Quotes
[F]rom the assumption that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being who created the world nothing can be logically deduced concerning whether certain other religious claims held by Judaism, Islam or Christianity are true.
William Rowe, Friendly atheism, skeptical theism, and the problem of evil, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 79–92, pp. 79-92
For most of my life I have been engaged in the study of philosophy, and I discovered early on that it is simultaneously the most exciting and frustrating of subjects.
Anthony Kenny, What I believe, London, 2006, p. 13
Why should th[e] allegedly “impersonal” content [of ideals] matter to us in deciding what to do, if that content, by definition, makes no difference to anyone’s life and so, in that important sense, matters to no one?
Roger Crisp, Egalitarianism and compassion, Ethics, vol. 114, no. 1, 2003, pp. 119–126, p. 129
—Ya te dije, no me banqué la máquina. Algo tenía que decir; si no, me reventaban.
—Eso sí lo entiendo; la máquina no se la banca nadie. Pero ésta no es la cuestión. O uno se la aguanta y no canta, o si no se la banca, delata a los verdaderos responsables. ¿Pero en qué cabeza cabe traer a personas que no tienen nada que ver, para tapar a tu gente? ¡Es una turrada!
El Tano despliega todo su arsenal ideológico para justificar su táctica dilatoria. Su conducta había estado destinada a minimizar el daño. Los verdaderos implicados hubieran sufrido, seguramente, tormentos más severos que quienes no estaban comprometidos en actividades políticas de envergadura. Además, como ya se había comprobado en Atila, los perejiles eran rápidamente liberados. En ese aspecto, las predicciones del Tano habían sido certeras. Y a pesar de que todavía quedaba un perejil adentro, un caso aislado no bastaba para cuestionar la racionalidad de su táctica. Probablemente, su selectividad delatoria había logrado generar el menor sufrimiento posible, aun contando el daño que me había ocasionado.
Existía, no obstante, un aspecto problemático en ese cálculo. El precio de la táctica del Tano había sido pagado por inocentes y no por quienes, por propia voluntad, habían decidido correr el riesgo de ser capturados y torturados.
Durante unos instantes, desaparezco de la conversación, sumido en esos ejercicios de matemática moral. El Tano lo percibe y trata de aprovecharlo. Sorpresivamente, me extiende su mano derecha a modo de reconciliación, para zanjar nuestras diferencias. Mis sensaciones son ambiguas. No siento rencor hacia él. Más bien, vivencio rabia y frustración ante mi cautiverio. Y, por raro que parezca, el razonamiento del Tano me provoca dudas. ¿Era, en verdad, tan canallesco someter a inocentes a un daño menor, para salvar a los verdaderos responsables de una muerte segura?
Claudio Marcello Tamburrini, Pase libre: la fuga de la Mansión Seré, Buenos Aires, 2002, pp. 92-93
[U]na doctrina con elementos libertarios y entiestatalistas debería exlicar por qué ha terminado por constituirse en la aureola ideológica de regímenes autocráticos; de qué modo las promesas que anunciaban el fin de la prehistoria han podido reforzar la historia de crímenes y tormentos de un siglo que no ha carecido precisamente de horrores; cómo el avance hacia una distribución más justa de la riqueza ha sido acompañado de nuevas y reprobables jerarquizaciones; por qué la proyectada democracia de los trabajadores desembocó en la despolitización de las masas y en la negación de derechos sindicales elementales; el pasaje del reino de la necesidad al de la libertad, en el cercenamiento de libertades básicas; el internacionalismo proletario, en el derecho imperial de intervención armada en los territorios sojuzgados y en el enfrentamiento violento y sin principios entre países del mismo campo socialista.
No obstante, si todos esos elementos eran más que suficientes para legitimar la puesta en crisis del marxismo, el anacronismo argentino ha querido que la recibamos con el carácter de una polémica doblemente aplazada, puesto que era imposible tematizarla cuando el terrorismo de Estado se dedicaba a descuartizar los cuerpos de tantos marxistas junto con las doctrinas que los sustentaban. Empero, un relato que hoy exculpe lisa y llanamente la responsabilidad de la izquierda en nuestro país, arguyendo el salvajismo incomnensurablemente mayor de la barbarie militar, no haría más que contribuir a ese viaje tan argentino por los parajes de la amnesia. Tanto las versiones peronistas como de izquierda, tanto las estrategias insurreccionalistas como guerirrlleras, tanto el obrerismo clasista como el purismo armado, estruvieron fuertemente animados de pulsiones jacobinas y autoritarias que se tradujeron en el desconocimiento de la democracia como un valor sustantivo y en una escisión riesgosa entre la política y la moral.
Oscar Terán, Una polémica postergada: la crisis del marxismo, in Oscar Terán (ed.) De utopias, catástrofes y esperanzas: Un camino intelectual, Buenos Aires, 2006, pp. 47–52, p. 49
Buy the gold-plate faucets if you will, but do not accessorize your prose.
William Strunk and E. B. White, The elements of style, Boston, 1999
Societies with private property are often described as free societies. Part of what this means is surely that owners are free to use their property as they please; they are not bound by social or political decisions. […] But that cannot be all that is meant, for it would be equally apposite to describe private property as a system of unfreedom, since it necessarily involves the social exclusion of people form resources that others own.
Jeremy Waldron, Property, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, September 6, 2004
Along with such other persistent offenders as the real and the natural, the concept of the subjective is one of the most treacherous in the philosophers’ lexicon.
