Quotes

[I]t is true that ‘I seem to see a table’ does not entail ‘I see a table’; but ‘I seem to feel a pain’ does entail ‘I feel a pain’. So scepticism loses its force—cannot open up its characteristic gap—with regard to that which ultimately most concerns us, pleasure and pain.

Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief, Oxford, 2010, p. 223

If the reader wishes to form an impartial judgment as to what the fundamental problems of Ethics really are, and what is the true answer to them, it is of the first importance that he should not confine himself to reading works of any one single type, but should realize what extremely different sorts of things have seemed to different writers, of acknowledged reputation, to be the most important things to be said about the subject.

G. E. Moore, Ethics, London, 1912, p. 253

In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion—a minimal respect for facts and logic—has been virtually abandoned.

Noam Chomsky, Language and politics, Oakland, 2004, p. 291

[T]he inhuman severity of the paradox that ‘pleasure and pain are indifferent to the wise man,’ never failed to have a repellent effect; and the imaginary rack on which an imaginary sage had to be maintained in perfect happiness, was at any rate a dangerous instrument of dialectical torment or the actual philosopher.

Christianity extricated the moral consciousness from this dilemma between base subserviency and inhuman indifference to the feelings of the moral agent. It compromised the long conflict between Virtue and Pleasure, by transferring to another world the fullest realisation of both; thus enabling orthodox morality to assert itself, as reasonable and natural, without denying the concurrent reasonableness and naturalness of the individual’s desire or bliss without allow.

Henry Sidgwick, Hedonism and ultimate good, Mind, vol. 2, no. 5, 1877, pp. 27–38, p. 30

El punto y coma es un signo considerado a veces arbitrario; sin embargo, cumple importantes funciones sintácticas y estilísticas.

Juan Gabriel López Guix and Jacqueline Minett Wilkinson, Manual de traducción: inglés-castellano: teoría y práctica, Barcelona, 1997, p. 152

When I am in pain, it is plain, as plain as anything is, that what I am experiencing is bad.

Guy Kahane, The sovereignty of suffering: Reflections on pain's badness, 2004, p. 2

The degrees of intensity are often more accurately described as degrees of saturation (of an experience with pleasantness) that are characteristic of the experience in question. Lust, for instance, is so highly saturated with pleasantness that is has usurped its very name.

Karl Duncker, On pleasure, emotion, and striving, Philosophy and phenomenological research, vol. 1, no. 4, 1941, pp. 391–430, p. 408

Things in their present enjoyment are what they seem; the apparent and real good are, in this case, always the same. For the pain or pleasure being just so great and no greater than it is felt, the present good or evil is really so much as it appears.

John Locke, An essay concerning human understanding, Oxford, 1975, p. 21

I think that while some parts of natural human morality may rest on illusion, hedonically grounded practical reasons, and at least those parts of morality that rest on them, very likely have some objective normative standing.

Leonard David Katz, Hedonic reasons as ultimately justifying and the relevance of neuroscience, in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.) Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, Cambridge, MA, 2008, pp. 409–417, p. 409

[A]nalytical Marxists do no think that Marxism possesses a distinctive and valuable method. Others believe that is has such a method, which they call ‘dialectical’. But we believe that, although the word ‘dialectical’ has not always been used without clear meaning, it has never been used with clear meaning to denote a method rival to the analytical one[.] […] I do not think that the following, to take a recent example, describes such a method: “This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic: a logic or form of explanation specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history.” (Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, p. 97.) If you read a sentence like that quickly, it can sound pretty good. The remedy is to read it more slowly.

Gerald Allen Cohen, Karl Marx's theory of history: A defence, Oxford, 1978, p. ed

Our view does not deny the importance, and indeed inevitability, of our sustaining the construction of a world in which values pertain to things which are not conceived as anyone’s mere personal experience. It will, however, think that for critical reflection the values of the constructed world only matter to whatever extent they, or the belief in them, are values realized in immediate experience.

Timothy L. S. Sprigge, The rational foundations of ethics, London, 1987, p. 182

Delay strategies might seem to hold out the best promise for dealing with emotion-based irrationality. Since emotions tend to have a short half-life, any obstacle to the immediate execution of an action tendency could be an effective remedy. As I note later, public authorities do indeed count on this feature of emotion when they require people to wait before making certain important decisions. It is rare, however, to observe people imposing delays on themselves for the purpose of counteracting passion. The requisite technologies may simply be lacking.

Jon Elster, Explaining social behavior: More nuts and bolts for the social sciences, Cambridge, 2010, p. 242

Picture this: You sit down at your computer to write a report that’s due the next day. You fire up a web browser to check the company intranet for a document. For a split second, you glance at your home page. “Wow!” you say. “The Red Sox won in the 17th inning! Let me see what happened…”

Three hours later, no report’s been written, and you want to throw yourself out of the window.

