Quotes

Either this is the best of all possible worlds, or God is not omnipotent, not perfectly good, or does not exist.

Stephen Grover, Why only the best is good enough, Analysis, vol. 48, no. 4, 1988, pp. 224–224, p. 224

It can’t possibly be a good idea to assess philosophical theories by the extent to which they preserve everyday intuitions. The trouble is that everyday intuitions are often nothing more than bad old theories in disguise. Any amount of nonsense was once part of common sense, and much nonsense no doubt still is. It was once absolutely obvious that the heavens revolve around the earth each day, that the heart is the seat of the soul, that without religion there can be no morality, that perception involves the reception of sensible forms, and so on. If philosophy had been forced to respect these everyday intuitions, we would still be in the intellectual dark ages.

David Papineau, The tyranny of common sense, The Philosophers' Magazine, no. 34, 2006, pp. 19–25

It is a puzzle how so many people, including intellectuals and academics, devote enormous energy to work in which nothing of themselves or their important goals shines forth, not even in the way their work is presented. If they were struck down, their children upon growing up and examining their work would never know why they had done it, would never know who it was that did it. They work that way and sometimes live that way, too.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical explanations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 578

Nature, by whatever mixture of chance and natural necessity, of natural selection and other less predictable evolutionary processes, has given us capacities for theoretical understanding in fundamental physics and higher mathematics that were of no conceivable use (as such) in the adaptive environments in which our hominid line evolved. For similarly unknown reasons it has made us phenomenally conscious experiencers of affective happiness and suffering.

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. 416

Now, let us hear another story. A man goes to India, consults a sage in a cave and asks him the meaning of life. In three sentences the sage tells him, the man thanks him and leaves. There are several variants of this story also: In the first, the man lives meaningfully ever after; in the second he makes the sentences public so that everyone then knows the meaning of life; in the third, he sets the sentences to rock music, making his fortune and enabling everyone to whistle the meaning of life; and in the fourth variant, his plane crashes as he is flying off from his meeting with the sage. In the fifth version, the person listening to me tell this story eagerly asks what sentences the sage spoke.

And in the sixth version, I tell him.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical explanations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, pp. 573-574

When large regions of one’s data are suspect and for that reason given less credence, even complex curves will tend to look simpler as they are interpolated across such suspect regions. In general, the more error one expects in one’s intuitions (one’s data, in the curve-fitting context), the more one prefers simpler moral principles (one’s curves) that are less context-dependent. This might, but need not, tip the balance of reflective equilibrium so much that we adopt very simple and general moral principles, such as utilitarianism. This might not be appealing, but if we really distrust some broad set of our moral intuitions, this may be the best that we can do.

Robin Hanson, Why health is not special: Errors in evolved bioethics intuitions, Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 19, no. 2, 2002, pp. 153–179, p. 179

We ought […] to take for granted, as first principles, things wherein we fid an universal agreement, among the learned and unlearned, in the different nations and ages of the world. A consent of ages and nations, of the learned and vulgar, ought, at least, to have great authority, unless we can show some prejudice, as universal as the consent is, which might be the cause of it. Truth is one, but error is infinite.

Thomas Reid et al., Essays on the intellectual powers of man, University Park, Pa, 1785, p. 2

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

Oscar wilde and Anton Lesser, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, S.I., 1888

Henry Sidgwick, quoted in Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the universe: An intellectual biography, 2004, p. vi

Pablo Neruda, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, Barcelona, 1924

If it were possible to blot entirely out the whole of German metaphysics, the whole of Christian theology, and the whole of the Roman and English systems of technical jurisprudence, and to direct all the minds that expand their faculties in these three pursuits to useful speculation or practice, there would be talent enough set at liberty to change the face of the world.

John Stuart Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, in Francis E. Mineka (ed.) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1963, p. 652

Though goodness is various, variety is not in itself good.

James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, equality, fraternity, New York, 1873, p. 43

Kawika Pierson and Fred Thompson, How you buy affects what you get: Technology acquisition by state governments, Government Information Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3, 2016, pp. 494–505

I am in the situation where people who recognize me and meet me briefly will decide for the rest of their lives what sort of a person I am based on that momentary interaction. People who are really famous must find this paralysing. I try so hard always to be extra-friendly with people, to avoid the awful thought that they may have been left with a poor impression of me. Knowing what famous people are ‘really like’ is an understandable source of fascination: we are all interested to know, regardless of whether or not we have a small amount of fame ourselves. Once, at the start of my career, I hurried into a café in Bristol to look for someone I was due to meet but thought I had missed. As I went through the door, I was looking over the heads of everyone to spot my friend’s ginger hair (I have no problem with that lot) and in my rather flustered state I didn’t notice that a couple, on their way out, had opened the door for me. Unwittingly I had just rushed right past them with my nose in the air. I was only aware when it was too late. I heard a mumbling of my name and a ‘Did you see that? Unbelievable’ as they walked away. That was their experience of meeting Derren Brown, and they went away thinking I was a cunt. And I’m sure they still delight in telling other people when my name comes up, ‘Derren Brown? Yes, met him once. An absolute cunt. Famous for it.’ And I might as well have been. It still makes me cringe. I’m sorry. I hope they read this. The café was the Primrose Café in Bristol. Please read this.

Derren Brown, Tricks of the mind, London, 2009, pp. 204-205

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is referable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.

Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and ethics and other essays, Charleston, S.C., 1884, p. 80

[H]euristics provide explanations of actual behavior; they are not normative ideals. Their existence, however, poses normative questions.

Gerd Gigerenzer, Moral intuition = fast and frugal heuristics?, in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.) Moral psychology, vol 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity., Cambridge, MA, 2008, pp. 1–26, p. 5

What is needed is a system (a) that does not depend for its execution upon the good-will of fellow jobholders, and (b) that provides swift, certain and unpedantic punishments, each fittet neatly to its crime.

I announce without further ado that such a system, after due prayer, I have devised. It is simple, it is unhackneyed, and I believe that it would work. It is divided into two halves. The first half takes the detection and punishment of the crimes of jobholders away from courts of impeachment, congressional smelling committees, and all the other existing agencies–i.e., away from other jobholders—and vest it in the whole body of free citizens, male and female. The second half provides that any member of that body, having looked into the acts of a jobholder and found him delinquent, may punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems appropriate and convenient—and that, in case this punishment involves physical damage to the jobholder, the ensuing inquiry by the grand jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question whether the jobholder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay or even lynch a jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined.

The American Mercury, 1924

I finished my doctoral dissertation when I was very young, at about the age of twenty-three. I thought I wanted to direct my philosophical work to questions that I really cared to answer. This is going to sound strange because one assumes that one will work on things that one cares to answer, but there are a lot of intellectually intriguing questions in philosophy: puzzles, paradoxes, little things that one can think about, especially in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, which were there for their own sake. I had a little imaginary experiment I haven’t thought about since then: if I were working on certain topics for two years, and if I were in an automobile accident that caused me to be in a coma, and then, when I came out of the coma, was told that somebody had solved this problem, but that it had been done in such a difficult way that I would have to spend a year of my life trying to understand the solution, would I still be interested in it?

Robert Nozick, The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre and Kuhn, Chicago, 1994, p. 77

Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara.

Jorge Luis Borges, El hacedor, Madrid, 1960

[Pain] is a bad thing in itself. It does not matter who experiences it, or where it comes in a life, or where in the course of a painful episode. Pain is bad; it should not happen. There should be as little pain as possible in the world, however it is distributed across people and across time.

John Broome, More pain or less?, Analysis, vol. 56, no. 2, 1996, pp. 116–118, p. 117