Quotes

Upon the whole, then, it appears, that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature. When, therefore, these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principle here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation; and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.

David Hume, An enquiry concerning human understanding: A critical edition, Oxford, 2000

I always am surprised when people say, ‘Oh that was a nice discussion. That was fun.’ I think, ‘Fun? Fun? This is a serious matter!’ You try and try to get the right account of the moral phenomena in such cases as the Trolley Case, and getting it right is just as important as when you are doing an experiment in natural science, or any other difficult intellectual undertaking. If we worked on a NASA rocket, and it launched well, we wouldn’t say, ‘Well that was fun!’ It was aweinspiring, that’s the right way of putting it!

[Moral] intuitions would fit the earlier social situations of people in hunter-gatherer societies, that is, the social conditions in which the evolutionary selection that shaped our current intuitions took place. (Would justifying norms by such intuitions make them relative to the conditions of hunter-gatherer societies?) How much weight should be placed upon such intuitions? Since they were instilled as surrogates for inclusive fitness, being correlated with it, why not now go directly to calculations of inclusive fitness itself? Or why not, instead, calculate what intuitions would be installed by an evolutionary process that operated over a longer period in which current social conditions held sway, and then justify our moral beliefs by their confluence with / those/ (hypothetical) intuitions, ones better suited to our current situation than the intuitions we have inherited? Or why stay with intuitions instilled by evolution rather than ones instilled by cultural processes, or by some other process we currently find attractive? (But what is the basis of our finding it attractive?)

Robert Nozick, Invariances: The structure of the objective world, Cambridge, MA, 2001, pp. 388-339

[Y]ou will often hear so-called experts complaining that taxes on driving or on pollution would be bad for the economy. That sounds worrying. But what is ‘the economy’? If you spend enough time watching Bloomberg television or reading the Wall Street Journal you may come to the mistaken impression that ‘the economy’ is a bunch of rather dull statistics with names like GDP (gross domestic product). GDP measures the total cost of producing everything in the economy in one year—for instance, one extra cappuccino would add £1.85 to GDP, or a little less if some of the ingredients were imported. And if you think this is ‘the economy’, then the experts may be right. A pollution tax might well make a number like GDP smaller. But who cares? Certainly not economists. We know that GDP measures lots of things that are harmful (sales of weapons, shoddy building work with subsequent expensive repairs, expenditures on commuting) and misses lots of things that are important, such as looking after your children or going for a walk in the mountains.

Most economics has very little to do with GDP. Economics is about who gets what and why.

Tim Harford, The undercover economist: exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor—and why you can never buy a decent used car!, Oxford, 2006, p. 109

By the end of this book, if not before, you may come to have a fuller appreciation of some of your central beliefs about yourself, and some of your related attitudes. In particular, you may come to realize more fully that, even as you yourself most deeply believe, after several more decades at most, you will cease to exist, completely and forever. In the light of this awareness, and according to your deepest values, perhaps you will make the most of your quite limited existence.

Peter Unger, Identity, consciousness and value, Oxford, 1990, p. 3

It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the woods, Boston, 1854

Logic cannot make me suffer.

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

If one goes for a long time without serious pain, one can more or less forget its distinctive nature. But then, when it comes, one is reminded only too well of what it is like, that is, of its reality as a distinctive quality of experience.

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. 127

Most of the time, we live in an illusion of meaningfulness and only some times, when we are philosophically reflective, are we aware of reality and the meaninglessness of our lives. It seems obvious that this has a genetic basis, due to Darwinian laws of evolution. In order to survive and reproduce, it must seem to us most of the time that our actions are not futile, that people have rights. The rare occasions in which we know the truth about life are genetically prevented from overriding living our daily lives with the illusion that they are meaningful. As I progress through this paper, I have the illusion that my efforts are not utterly futile, but right now, as I stop and reflect, I realise that any further effort put into this paper is a futile expenditure of my energy.

Quentin Smith, Moral realism and infinite spacetime imply moral nihilism, in Heather Dyke (ed.) Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, Dordrecht, 2003, pp. 43–54, p. 53

If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sight and Sound, Jackson, 2006, pp. 152-153

He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain’s unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it has his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony.

Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff, The fountainhead, New York, 1943, p. 1

[W]e may, without realizing it or even being able to admit it to ourselves, develop patterns of behaviour that encourage or discourage specific behaviors in others, such as the unconscious means by which we cause those whose company we do not enjoy not to enjoy our company.

Peter Railton, Moral realism, Philosophical review, vol. 95, no. 2, 1986, pp. 163–207, p. 187

According to his early biographers, at a certain point in his life Kant had a ‘maxim’ not to smoke more than a single pipe a day, tempted though he was. He adhered to this maxim rigorously. After a while, however, he bought a bigger pipe.

Jens Timmermann, Kant, in Sacha Golob and Jens Timmermann (eds.) The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy, 2000, pp. 394–409, p. 39

Analytical philosophers often aim at producing moral principles that may be very complex in structure, full of subclauses and qualifications, because these principles enable them to capture “our moral intuitions” and the precisely worded epicyclic subclauses enable us to deal cleverly with threatened counterexamples of various kinds. […] But the resulting principles often do more to disguise than to state the fundamental value basis on which decisions are to be made.

Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Kant and modern philosophy, Cambridge, 2006, p. 346

[I]t is difficult to believe that the way in which an agent is instrumental in the occurrence of an outcome could be more important than the nature of the outcome itself. Consider the value of an entire human life—of all the good that the life contains. Now suppose that one must choose between killing one person to save two and allowing the two to die. Is it really credible to suppose that how one acts on that single occasion matters more in moral terms than the whole of the life that will be lost if one lets the two die rather than killing the one?

Jeff McMahan, Killing, letting die, and withdrawing aid, Ethics, vol. 103, no. 2, 1993, pp. 250–279, p. 279

As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs.

John Gray, Straw dogs: Thoughts on humans and other animals, London, 2002, p. 37

Most of the time my separate existence looks pretty important to me[.]

George Orwell, Coming up for air, San Diego, 1939, p. 8

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man […] with no means of filling up time is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

George Orwell, Down And Out In Paris And London, Boston, 1933, p. 33

[N]o basta ser antiperonista para ser buena persona, pero basta ser peronista para ser una mala persona.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, Barcelona, 2006, p. 194

[Thoreau] was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort[.]

Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions, Cornhill Magazine, 1880