. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Ted Chiang, What's expected of us, Nature, vol. 436, no. July, 2005, pp. 2005, p. 150

Our universe sprouted from an initial event, the ‘big bang’ or ‘fireball’. It expanded and cooled; the intricate pattern of stars and galaxies we see around us emerged thousands of millions of years later; on at least one planet around at least one star, atoms have assembled into creatures complex enough to ponder how they evolved.

Martin Rees, Before the beginning: our universe and others, London, 1997, p. 1

[M]oral nonnaturalism faces the challenge of explaining the normativity of morality just as much as does moral naturalism. If normativity needs to be explained, it is not explained by giving up on naturalistic ways of explaining it. Antireductionist forms of nonnaturalism that view moral properties as sui generis face an especially difficult problem, for they appear simply to postulate normativity. It is unclear how they could explain it.

David Copp, Morality in a natural world: Selected essays in metaphysics, Cambridge, 2019, p. 282

[T]he Everett interpretation is almost impossible to believe. It postulates that there is vastly more in the world than we are ever aware of. On this interpretation, the world is really in a giant superposition of states that have been evolving in different ways since the beginning of time, and we are experiencing only the smallest substate of the world. It also postulates that my future is not determinate: in a minute’s time, there will be a large number of minds that have an equal claim to count as me. A minute has passed since I wrote the last sentence; who is to know what all those other minds are doing now?

David J. Chalmers, The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory, Oxford, 1996, p. 356