Quotes

The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights.

Shirin Ebadi, The Progressive Interview, The Progressive, vol. 68, no. 9, 2004, p. 37

Existen dos enemigos de la autonomía y la horizontalidad: los grandes números y las grandes distancias.

Ezequiel Adamovsky, Anticapitalismo para pricipiantes: la nueva generación de movimientos emancipatorios, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 102

Unexpected discoveries are useful for calibrating pre-existing ideas. G. W. F. Hegel has had a very powerful imprint on professional philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a profound influence on the future of the world because Karl Marx took him very seriously (although sympathetic critics have argued that Marx’s arguments would have been more compelling had he never heard of Hegel). In 1799 or 1800 Hegel confidently stated, using presumably the full armamentarium of philosophy available to him, that no new celestial objects could exist within the solar system. One year later, the asteroid Ceres was discovered. Hegel then seems to have returned to pursuits less amenable to disproof.

Carl Sagan, Broca`s brain: Reflections on the romance of science, New York, NY, 1974, p. 235

[S]uffering cries out for its own abolition[.]

Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and moral responsibility, Oxford, 1999, p. 111

[O]ther things being equal it is worse to cause an animal pain than to cause an adult human being pain. An adult human being can, as it were, think his or her way around the pain to what lies beyond it in the future; an animal -like a human baby-cannot do this, so that there is nothing for the animal but the pain itself.

Judith Jarvis Thomson, The realm of rights, Cambridge, MA, 1990, pp. 292-293

If a simplification actually creates fewer problems that it prevents, and makes life better than a truer theory that is more respectful of complexity, subtlety, ambiguity, and indeterminacy, then courage requires that we be fictionalists and admit it.

Peter Suber, Against the sanctity of life, HCA Scholarly Articles, 1996

In a nutshell, hunter-gatherers require coercion or persuasion to join the modern world, while peasants typically require coercion to keep them as peasants. It is probable that hunting and gathering is more humanly satisfying that modern life, but since it is not a viable way of supporting the world’s population, the superiority of modern societies over traditional societies seems to be decisive. Given that the realistic choice lies between traditional and modernizing societies, modernization seems clearly the more desirable option.

Bruce Charlton and Peter Andras, The Modernization Imperative a Systems Theory Account of Liberal Democratic Society, The Modernization Imperative a Systems Theory Account of Liberal Democratic Society, 2003, p. 19

If physical mobility is an essential condition of freedom, the bicycle has probably been the greatest single device for achieving what Marx called the full realization of the possibilities of being human invented since Gutenberg, and the only one without obvious drawbacks.

Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting times: a twentieth-century life, London, 2002, pp. 88-89

Open your eyes again and look at Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In the upper right hand, as you’ve already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world into existence and in his upper left hand he carries the destroying fire. Life and death, order and disintegration, impartially. But now look at Shiva’s other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. What does that mean? It signifies, ‘Don’t be afraid: it’s All Right’. But how can anyone in his senses fail to be afraid, when it’s so obvious that they’re all wrong? Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He’s using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing? Look closely and you’ll see that the right foot is planted squarely on a horrible little subhuman creature—the demon, Muyalaka. A dwarf, but immensely powerful in his malignity, Muyalaka is the embodiment of ignorance, the manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood. Stamp on him, break his back! And that’s precisely what Nataraja is doing. Trampling the little monster down under his right foot. But notice that it isn’t at his trampling right foot that he points his finger; it’s at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances, he’s in the act of rising from the ground. And why does he point at it? Why? That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity—it’s the symbol of release, of Moksha, of liberation. Nataraja dances in all the worlds at once—in the world of physics and chemistry, in the world of ordinary, all-too-human experience, in the world finally of Suchness, of Mind, of the Clear Light…

Aldous Huxley, Island, New York, 1962, pp. 206-207

[S]omeone who does not see that the remediable suffering of others creates obligations is simply not a moral agent.

John Harris, Organ procurement: dead interests, living needs, Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 29, no. 3, 2003, pp. 130–134, p. 133

Throghout the modern world, equality is generally prescribed, yet inequality is generally practiced.

