Quotes

[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, SSRN Electronic Journal, no. 349, 2002, pp. 1–47, 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 E. 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.

Adam Elga, How to disagree about how to disagree, in Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield (eds.) Disagreement, Oxford, 2010, pp. 175–86

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.

H. J. 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, 2005, pp. 556–84, 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, Journal of philosophy, vol. 92, no. 4, 1995, pp. 181–204, 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: How we discover the big truths in small things, New York, 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, 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.

On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects, 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 T. 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. 1, 1998, pp. 217–223, 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, 1992, pp. 589, 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.

John Leslie Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, London, 1990, 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, Oxford, 2011, p. 101

Suffering is an evil in itself for whatever or whoever undergoes it[.]

Loren E. Lomasky, Persons, rights, and the moral community, Oxford, 1987, p. 224

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 and Policy, vol. 9, no. 2, 1992, pp. 169–189, p. 189

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.

J. Ellis McTaggart, Some dogmas of religion, London, 1906, pp. 67-68

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 J. Ellis McTaggart, Some dogmas of religion, London, 1930, pp. xxv-lii, 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.

J. Ellis McTaggart, Some dogmas of religion, London, 1906, p. 163