Quotes

If animals are conscious, then they feel things—for example, pain, fear and hunger—which is intrinsically bad to feel. To inflict deliberately such experiences on an animal for no reason is either to treat the animal as a thing or else in some way to relish its suffering. And surely both those attitudes are immoral.

Roger Scruton, Animal rights and wrongs, London, 1996, p. 21

[B]akunin is opposed to the imposition of any restraints upon anyone at any time under any conditions.

Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, London, 1978, p. 110

[T]he main principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy[.]

Paul Goodman and Taylor Stoehr, Crazy hope and finite experience: final essays of Paul Goodman, San Francisco, 1994, p. 56

Once upon a time, dissenting intellectuals deployed robust political categories such as “power” and “interests,” on the one hand, and “ideology,” on the other. Today, all that remains is the bland, depoliticized language of “concerns” and “memory”.

Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust industry: reflection on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, London ; New York, 2000, p. 5

“I think him [/sc/. James Mill] nearly the most wonderful prose-writer in our language.”

“That do not I,” says Morton. “I approve the matter of his treatises exceedingly, but the style seems to me detestable.”

“Oh!,” says Eustace, “I cannot separate matter and style… My reason for delighting in his book is, that it gives such a fixedness and reality to all that was most vaguely brilliant in my speculations—it converts dreams into demonstrations.”

Frederick Maurice, Eustace Conway: Or, The Brother and Sister; a Novel, London, 1834

[E]ffective institutional outcomes do not map into unique institutional designs. And since there is no unique mapping from function to form, it is futile to look for uncontingent empirical regularities that link specific legal rules to economic outcomes. What works will depend on local constraints and opportunities.

DICE Report, 2002, p. 13

[M]ass media is the modern equivalent of the Athenian agora. It is the medium in which politics is exerted. When the mass media is almost completely in private hands—and of an oligopolistic character—the distortion is similar to what would have been produced if the agora had been replaced by a private theater, entrance to which was at the pleasure of the owner.

Carlos Santiago Nino, The constitution of deliberative democracy, New Haven, 1996, p. 162

Take any two persons, A and B, and suppose them the only persons in existence:—call them, for example, Adam and Eve. Adam has no regard for himself: the whole of his regard has for its object Eve. Eve in like manner has no regard for herself: the whole of her regard has for its object Adam. Follow this supposition up: introduce the occurrences, which, sooner or later, are sure to happen, and you will see that, at the end of an assignable length of time, greater or less according to accident, but in no case so much as a twelvemonth, both will unavoidably have perished.

Jeremy Bentham et al., Constitutional code: vol. I, Oxford [Oxfordshire] : New York, 1983, p. 119

It is sometimes said that we live in an age that rejects authority. The statement, thus qualified, seems misleading; probably there never was a time when the number of beliefs held by each individual, undemonstrated and unverified by himself, was greater. But it is true that we only accept authority of a peculiar sort; the authority, namely, that is formed and maintained by the unconstrained agreement of individual thinkers, each of whom we believe to be seeking truth with single-mindedness and sincerity, and declaring what he has found with scrupulous veracity, and the greatest attainable exactness and precision.

H. Sidgwick, The Ethics of Religious Conformity, Ethics, vol. 6, no. 3, 1896, pp. 273, p. 280

Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore, naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

Bertrand Russell, An inquiry into meaning and truth: The William James lectures for 1940 delivered at Harvard University, London ; New York, 1995, p. 15

Jorge Luis Borges, El otro, el mismo, Buenos Aires, 1964

We tell someone that such and such a thing is what morality requires, and he replies that he agrees with us but does not see why he should do what morality requires. What could we say in reply? The individual could have reasons of prudence to do the same thing that morality requires, but, if he asks that question, it is probable that he does not have those reasons or that they are not enough for him. But, if they are not reasons of prudence, what other kinds of reasons is he looking for? What is the meaning of ‘should’ in the question ‘why should I be moral?’ The only possible answer is that the reasons in question must be moral ones and that the duty alluded to by the expression ‘should’ must be amoral duty, since our practical reasoning does not admit reasons and duties of a higher order. But the person who asks these questions will not, of course, be satisfied with an answer which presupposes what he is doubting. What is he in fact asking? The very question seems to involve a contradiction, since once adequately articulated it reads: What moral reason do I have to do what morality prescribes, which is not a reason which is derived from morality itself? This is like asking who is the lucky woman who is the wife of the richest bachelor on earth, and being distressed that we do not get an answer.

Carlos Santiago Nino, The duty to punish past abuses of human rights put into context: The case of argentina, Yale Law Journal, vol. 100, no. 8, 1991, pp. 2619–2640, pp. 81-82

[W]e have no reason to trust anyone’s intuitions about very large numbers, however excellent their philosophy. Even the best philosophers cannot get an intuitive grasp of, say, tens of billions of people. That is no criticism; these numbers are beyond intuition. But these philosophers ought not to think their intuition can tell them the truth about such large numbers of people.

For very large numbers, we have to rely on theory, not intuition. When people first built bridges, they managed without much theory. They could judge a log by eye, relying on their intuition. Their intuitions were reliable, being built on long experience with handling wood and stone. But when people started spinning broad rivers with steel and concrete, their intuition failed them, and they had to resort to engineering theory and careful calculations. The cables that support suspension bridges are unintuitively slender.

Our moral intuitions are formed and polished in our homely interactions with the few people we have to deal with in ordinary life. But nowadays the scale of our societies and the power of our technologies raise moral problems that involve huge numbers of people. […] No doubt our homely intuitive morality gives us a starting point, but we have to project our morality beyond the homely to the vast new arenas. To do this properly, we have to engage all the care and accuracy we can, and develop a moral theory.

Indeed, we are more dependent on theory than engineers are, because moral conclusions cannot be tested in the way engineers’ conclusions are tested. If an engineer gets her calculations wrong, her mistake will be revealed when the bridge falls down. But a mistake in moral theory is never revealed like that. If we do something wrong, we do not later see the error made manifest; we can only know it is an error by means of theory too. Moreover, our mistakes can be far more damaging and kill far more people than the collapse of a bridge. Mistakes in allocating healthcare resources may do great harm to millions. So we have to be exceptionally careful in developing our moral theory.

John Broome, Weighing lives, Oxford, 2004, pp. 56-57

Roger, I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I’m having trouble you see, because he’s old … and dying … and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully.

David Cronenberg, Shivers, 1975

It was because Locke so readily felt the structures of social control in the society in which he lived to be legitimate that he rejected their abuse with such intensity.

John Dunn, The political thought of John Locke: an historical account of the argument of the 'Two treatises of government', Cambridge, 1969, p. 167

Sometimes the consequences of holding a belief matter more than its truth.

Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic happiness: using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment, New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi, 2002, p. 97

[A]moralists are among the more popular heroes of both philosophical fantasy and non-philosophical fiction.

Michael Smith, The moral problem, Oxford, 1995, p. 67

Marvin Levine, Look down from the clouds: poetry, Long Island, N.Y., 1997

All that is needed is a little acid.

Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Critique of religion and philosophy, Princeton, N. J, 1958, p. 23

Macedonio era un hombre dispuesto a defender su singularidad de cualquier manera, un hombre que era una especie de isla en este país. Entonces el país no era la sociedad de masas que es ahora, era más fácil defender esta ínfima partícula que es un hombre. Hoy se le imponen a uno las películas, las novelas, la música: la coacción del medio es mucho más fuerte de lo que era antes.

Francisco Luis Bernárdez, Hablan de Macedonio Fernández, Buenos Aires, 1968