Quotes

I’m very suspicious of the professional ethical scene, which I think has to concentrate on issues of often obsessive importance to certain kinds of middle-class Americans. For example, you find probably 10 articles in the ethical journals on the rights and wrongs of abortions for one article you find on the distribution of resources to healthcare, for example, between the poor and the rich, which seems to me a far more important problem: the fact that the rich command all the health resources available. So, if I were to become a first-order moralist, on these matters, I’d become a first-order political theorist. It seems to me that actually the fundamental moral problem faced in the world is the distribution of wealth. It has nothing to do with whether women should have control over their bodies, or if we should be allowed to red pornography, or whatever might be. These things are side shows. The real ethical issues are the different life-expectancies in different countries, and the different access to the necessities in life [for different] people.

Simon Blackburn, Being good: a short introduction to ethics, Oxford, 2002, p. 114

In science there are no “depths”; there is surface everywhere[.]

Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath, and R. S. Cohen, Empiricism and sociology, Dordrecht, 1973, p. 306

An important element of the intellectual trend called “postmodernism” is the repudiation of global models of social analysis and global solutions, and their replacement with a focus on local and group differences and the ways in which ordinary individuals adapt to and help reshape their environments. Its proponents often present themselves as populists, hostile to the elitism of modernists, who, on the basis of “essentialist” and “totalizing” theories, suggest that ordinary people are being manipulated and victimized on an unlevel playing field. […] In an academic context, the focus on individual responses and micro-issues of language, text interpretation, and ethnic and gender identity is politically safe and holds forth the possibility of endless deconstructions of small points in a growing framework of technical jargon. The process has been a long-standing one in economics, where mathematics opened up wonderful opportunities for building complex gothic structures on the foundation of very unrealistic assumptions. These models have slight application to reality, but conveniently tend to reaffirm the marvels of the free market, given their simple assumptions of perfect competition, etc. […] It is good to see that the active audience intellectuals are as useful in serving the cause of the “free flow” of information as the mainstream economists are in helping along “free trade.”

Edward Herman, Postmodernism Triumphs, Z Magazine, 1996

While Westerners usually equate the marketplace with freedom of opinion, the hidden hand of the market an be almost as potent an instrument of control as the iron fist of the state.

Benjamin Ginsberg, The captive public: how mass opinion promotes state power, New York, N.Y, 1986, p. 89

Normative concepts form a fundamental category-like, say, temporal or logical concepts. We should not expect to explain time, or logic, in non-temporal or non-logical terms. Similarly, normative truths are of a distinctive kind, which we should not expect to be like ordinary, empirical truths. Nor should we expect our knowledge of such truths, if we have ay, to be like our knowledge of the world around us.

Derek Parfit, Reasons and motivation, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 71, no. 1, 1997, pp. 99–130, pp. vol

In approaching the problem of incontinence it is a good idea to dwell on the cases where morality simply doesn’t enter the picture as one of the contestants for our favour—or if it does, it is on the wrong side. Then we shall not succumb to the temptation to reduce incontinence to such special cases as being overcome by the beast in us, or of failing to heed the call of duty, or of succumbing to temptation.

Donald Davidson, How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?, in Joel Feinberg (ed.) Moral Concepts, Oxford, 1969, p. 102

As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

Charles Darwin, The descent of man, Amherst, N.Y, 1871, pp. 100-101

In common parlance, ‘hedonism’ suggests something a bit vulgar and risqué. We may think of someone like the former publisher of a slightly scandalous girlie magazine. He apparently enjoyed hanging out with bevies of voluptuous young women, drinking and dining perhaps to excess, travelling to tropical resorts where the young women would reveal extensive amounts of tanned flesh, and revelling till dawn. In an earlier era the motto was ‘wine, women, and song’. Nowadays, we are required to substitute the somewhat more P.C. ‘sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll’. No matter what the motto, the vision is misguided. It reveals a misconception of the views of most serious hedonists[.]