Sound familiar?

It’s too easy to scamper down the rabbit hole of the Web when you’ve gt pressing tasks to work on. At one point or another, you’ve probably burned a few hours clicking around Wikipedia, Amazon.com, eBay, Flickr, YouTube, or Google News when you had a deadline to meet. Surfing efficiently is an exercise in discipline and sometimes outright abstinence. This hack uses the LeechBlock Firefox extension to blank out certain web sites during times you’re supposed to be working. […]

[A] particularly determined procrastinator might say, “If it’s a block I can disable, I’ll do it.” If you find yourself blocked from a time-wasting site that you insist on visiting (and to hell with your deadline), you could go into LeechBlock’s options and undo the block. However, LeechBlock comes with a clever feature built to prevent just that. In LeechBlock’s options dialog, check off “Prevent access to options for this block set at times when these sites are blocked.”

Gina Trapani, Upgrade your life: The Lifehacker guide to working smarkter, faster, better, Indianapolis, 2008, pp. 140-141

Almost any shift away from the ways in which meat is currently produced and consumed would be better for both animals and people.

Jeff McMahan, Eating animals the nice way, Dædalus, vol. 137, no. 1, 2008, pp. 66–76, p. 76

Everywhere I went in Sweden I was received with the greatest kindness and hospitality. I fell in love with the country and its astonishingly good-looking inhabitants, and have never since fallen out of it.

C. D. Broad, Autobiography, in Paul A. Schilpp (ed.) The philosophy of C.D. Broad, New York, 1959, pp. 3–68, p. 40

If the concept of pleasure is to have a place in an ethical theory, it must be regimented, but only for phenomenological, not scientific, reasons.

Panayot Butchvarov, Skepticism in ethics, Bloomington, 1989, p. 91

With adequate safeguards and cautious preparation, genetic engineering could be used to relieve suffering and increase happiness by quantum leaps. Our short-term prospect here would be the eradication of many genetic handicaps. The medium-term prospect could be the reduction of the proportion of the neurotic and depressed personality. The longer-term prospect might be the dramatic enhancement of our capacity for enjoyment. All these have to be done with extreme caution. The reason we should be very cautious is not so much to avoid sacrificing our current welfare (which is relative small in comparison to that in the future with brain stimulation and genetic engineering) but to avoid destroying our future.

Yew-Kwang Ng and Siang Ng, The road to happiness, 2013, p. 7

[I]t is an objective fact whether a certain experience is pleasurable or unpleasurable, and relatedly whether a particular conscious individual is presently experiencing something pleasurable or painful. It is an objective fact, so we may put it, about a subjective state.

Timothy L. S. Sprigge, Is the esse of intrinsic value percipi?: pleasure, pain and value, in Anthony O'Hear (ed.) Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 119–140, p. 123

The day starts when my alarm clock goes off. I leave a state of dreamless sleep and, for a moment, my situation is worse than it would have been, had the alarm bell remained silent. When I brush my teeth I begin to see some meaning in my life, however, and as soon as I taste my morning coffee the situation looks quite pleasant. However, once I start to read the morning newspaper things become worse. I am reminded of the miserable state of the world (in many respects). In particular, when I read about a famine in the aftermath of a war in Sudan, I feel despair. But when I catch the tube and embark on my journey to work, once again I feel fine. However, when I leave the tube station near my office, I see a child being knocked over by a car. I rush to her rescue and for a short while I stand there, holding the unconscious child in my arms, feeling the weight of her head on my shoulder. I feel miserable. An ambulance arrives and the child is taken care of. I continue my walk to my office. I start preparing a lecture. I call the hospital and learn that the child has not been injured seriously. I give my lecture and get a stimulating response from my audience. I go home by tube and prepare the dinner. My wife, who is a nurse at the hospital, returns home in the evening. We have dinner together, I tell her about the accident, and we go to bed early. The last thing I feel, as wakefulness merges into unconsciousness, is intense well-being.

Torbjörn Tännsjö, Narrow hedonism, Journal of happiness studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2007, pp. 79–98, pp. 81-82

Objection might be taken to the claim that there could be a ‘bare sensation’ of pain which was not disliked. What, it might be asked, would such an experience be like? Can we imagine such an experience? I think that I can not only imagine it, but have had it; but I shall return to this question later. Here I shall just make the obvious point that we cannot conclude, from the fact that something surpasses our imagination, that it cannot happen. I cannot myself imagine what the electric torture would be like; but that does not take away the possibility that it might be inflicted on me. It would be more relevant if it could be established that no sense could be given to the expression ‘experience which is like pain except for not being disliked.’ But that is precisely the question at issue, and this whole paper is an attempt to see what sense can be given to such an expression.

R. M. Hare and P. L. Gardiner, Pain and evil, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 38, no. 1, 1964, pp. 91–124, pp. vol