Quotes

I believe […] firmly in some form of act-utilitarianism in ethics, but the sacred principle of utility itself forbids my telling you this, much less committing (detectable) murders in its name.

William G. Lycan, Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass, 1987, p. 136

[A] source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker.

But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake. I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

Charles Darwin, The autobiography of Charles Darwin, Collins, 1958, pp. 92-94

[I]f PSR [the principle of sufficient reason] is wrong and there are uncaused events, what happens to the imperative to seek causes? Should scientists and others now stop looking for them? Not at all. To seek causes does not commit us to believing there must always be a cause for us to find, no more than seeking gold commits us to supposing there will always be gold where we hope to find it. Often there will not be. On such occasions the better part of wisdom is to admit it and look elsewhere. Science does not presuppose PSR, even though science is an enterprise dedicated in large part to seeking causes.

John F. Post, Metaphysics: a contemporary introduction, New York, 1991, pp. 66-67

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person.

Cary Grant, quoted in 'Notes on Fashion' John Duka, Notes on Fashion, The New York Times, 1981, pp. 16, p. 16

Although Hume said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” he did not mean that passion should be allowed to set itself up as an arbitrary tyrant. Even a slave needs some independence to serve his master well; beliefs born out of passion serve passion badly.

Jon Elster, Strong feelings: Emotion, addiction, and human behavior, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 145

It took me a long time to express clearly what I was doing, but eventually I realized that one way to deal with a difficult problem is to change the question–in particular by shifting levels.

Paul Krugman, How I Work, The American Economist, vol. 37, no. 2, 1993, pp. 5–16, pp. 5-16

It is mere prejudice to assume that it is harder for the great than for the little to be, and that easiest of all it is to be nothing. What makes things difficult in any line is the alien obstructions that are met with, and the smaller and weaker the thing the more powerful over it these become.

William James, Some problems of philosophy: beginning of an introduction to philosophy, London, 1911, pp. 42-43

I recall my eventual dissertation supervisor, Bernard Williams, saying to me once that he didn’t think that anyone could do ethics competently without a thorough grounding in logic. I nodded solemnly as if to register agreement, though I had never spent a minute studying logic and didn’t even know what a modus ponens was—in fact, I still don’t, though I know it has something to do with p and q.

Jeff McMahan, Normative Ethics: 5 Questions, United States, 2007, p. 69

Where almost everyone feels that a particular kind of conduct is wrong, that might seem solid evidence that such conduct really is wrong. But Mill is not denying that our moral feelings provide some prima facie support for our moral opinions. If we feel that torturing children or stealing bread from the starving are wrong actions, then they probably are wrong. However, it is worth remembering some of the other moral feelings that people have also had in the past. Thus at various times people have felt that it was right to burn heretics and witches, to practice slavery, to expose unwanted children, and to punish severely wives who were disobedient to their husbands. Reflection on such cases supports Mill’s contention that feeling is an unreliable guide to moral truth, and that it is dangerous to treat it as a final court of appeal. Following Bentham, Mill demands that our moral opinions should be answerable to some external standard—that is, that we should be able to articulate reasons for them that go beyond a statement of our gut feelings, attitudes or ‘intuitions’. The provision of reasons for moral beliefs makes moral debate possible, from which truth and enlightenment can emerge. By contrast, dogmatically insisting that one already knows all the moral answers via one’s feelings or intuitions forecloses the possibility of an escape from error should those feelings or intuitions be wrong. Mill’s position is therefore better described as one of moral caution than of moral skepticism. His aim is not to persuade us that moral knowledge is unattainable, but to warn us against supposing that it can be securely attained by a purely subjective process unassisted by reason.

Geoffrey Scarre, Mill's On liberty: A reader's guide, London, 2007, p. 99

[A] feeling of liking or aversion to an action, confined to an individual, would have no chance of being accepted as a reason. The appeal is always to something which is assumed to belong to all mankind. But it is not of much consequence whether the feeling which is set up as its own standard is the feling of an individual human being, or of a multitude. A feeling is not proved to be right, and exempted from the necessity of justifying itself, because the writer or speaker is not only conscious of it in himself, but expects to find in other people, because instead of saying “I,” he says “you and I.”

John Stuart Mill, The collected works of John Stuart Mill, Indianapolis, Ind, 1988, pp. 178-179

The capitalist ideal of free and voluntary exchange, producers competing to serve consumer needs in the market, individuals following their own bent without outside coercive interference, nations relating as cooperating parties in trade, each individual receiving what others who have earned it choose to bestow for service, no sacrifice imposed on some by others, has been coupled with and provided a cover for other things: international predation, companies bribing governments abroad or at home for special privileges which enable them to avoid competition and exploit their specially granted position, the propping up of autocratic regimes—ones often based upon torture—that countenance this delimited private market, wars for the gaining of resources or market territories, the domination of workers by supervisors or employers, companies keeping secret some injurious effects of their products or manufacturing processes, etc.

Robert Nozick, The ideal and the actual, in Robert Nozick (ed.) Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, New York, 1990, pp. 279–285, p. 280

I am forty-four. Not old, but old enough that friends and family are beginning to provide more occasions for funerals than for weddings. Old enough to love life for what it is. Old enough to see that it has meaning, even while seeing that it has less than I might wish.

David Schmidtz (ed.), Robert Nozick, Cambridge, UK ; New York, 2002, p. 199

Future generations, I suspect, will wonder why it took us so long in the twentieth century to see the centrality of consciousness in the understanding of our very existence as human beings. Why, for so long, did we think that consciousness did not matter, that it was unimportant? The paradox is that consciousness is the condition that makes it possible for anything at all to matter to anybody. Only to conscious agents can there ever be a question of anything mattering or having any importance at all.