Fred Feldman, Pleasure and the good life, Oxford, 2004, p. 21

Does life have meaning? Are there objective ethical truths? Do we have free will? What is the nature of our identity as selves? Must our knowledge and understanding stay within fixed limits? These questions moved me, and others, to enter the study of philosophy. I care what their answers are. While such other philosophical intricacies as whether sets or numbers exist can be fun for a time, they do not make us tremble.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical explanations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 1

Until this century, most of mankind lived in small communities. What each did could affect only a few others. But conditions have now changed. Each of us can now, in countless ways, affect countless other people. We can have real though small effects on thousands or millions of people. When these effects are widely dispersed, they may be either trivial, or imperceptible. It now makes a great difference whether we continue to believe that we cannot have greatly harmed or benefited others unless there are people with obvious grounds for resentment or gratitude.

Derek Parfit, Reasons and persons, Oxford, 1984, p. 86

If I had to sum up philosophy in a sentence I’d say that philosophy is the theory of the form of the proposition ‘p supports q’.

Bryan Magee and Anthony Quinton (eds.), Modern British philosophy, Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York, 1986, p. 84

It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider.

Jeremy Bentham, Manuscript note on merit, desert and the principles of sympathy and antipathy, London, 1786

Rawls’s writing in moral philosophy has had many effects, but one has been to encourage a style of argumentation that is more high-flown than it is productive.

Brian Leiter (ed.), The future for philosophy, Oxford, 2004, p. 261

When aggregate wealth is increasing, the condition of those at the bottom of society, and in the world, can improve, even while the distance between them and the better off does not diminish, or even grows. Where such improvement occurs (and it has occurred, on a substantial scale, for many disadvantaged groups), egalitarian justice does not cease to demand equality, but that demand can seem shrill, and even dangerous, if the worse off are steadily growing better off, even though they are not catching up with those above them. When, however, progress must give way to regress, when average material living standards must fall, then poor people and poor nations can no longer hope to approach the levels of amenity which are now enjoyed by the world’s well off. Sharply falling average standards mean that settling for limitless improvement, instead of equality, ceases to be an option, and huge disparities of wealth become correspondingly more intolerable, from a moral point of view.

Gerald A. Cohen, If you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich?, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, pp. 113-114

I regard Peter as one of the great moralists, because I suspect that more than anyone he has helped to change the attitudes of very many people to the sufferings of animals. Peter is a utilitarian in normative ethics, and a humane attitude to animals is a natural corollary of utilitarianism. Utilitarian concern for animals goes back to Bentham, who, presumably alluding to the Kantians, said that the question was not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer.

Philip Pettit, Richard Sylvan, and Jean Norman, Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J. J. C. Smart, Oxford, 1987, p. 192

Very few people deliberately do what, at the moment, they believe to be wrong; usually they first argue themselves into a belief that what they wish to do is right. They decide that it is their duty to teach so-and-so a lesson, that their rights have been grossly infringed that if they take no revenge there will be an encouragement to injustice, that without a moderate indulgence in pleasure a character cannot develop in the best way, and so on and so on.

Bertrand Russell, Philosophical essays, London ; New York, 1910

[P]robing and manipulation […] has seriously antihumanistic implications. Much of it seems to represent regress rather than progress for man in his long struggle to become a rational and self-guiding being. Something new, in fact, appears to be entering the pattern of American life with the growing power of our persuaders.

Vance Packard, The hidden persuaders, Brooklyn, N.Y, 1957, p. 6

Salvo algunos momentos fugaces y de escaso relieve histórico, la nación nuca fue en la Argentina–como lo es en los países logrados–la unidad integrada de todos sus componentes, sino más bien la visión absoluta y excluyente que cada uno de éstos tenía de sí mismo.

Pablo Giussani, Los días de Alfonsín, Buenos Aires, 1986, p. 8

[T]he major source of useless experimentation, animal or otherwise, namely the dearth of clear original hypotheses, is still strong. This offers philosophers of science an opportunity of being kind to animals by way of being ruthless to mindless empiricists.

Mario Bunge, Treatise on basic philosophy: Volume 8: Ethics: The good and the right, Dordrecht, 1989

It is important to learn to be surprised by simple things—for example, by the fact that bodies fall down, not up, and that they fall at a certain rate; that if pushed, they move on a flat surface in a straight line, not a circle; and so on. The beginning of science is the recognition that the simplest phenomena of ordinary life raise quite serious problems: Why are they as they are, instead of some different way?

Noam Chomsky, Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures, Cambridge, Mass, 1988, p. 43