Leonard W. Sumner, Welfare, happiness, and ethics, Oxford, 1996, p. 27
Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it.
Kay R. Jamison, An unquiet mind: a memoir of moods and madness, New York, 1995, p. 6
Pragmatism is offered as a revolutionary new way of thinking about ourselves and our thoughts, but it is apparently disabled by its own character from offering arguments that might show its superiority to the common sense it seeks to displace.
Thomas Nagel, Concealmente and Exposure: and Other Essays, Oxford, 2002, p. 162
Some, I know, find the political and moral insight of the Utilitarians a very simple one, but we should not mistake this simplicity for superficiality nor forget how favorably their simplicities compare with the profoundities of other thinkers.
H. L. A. Hart, Positivism and the separation of law and morals, Harvard Law Review, vol. 71, no. 4, 1958, pp. 593, p. 596
Cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!
Hilary Putnam, Meaning and reference, Journal of philosophy, vol. 70, no. 19, 1973, pp. 699–711, p. 704
At the global level, and in sharp contrast to what is increasingly the trend at the national level, it is plutocracy rather than democracy that we live in[.] […] It has become almost commonplace to point out that the rules of the game in all important international organizations are disproportionately influenced by the rich world, and among them by special interest groups. […] The World Trade Organization, despite an appearance of democracy in the sense that decisions are made unanimously, is also […] controlled by rich countries. The “green room” negotiations where the really important issues are decided in small circle have come in for much criticism. So have many WTO decisions relating to the protection of intellectual property rights and unwillingness to allow the provision of cheaper generic drugs in poor countries, the exemption of agriculture and, until recently, textiles from tariff liberalizations, the emphasis on the liberalization of financial services where the rich countries enjoy comparative advantage, the prohibitively high costs of dispute resolution, and so forth. Global bodies tend to be either irrelevant if representative, or if relevant, to be dominated by the rich.
Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality, 2005, pp. 149-150
Nozick wants to make it appear that laissez-faire institutions are natural and define the baseline distribution which Rawls then seeks to revise ex post trough redistributive transfers. Nozick views the first option as natural and the second as making great demands upon the diligent and the gifted. He allows that, with unanimous consent, people can make the switch to the second scheme; but, if some object, we must stick to the first. Rawls can respond that a libertarian basic structure and his own more egalitarian liberal-democratic alternative are potions on the same footing: the second is, in a sense, demanding on the gifted, if they would do better under the first-but then the first is, in the same sense and symmetrically, demanding on the less gifted, who would do much better under the second scheme.
Thomas W. Pogge, An egalitarian law of peoples, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 23, no. 3, 1994, pp. 195–224, p. 212
A right to emigrate from a country without a correlative right to immigrate to a country is a facile right.
Kok‐Chor Tan, Liberal toleration in Rawls's Law of Peoples, Ethics, vol. 108, no. 2, 1998, pp. 276–295, p. 293
Professional philosophy, like any hierarchical organization, also displays unpleasant bureaucratic features, such as cronyism and in-breeding. Philosophers often describe their discipline as being an especially “critical” one, yet much of the time philosophers are deeply uncritical, more so than most might believe. As Hegel appreciated, most philosophers tend to capture their time in thought, that is, they end up giving expression to and trying to rationalize the most deep-seated beliefs of their culture (vide Hegel himself, not to mention Kant). Much philosophy takes quite seriously our ordinary “intuitions”—untutored and immediate responses to particular questions or problems—in ways that might be thought suspect. Much philosophy fits the mold of a recent book by an eminent philosopher, whose publisher describes it as “reconcile[ing] our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, rational agents” with “a world that we believe includes brute, unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields of force”. But why think such a reconciliation is in the offing? Too often, the answer is unclear in philosophy.
Brian Leiter (ed.), The future for philosophy, Oxford, 2004, pp. 20-21
It’s a good reason for postponing pleasures that you will then have more time in which you can enjoy looking forward to them. I remember exactly when, at the age of eight, I changed over from eating the best bits first to eating them last.
Synthese, 1982, p. 255
[I]f, as all studies agree, current resentment against Jews has coincided with Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinians, then the prudent, not to mention moral, thing to do is end the occupation. A full Israeli withdrawal would also deprive those real anti-Semites exploiting Israeli policy as a pretext to demonize Jews-and ho can doubt they exist?-of a dangerous weapon as well as expose their real agenda. And the more vocally Jews dissent from Israel’s occupation, the fewer will be those non-Jews who mistake Israel’s criminal policies and the uncritical support (indeed encouragement) of mainline Jewish organizations for the popular Jewish mood.
Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond chutzpah: on the misuse of anti-semitism and the abuse of history, Berkeley, 2005, p. 16
We can often be confident about what would be true in certain counterfactual situations on the basis of evidence gathered here in the actual world, but few would claim the power to make predictions about the actual world on the basis of evidence gathered in merely possible situations.
Chris Swoyer, The nature of natural laws, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 60, no. 3, 1982, pp. 203–223, p. 217
Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another. […] [I]it seems to me that the horror I experienced on that dark night in the woods was a veridical insight. What I experienced was a brief and terrifying glimpse into the ultimately evil dimension of a godless world.
Quentin Smith, Yellow Springs, and Quentin Smith, An atheological argument from evil natural laws, International journal for philosophy of religion, vol. 29, 1991, pp. 159–174, pp. 159