Quotes

We shouldn’t be afraid of difficult films, we shouldn’t be afraid not to be entertained. The viewer pays a high price for a film. And not in money. Viewers spend their time, a piece of their lives—an hour and a half to two hours. A bad film, an aggressive film, takes several centuries of life from humanity.

Edward Guthmann, How Director Shot Movie in One Take, San Francisco Chronicle, 2003

After-the-fact interpretation is appropriate for some historical and literary scholars, which helps explain Freud’s lingering influence on literary criticism. But in science as in horse racing, bets must be placed before the race is run.

David G. Myers, Intuition: its powers and perils, New Haven, 2002, p. 23

Depending on where along the political spectrum power is situated, apostates almost always make their corrective leap in that direction, discovering the virtues of the status quo. “The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,” Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler’s seizure of power. “You always wore it the ‘right’ way around.” If apostasy weren’t conditioned by power considerations, one would anticipate roughly equal movements in both directions. But that’s never been the case. The would-be apostate almost always pulls towards power’s magnetic field, rarely away.

Norman Finkelstein, Fraternally Yours, Chris

Es común que se diga […] que los argentinos no desaprobamos socialmente [la evasión impositiva], y me parece que ello ocurre en parte porque no se percibe el carácter socialmente dañoso que ella tiene. La respuesta de muchos es que “no vale la pena pagar impuestos, porque ellos solo sirven para que se los roben los funcionarios, o para pagar la ineficiencia estatal”. Es obvio que esta respuesta carece de base racional: por más corrupción que haya o por más ineficiencia que afecte a la administración pública, ella solo puede incidir en una proporción marginal en el destino de los impuestos. Que una parte importante de las contribuciones tienen un destino de bien público lo atestigua la existencia en el ámbito público de escuelas, universidades, bibliotecas, fuerzas de seguridad y de defensa, calles y rutas, parques, etcétera. Parece que la desconfianza al Estado que se da típicamente en nuestro país obnubilara la relación causal entre las contribuciones de los ciudadanos y los servicios públicos que los mismos ciudadanos utilizan. Es como si aquellas contribuciones las absorbiera el Estado para beneficio de los funcionarios, y los servicios se financiaran con maná del cielo. Es muy difícil encontrar a alguien que perciba en la evasión impositiva de otro un daño directo para sus intereses.

Carlos Santiago Nino, Un país al margen de la ley: Estudio de la anomia como componente del subdesarrollo argentino, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 188-189

When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology.

Noam Chomsky, The responsibility of intellectuals, New York Review of Books, vol. 8, no. 3, 1967

[W]e live in an age when only unnecessary things are absolutely necessary to us.

Oscar Wilde, The picture of Dorian Gray, New York, 1890

La concepción más divulgada en la actualidad presenta la vida política como una lucha entre facciones contrarias, en la que únicamente hay lugar para los juegos estratégicos y los cálculos en torno a pérdidas y ganancias. […] A ello se ha sumado en la última década una presión incontenible del capital financiero internacional que por la vía de la ampliación o de la restricción del crédito público somete a los poderes elegidos democráticamente a un Diktat, tanto más efectivo cuanto más impersonal y neutro sea su maquillaje. De este modo se ha producido una extraordinaria confluencia de tradiciones provenientes de polos opuestos en el comienzo del siglo XX, que hoy festejan su connubio en un clima de fervor casi dionisiaco. En efecto, tanto el autoritarismo de origen nietzscheano, el postmarxismo y el postestructuralismo, por un lado, como el nuevo libertarismo, de procedencia básicamente anglosajona y austriaca, por el otro, han coincidido en sostener una misma concepción tanto en la teoría como en los hechos, según la cual los derechos auoproclamados de libertad individual sin control por parte del Estado están por encima de cualquier regulación jurídica o moral.

Osvaldo Norberto Guariglia, Una ética para el siglo XXI: etica y derechos humanos en untiempo posmetafísico, México, 2001, pp. 140-141

What principles should govern human action? As rational beings, we should act rationally. As moral beings, we should act morally. What, in each case, are the principles involved? What is it to act rationally, or morally? It is often thought, or said, that philosophers are preeminently the people who have (and have neglected) a moral obligation to apply their rational skills to these great questions.

