Quotes

It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn’t there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation—the least unlikely state of affairs, the most economical solution to all possible problems, the simplest explanation–nothing is what you would have expected there to be. But such was not the case, self-evidently. And yet although it was impossible to know what there was, and therefore impossible to say what it was, and perhaps therefore even impossible to assert that there was any/thing/, something was unquestionably going on. Yet how could anything be going on? In what medium? Nothingness? Impossible to conceive: and yet undeniably something was happening.

Although more and more given to talk and discussion and argument as I grew older, for several years I never encountered anyone who felt the same fascination as I did with these questions. By the time I had grown into adulthood I had become familiar with a number of general attitudes to experience that seemed to embrace among themselves most people, at least most of those I met, but none of them was at all like mine. There seemed to be three main groupings. First, there were people who took the world for granted as they found it: that’s how things are, and it’s obvious that that’s how they are, and talking about it isn’t going to change it, so there’s no purpose that perpetually questioning it is going to serve; discussing it is really a waste of time, even thinking about it much is a waste of time; what we have to do is get on with the practical business of living, not indulge in a lot of useless speculation and ineffectual talk That seemed to be roughly the outlook of most people. Then there were others who regarded that attitude as superficial, on religious grounds. According to them, this life was no more than an overture, a prelude to the real thing. There was a God who had made this world, including us, and had given us immortal souls, so that when our bodies died after a brief sojourn on earth the souls in them would go on for ever in some “higher” realm. Such people tended to think that in the eye of eternity this present world of ours was not all that important, and whenever one raised questions about the self-contradictory nature of our experience they would shrug their shoulders and attribute this to the inscrutable workings of a God. It was not that they used this as the answer to all questions, because what such people said seldom answered any actual questions: they felt under no pressure to do so. God knew al the answers to all the questions, and his nature was inscrutable to us, therefore the only thing for us to do was to put our trust in him and stop bothering ourselves with questions to which we could not possibly know the answers until after we died. It seemed to me that this attitude was at bottom as incurious as the first; it just offered a different reason for not asking questions; and equally obviously it did not really feel the problems. There was no awareness in it of the real extraordinariness of the world: on the contrary, people who subscribed to it were often marked by a certain complacency, not to say smugness. They seemed to be happily lulling themselves to sleep with a story which might or might not be true but which they had no serious grounds for believing.

Finally, there were people who condemned both of these other sets of attitudes as uncomprehending and mistaken, on what one might call rationalistic grounds. They critically questioned both the ways things are and traditional religious beliefs, and challenged the adherents of either for proof, or at least good evidence; for some justification, or at least good argument. These tended in spirit to be either children of the enlightenment or children of the age of science, and in either case to have a kind of outlook that did not begin to exist until the seventeenth century. They seemed to believe that everything was explicable in the light of reason, that rational enquiry would eventually make all desirable discoveries, and that in principle if not altogether in practice all problems could be solved by the application of rationality. Most of my friends and fellow spirits seemed to fall into this third category, and indeed I tended to agree with their criticisms of the other two. My problem was that their own positive beliefs seemed to me manifestly untenable, and their attitudes—well, perhaps not quite as comfortable and complacent as those they criticized, but comfortable and complacent none the less. They seemed to think that the world was an intelligible place, and I did not see how in the light of a moment’s thought this belief could be entertained. […] What cut me off most deeply of all from this attitude, and what I also found hardest to understand about it, was its lack of any sense of the amazingness of our existence, indeed of the existence of anything at all-the sheer miraculousness of everything.

Bryan Magee, Confessions of a philosopher: a personal journey through Western philosophy from Plato to Popper, New York, 1997, pp. 13-15

Philosophers do not agree about anything to speak of. And why not? How can it be that equally intelligent and well-trained philosophers can disagree about the freedom of the will or nominalism or the covering-law model of scientific explanation when each is aware of all the arguments and distinctions and other relevant considerations that the others are aware of? How can we philosophers possibly regard ourselves as justified in believing anything of philosophical significance under these conditions? How can I believe (as I do) that free will is incompatible with determinism or that unrealized possibilities are not physical objects or that human beings are not four-dimensional things extended in time as well as in space when David Lewis—a philosopher of truly formidable intelligence and insight and ability—rejects these things I believe and is aware of and understands perfectly every argument that I could bring in their defense?