John R. Searle, The mystery of consciousness, The New York Review of Books, 1995, p. xiv

The Matrix naturally adopts the perspective of the humans: they are the victims, the slaves, cruelly exploited by the machines. But there is another perspective, that of the machines themselves. […] The machines need to factory farm the humans, as a direct result of the humans’ trying to exterminate the machines, but they do so as painlessly as possible. Compared to the way the humans used to treat their own factory-farm animals—their own fuel cells-the machines are models of caring livestock husbandry.

Christopher Grau (ed.), Philosophers explore The Matrix, Oxford, 2005, pp. 62-63

It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds—a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and the technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others are not so lucky or so prudent, perish.

Carl Sagan, Pale blue dot: A vision of the human future in space, New York, 1994, pp. 305-306

An absent-minded person who needs to remember to do an errand on the way to work may choose to drive an unaccustomed route, knowing that if he drives his usual route he will pursue his usual thoughts and nothing will remind him along the way of the errand he must stop for, while an unaccustomed route will continually remind him that there is some reason for his being in strange surroundings.

Thomas C. Schelling, Enforcing rules on oneself, Journal of law, economics & organization, vol. 1, no. 2, 1985, pp. 357–374, p. 361

[A] man’s attractiveness in short-term mating contexts is just as important to women as a woman’s attractiveness is to men when men evaluate long-term mates.

Jeffry Simpson, The Evolution of Human Mating: Trade-Offs and Strategic Pluralism, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 23, no. 4, 2000, pp. 581, p. 581

If you are chronically spending every Saturday night alone, despite valiant and persistent effort to find a date, then chances are there’s something wrong with you, at least in this area of life. You probably don’t possess the qualities that members of the opposite sex seek in potential mates. Evolutionary psychological research has not only discovered what these traits are that men and women seek in each other, but also that the traits sought after by men and women are culturally universal; men everywhere in the world seek the same traits in women (such as youth and physical attractiveness) and women everywhere in the world seek the same traits in men (such as wealth and status). In fact, one of the themes of evolutionary psychology is that human nature is universal (or “species-typical”) and people are the same everywhere (or their cultural differences can be explained by the interaction of universal human nature and the local conditions). You may be comforted to know that you are not alone in your plight; there are losers like you everywhere in the world, and for the same reasons.

Satoshi Kanazawa, The evolutionary psychological imagination: Why you can't get a date on a Saturday night and why most suicide bombers are Muslim., Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 7–17, p. 8

Relinquish authority to somebody else: let him hold your car keys.

Commit or contract: order your lunch in advance.

Disable or remove yourself: throw your car keys into the darkness; make yourself sick.

Remove the mischievous resources: don’t keep liquor, or sleeping pills, in the house; order a hotel room without television.

Submit to surveillance.

Incarcerate yourself. Have somebody drop you at a cheap motel without telephone or television and call for you after eight hours’ work. (When George Steiner visited the home of Georg Lukacs he was astonished at how much work Lukacs, who was under political restraint, had recently published-shelves of work. Lukacs was amused and explained, “You want to know how one gets work done? House arrest, Steiner, house arrest!”)

Arrange rewards and penalties. Charging yourself $100 payable to a political candidate you despise for any cigarette you smoke except on twenty-four hours’ notice is a powerful deterrent to rationalizing that a single cigarette by itself can’t do any harm.

Reschedule your life: do your food shopping right after breakfast.

Watch out for precursors: if coffee, alcohol, or sweet desserts make a cigarette irresistible, maybe you can resist those complementary foods and drinks and avoid the cigarette.

Arrange delays: the crisis may pass before the time is up.

Use buddies and teams: exercise together, order each other’s lunches.

Automate the behavior. The automation that I look forward to is a device implanted to monitor cerebral hemorrhage that, if the stroke is severe enough to indicate a hideous survival, kills the patient before anyone can intervene to remove it.

Finally, set yourself the kinds of rules that are enforceable. Use bright lines and clear definitions, qualitative rather than quantitative limits if possible. Arrange ceremonial beginnings. If procrastination is your problem, set piecemeal goals. Make very specific delay rules, requiring notice before relapse, with notice subject to withdrawal.Permit no exceptions.

Thomas C. Schelling, Self-command in practice, in policy, and in a theory of rational choice, American economic review, vol. 74, no. 2, 1984, pp. 1–11, pp. 6-7

Some have argued that the difference between the deaths of several hundred million people in a nuclear war (as has been thought until recently to be a reasonable upper limit) and the death of every person on Earth (as now seems possible) is only a matter of one order of magnitude. For me, the difference is considerably greater. Restricting our attention only to those who die as a consequence of the war conceals its full impact.

If we are required to calibrate extinction in numerical terms, I would be sure to include the number of people in future generations who would not be born. A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will be humans. Even if the population remains static, with an average lifetime of the order of 100 years, over a typical time period ofor the biological evolution of a successful species (roughly ten million years), we are talking about some 500 trillion people yet to come. By this criterion, the stakes are one million times greater for extinction that for the more modest nuclear wars that kill “only” hundreds of millions of people.

There are many other possible measures of the potential loss—including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.

Carl Sagan, Nuclear war and climatic catastrophe: some policy implications, Foreign Affairs, vol. 62, no. 2, 1983, pp. 257, p. 275