Quotes
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
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, MA, 2003, pp. 525–536, 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
[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, pp. 161–187, p. 170
Pain […] may not be the only evil, but it cannot be denied to be evil.
J. Ellis 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, Berkeley, 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, The examined life: philosophical meditations, 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 T. Gilbert, Stumbling on happiness, New York, 2006, 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, London, 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, New York, 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
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, New York, 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, 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 T. Olson, What are we?: a study in personal ontology, Oxford, 2007, p. 210
El frío de la tristeza es como un cosquilleo en el estómago que me recorre la columna, las piernas, y por fin se instala cómodo en el pecho, en la garganta. El sol comienza a bajar y sé que es la señal.
Adrián Cangi (ed.), Favio: sinfonía de un sentimiento, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 30
The unpleasantness of a toothache and the pleasantness of a beautiful view are not likely to coexist—not so much because the two hedonic tones have opposite signs, but rather because the two underlying experiences or attitudes are incompatible. The pain so “absorbs me” that I cannot give myself over to the view enough really to enjoy it, or, on the other hand, the view may absorb me away from the pain. For two attitudes or absorptions thus to detract from each other, it is not at all necessary that the two hedonic tones be opposite. I have made experiments like the following: while listening to the marche funèbre in Beethoven’s Seventh, I ate a piece of delicious candy and observed whether I could maintain the two enjoyments unimpaired alongside each other. It was impossible.
Karl Duncker, On pleasure, emotion, and striving, Philosophy and phenomenological research, vol. 1, no. 4, 1941, pp. 391–430, p. 409