Peter van Inwagen, Quam dilecta, in Thomas V. Morris (ed.) God and the philosophers: the reconciliation of faith and reason, Oxford, 1994, pp. 31–60, pp. 40-41

[I]n the end the surest means of advancing the utilitarian cause, will be to advance that of humanity, since it is by the intelligent acts of man alone, if by any means, that right may be made to reign throughout the sentient world.

James MacKaye, The Economy of Happiness, Boston, 1906, p. 188

The physical sciences—physics, chemistry, biology—tell us a great deal about what our world is like. In addition, they tell us a great deal about what we are like. They tell us what our bodies are made of, the chemical reactions necessary for life, how our ears extract location information from sound waves, the evolutionary account of how various bits of us are as they are, what causes our bodies to move through the physical environment as they do, and so on. We can think of the true, complete physical account of us as an aggregation of all there is to say about us that can be constructed from the materials to be found in the various physical sciences. This account tells the story of us as revealed by the physical sciences.

Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (eds.), The oxford handbook of contemporary philosophy, Oxford, 2007, pp. 310-311

That alcohol in dilute aqueous solution, when taken into the human organism, acts as a depressant, not a stimulant, is now so much a commonplace of knowledge that even the more advanced varieties of physiologists are beginning to be aware of it. The intelligent layman no longer resorts to the jug when he has important business before him, whether intellectual or manual; he resorts to it after his business is done, and he desires to release his taut nerves and reduce the steam-pressure in his spleen. Alcohol, so to speak, unwinds us. It raises the threshold of sensation and makes us less sensitive to external stimuli, and particularly to those that are unpleasant. Putting a brake upon all the qualities which enable us to get on in the world and shine before our fellows - for example, combativeness, shrewdness, diligence, ambition-, it releases the qualities which mellow us and make our fellows love us - for example, amiability, generosity, toleration, humor, sympathy. A man who has taken aboard two or three cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed of trust, or to conduct Bach’s B minor mass, but he is immensely more competent to entertain a dinner party, to admire a pretty girl, or to hear Bach’s B minor mass. The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind. Pithecanthropus erectus was a teetotaler, but the angels, you may be sure, know what is proper at 5 p.m.

The American Mercury, 1924, p. 101

Pain that is equally intense may be equally bad even in the absence of self-consciousness. It is not necessary to have the thought “I am in pain” in order for pain to be bad. As people who have experienced the more intense forms of pain are aware, pain can blot out self-consciousness altogether. Intense pain can dominate consciousness completely, filling it and crowding out all self-conscious thoughts.

Jeff McMahan, The ethics of killing: Problems at the margins of life, New York, 2003, p. 229

My advice to Broome is to be less sadistic.

Krister Bykvist et al., The good, the bad, and the ethically neutral, Economics and philosophy, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, pp. 97–105, p. 105

Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfare economics: introduction and development of basic concepts, London, 1979, p. v

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

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

Emotional reactions typically involve extensive cognitive processing, but affective neuroscience is distinguishable from cognitive neuroscience in that emotional processes must also always involve an aspect of affect, the psychological quality of being good or bad.

Kent C. Berridge, Pleasures of the brain, Brain and cognition, vol. 52, no. 1, 2003, pp. 106–128, p. 106

You do not abolish your commitments by refusing to be explicit about them, any more than you can get rid of unpleasant realities by employing euphemisms.

Peter F. Strawson, Analysis and metaphysics: An introduction to philosophy, Oxford, 1992, p. 49

Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective, and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours. On the other hand, like sex it implies some physical action—marching, chanting slogans, singing—through which the merger of the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression. […] When, in British isolation two years later, I reflected on the basis of my communism, this sense of ‘mass ecstasy’ (Massenekstase, for I wrote my diary in German) was one of the five components of it—together with pity for the exploited, the aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, ‘’dialectical materialism’, a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism.

Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting times: a twentieth-century life, London, 2002, pp. 73-74

We have next to consider who the “all” are, whose happiness is to be taken into account. Are we to extend our concern to all the beings capable of pleasure and pain whose feelings are affected by our conduct? or are we to confine our view to human happiness? The former view is the one adopted by Bentham and Mill, and (I believe) by the Utilitarian school generally: and is obviously most in accordance with the universality that is characteristic of their principle. It is the Good Universal, interpreted and defined as ‘happiness’ or ‘pleasure,’ at which a Utilitarian considers it his duty to aim: and it seems arbitrary and unreasonable to exclude from the end, as so conceived, any pleasure of any sentient being.