Peter Strawson, The Parfit Connection, The New York Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 10, 1984

Professional philosophers […] have been more interested in using the issue of famine relief as a club with which to beat utilitarianism over the head for its allegedly extreme demandingness than they have been in upholding the moral necessity of doing far more than most of us do now to aid those in distress—or in exploring why our culture is resistant to that message.

William H. Shaw, Contemporary ethics: taking account of utilitarianism, Malden, Mass, 1999, p. 287

In the mid-1980s I attended a series of graduate seminars, run by Derek Parfit, on Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics. Parfit began the first seminar by claiming that the Methods was the greatest book on ethics ever written.

Philip Stratton-Lake (ed.), Ethical intuitionism: Re-evaluations, Oxford, 2002, p. 56

I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level—there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy. In this sense, I would describe myself as a libertarian socialist—I’d love to see centralized power eliminated, whether it’s the state or the economy, and have it diffused and ultimately under direct control of the participants. Moreover, I think that’s entirely realistic. Every bit of evidence that exists (there isn’t much) seems to show, for example, that workers’ control increases efficiency. Nevertheless, capitalists don’t want it, naturally; what they’re worried about is control, not the loss of productivity or efficiency.

Noam Chomsky, One man's view: Noam Chomsky. Are universities too conservative? Do they collude with corporations to obscure the way power works in our society? Noam Chomsky thinks so and explains why, Business Today, 1973

The intuitions which many moral philosophers regard as the final court of appeal are the result of their upbringing—i.e. of the fact that just these level-1 principles were accepted by those who most influenced them. In discussing abortion, we ought to be doing some level-2 thinking; it is therefore quite futile to appeal to those level-1 intuitions that we happen to have acquired. It is a question, not of what our intuitions are, but of what they o/ught to be/.

Richard Mervyn Hare, Essays on bioethics, Oxford, 1999, p. 10

At its best, utilitarianism is a strong weapon against prejudice and superstition, providing a standard and a procedure that challenge those who claim authority over us in the name of morality.

Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, Oxford, 1990, p. 11

Th[e] compartmentalization of academic disciplines is the product of corporate interests rather than scientific and intellectual necessities or practical convenience.

Jorge Malem Seña, Carlos Santiago Nino: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch, University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 1995, pp. 45, p. 46

Celebrating power may be the world’s oldest profession among poets and men of letters.

Reports show that the combined Gross Domestic Product of forty-eight countries is less than the wealth of the three richest people in the world. Fifteen billionaires have assets greater than the total national income of Africa, south of the Sahara. Thirty-two people own more than the annual income of everyone who lives in South Asia. Eighty-four rich people have holdings greater than the GDP of China, a nation with 1.2 billion citizens.

Why do we fear the wrong things? Why do so many smokers (whose habit shortens their lives, on average, by about five years) fret before flying (which, averaged across people, shortens life by one day)?

David Myers, Do We Fear the Right Things?

I am a utilitarian. I am also a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian because I am a utilitarian.

Peter Singer, Utilitarianism and vegetarianism, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 9, no. 4, 1980, pp. 325–337, p. 325

[Henry] Spira has a knack for putting things plainly. When I asked him why he has spent more than half a century working for the causes I have mentioned, he said simply that he is on the side of the weak, not the powerful; of the oppressed, not the oppressor; of the ridden, not the rider. And he talks of the vast quantity of pain and suffering that exists in our universe, and of his desire to do something to reduce it. That, I think, is what the left is all about. There are many ways of being on the left, and Spira’s is only one of them, but what motivates him is essential to any genuine left. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain life at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that that is just the way the world is, and always will be, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation.

Peter Singer, A Darwinian left: Politics, evolution and cooperation, London, 1999, pp. 8-9

Surely if we have learned anything from the history of morals it is that the thing to do with a moral quandary is not to hide it. Like nettles, the occasions when life forces us to choose between the lesser of two evils must be grasped with the consciousness that they are what they are. The vice of this use of the principle that, at certain limiting points, what is utterly immoral cannot be law or lawful is that it will serve to cloak the true nature of the problems with which we are faced and will encourage the romantic optimism that all the values we cherish ultimately will fit into a single system, that no one of them has to be sacrificed or compromised to accommodate another.

H. L. A. Hart, Positivism and the separation of law and morals, Harvard Law Review, vol. 71, no. 4, 1958, pp. 593, p. 33