James S. Fishkin, Justice, equal opportunity and the family, New Haven, [Conn.], 1983, p. 47

Como la realidad es siempre compleja, de vez en cuando Félix lee en los periódicos argentinos o españoles algunas crónicas de hechos que parecen destinados a compensar o corregir los errores ético-jurídicos de la Argentina moralizante y de los primeros años del gobierno de Menem. […] “–¿Vos sos Astiz? –Sí, ¿y vos quién sos? –No importa. Vos sos un asesino hijo de puta.”

Ernesto Garzón Valdés, El velo de la ilusión: apuntes sobre una vida argentina y su realidad política, Buenos Aires, 2000, p. 214

The word “acceptance” is widely used to denote an optimistic attitude toward illness that gets past the initial horror of it and enables you to proceed with life. No matter how philosophical you are, however, pain is never really “acceptable.”

Cheri Register, Living with chronic illness: days of patience and passion, New York, 1987, p. 180

Almost every argument for immigration controls is flawed. Take, for example, the argument that we need to ‘protect out jobs’. Well, why is someone who charges too much for his labour entitled to keep that job and not be out competed? The usual answer is that it is all right to be out competed by a compatriot but not by a foreigner. But this is simply xenophobic (‘communitarian’ would be a more charitable word)[.]

Fernando R Tesón, On trade and justice, Theoria, vol. 51, no. 104, 2004, pp. 192–202, p. 196

It is surprising to see such a warm, mushy idea—brotherly love—grow out of a word as cold and clinical as “utilitarianism.” But it shouldn’t be. Brotherly love is implicit in the standard formulations of utilitarianism—maximum total happiness, the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words: everyone’s happiness counts equally; you are not priviledged, and you shouldn’t act as if you are.

Robert Wright, The moral animal: the new science of evolutionary psychology, New York, 1994, p. 336

“Libertarian” capitalism sacrifices liberty to capitalism, a truth its advocates are able to deny only because they are prepared to abuse the language of freedom.

G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Cambridge, 1995, p. 37

The anarchists attack the principle of authority which is central to contemporary social forms, and in doing so they arouse a guilty kind of repugnance in ordinary people; they are rather like Ivan Karamazov crying out in the court-room, ‘Who does not desire his father’s death?’ The very ambivalence of the average man’s attitude to authority makes him distrust those who speak openly the resentments he feels in secret, and thus it is in the psychological condition which Erich Fromm has named ’the fear of freedom’ that we may find the reason why—against the evidence of history—so many people still identify anarchism with unmitigated destruction and nihilism and political terror.

George Woodcock, Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements, Peterborough, Ont. ; Orchard Park, NY, 1975, pp. 14

Es frecuente entre los historiadores y sociólogos que se ocupan hoy del anarquismo afirmar que éste representa una ideología del pasado. Si con ello se quiere decir simplemente que tal ideología logró su máxima influencia en el pueblo y en el movimiento obrero a fines del siglo XIX y durante la primera década del XX, nada podemos objetar. Pero si ese juicio implica la idea de que el anarquismo es algo muerto y esencialmente inadecuado al mundo del presente, si pretende que él no puede interpretar ni cambiar la sociedad de hoy, creemos que constituye un notorio error. Frente a la grave crisis (teórica y práctica) del marxismo, que se debate entre un stalinismo más o menos vergonzante y una socialdemocracia que suele renegar de su pasado, el anarquismo representa, más bien, la ideología del futuro.

Angel Cappelletti, La ideología anarquista, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 130-131

Anarquista es el que cree posible vivir sin el principio de autoridad. Hay organismos esencialmente anarquistas, por ejemplo la ciencia moderna, cuyos progresos son enormes desde que se ha sustituido el criterio autoritario por el de la verificación experimental.

Rafael Barrett, Moralidades actuales, Montevideo, 1910

We produce in order to be able to afford certain amenities and comforts as “consumers”. If, however, somebody demanded these same amenities and comforts while he was engaged in “production”, he would be told that this would be uneconomic, that it would be inefficient, and that society could not afford such inefficiency.

E. F. Schumacher, Small is beautiful: economics as if people mattered, New York, 1974, p. 87