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, London, 1907, p. 1

[C]ommon-sense deontological morality, standing between egoism and consequentialism, sometimes seems to be caught in a kind of normative squeeze, with its rationality challenged in parallel ways by (as it were) the maximizers of the right and of the left: those who think that one ought always to pursue one’s good, and those who are convinced that one should promote the good of all.

Samuel Scheffler, Agent-centred restrictions, rationality, and the virtues, Mind, vol. 44, no. 375, 1985, pp. 409–419, p. 415

Epicurus’s hedonism actually implies that death normally harms you. Epicurus thinks it implies the opposite, but he is mistaken. He is right that there is no time when death harms you, but it does not follow that death does not harm you. It may harm you, even though it harms you at no time.

John Broome, What is your life worth?, Dædalus, vol. 137, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49–56, p. 52

[H]alf the time I personally have forgotten what the date is, and have to look it up or ask somebody when I need it for writing cheques, etc.; yet even in this perceptual dateless haze one somehow communicates, one makes oneself understood, and with time-references too. One says, e.g., “Thank goodness that’s over!”, and not only is this, when said, quite clear without any date appended, but it says something which it is impossible that any use of a tenseless copula with a date should convey. It certainly doesn’t mean the same as, e.g. “Thank goodness the date of the conclusion of that thing is Friday, June 15, 1954”, even if it be said then. (Nor, for that matter, does it mean “Thank goodness the conclusion of that thing is contemporaneous with this utterance”. Why should anyone thank goodness for that?)

Arthur Norman Prior, Thank goodness that's over, Philosophy, vol. 34, no. 128, 1959, pp. 12–17, p. 17

Nature, even human nature, will cease more and more to be an absolute datum: more and more, it will become what scientific manipulation has made it.

Bertrand Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, Hoboken, 1961, p. 371

The evidentialist objection to belief in God cannot be sidestepped through any analogy with beliefs that we hold in the absence of evidence, but which it is clearly rational for us to believe. The beliefs about matters of fact and existence that we do hold without evidence in their support—beliefs like Plantinga’s strictly and loosely basic beliefs or Kenny’s fundamental beliefs—are related to sense-experience or to our trust in procedures of belief-formation on the basis of sense-experience in ways quite different from the ways in which religious beliefs are related to that experience and those procedures. Not can religious beliefs which arise directly out of experience other than ordinary perceptual experience be directly evident, for they manifest few of the signs of reliability which ordinary perceptual claims manifest and show signs of unreliability as well. If we regard the belief that God exists as an unjustified and unjustifiable presupposition of the theist’s world picture then we either relinquish any claim to rationality for that belief, or attain the required rationality only at the cost of abandoning the claim to objectivity which genuinely theistic belief cannot go without.

Stephen Grover, God and the Absence of Evidence, 1987, p. 185

Many […] Christians […] are sincerely compassionate; they genuinely forgive their enemies. Yet they knowingly worship the perpetrator. Perhaps they do not like to think about it, but they firmly believe that, in the hereafter, their God will consign people they know, some of whom they love, to an eternity of unimaginable agony. Moved by this thought, they do whatever they can to urge others to join them in faith. Their deep sympathy with the unbelievers is expressed in efforts to persuade others to play by the rules the perpetrator has set. In worshiping the perpetrator, however, they acquiesce in those rules. They are well aware that many will not fall in line with the rules. They think that, if that happens, the perpetrator will be right to start the eternal torture. They endorse the divine evil. And that’s bad enough.

David K. Lewis and Louise M. Antony, Divine evil, in Louise M. Antony (ed.) Philosophers without gods: Meditations on atheism and the secular life, Oxford, 2007, pp. 231–242, p. 239

[On Parfit’s view], the boundaries within lives are like the boundaries between lives. So we do not regard people as the morally significant units. This only means that if we are concerned with distribution at all, we shall be concerned with distribution between what are the morally significant units—namely, person-segments or whatever these divisions of a person are. So certainly the fact that a person has suffered more in the past will not make us give extra weight to relieving her suffering now. But if she is suffering more now, we may give extra weight to it. We may be concerned to equalize the distribution of good between person-segments. So all this argument does is remind us that we have changed the units of distribution. It does not suggest that we should be less interested in distribution between them.

John Broome, Utilitarian metaphysics?, in Jon Elster and John E. Roemer (eds.) Interpersonal comparisons of well-being, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 70–95, p. 94