David Hume

Upon the whole, then, it appears, that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature. When, therefore, these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principle here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation; and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.

David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, London, 1748, sect. 10, pt. 2

Frances Kamm

I always am surprised when people say, ‘Oh that was a nice discussion. That was fun.’ I think, ‘Fun? Fun? This is a serious matter!’ You try and try to get the right account of the moral phenomena in such cases as the Trolley Case, and getting it right is just as important as when you are doing an experiment in natural science, or any other difficult intellectual undertaking. If we worked on a NASA rocket, and it launched well, we wouldn’t say, ‘Well that was fun!’ It was aweinspiring, that’s the right way of putting it!

Frances Kamm, ‘In Search of the Deep Structure of Morality’, Imprints, vol. 9, no. 2 (2006), pp. 93-117

Robert Nozick

[Moral] intuitions would fit the earlier social situations of people in hunter-gatherer societies, that is, the social conditions in which the evolutionary selection that shaped our current intuitions took place. (Would justifying norms by such intuitions make them relative to the conditions of hunter-gatherer societies?) How much weight should be placed upon such intuitions? Since they were instilled as surrogates for inclusive fitness, being correlated with it, why not now go directly to calculations of inclusive fitness itself? Or why not, instead, calculate what intuitions would be installed by an evolutionary process that operated over a longer period in which current social conditions held sway, and then justify our moral beliefs by their confluence with those (hypothetical) intuitions, ones better suited to our current situation than the intuitions we have inherited? Or why stay with intuitions instilled by evolution rather than ones instilled by cultural processes, or by some other process we currently find attractive? (But what is the basis of our finding it attractive?)

Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001, pp. 388-339

Tim Harford

[Y]ou will often hear so-called experts complaining that taxes on driving or on pollution would be bad for the economy. That sounds worrying. But what is ‘the economy’? If you spend enough time watching Bloomberg television or reading the Wall Street Journal you may come to the mistaken impression that ‘the economy’ is a bunch of rather dull statistics with names like GDP (gross domestic product). GDP measures the total cost of producing everything in the economy in one year—for instance, one extra cappuccino would add £1.85 to GDP, or a little less if some of the ingredients were imported. And if you think this is ‘the economy’, then the experts may be right. A pollution tax might well make a number like GDP smaller. But who cares? Certainly not economists. We know that GDP measures lots of things that are harmful (sales of weapons, shoddy building work with subsequent expensive repairs, expenditures on commuting) and misses lots of things that are important, such as looking after your children or going for a walk in the mountains.

Most economics has very little to do with GDP. Economics is about who gets what and why.

Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist, London, 2006, p. 109

Peter Unger

By the end of this book, if not before, you may come to have a fuller appreciation of some of your central beliefs about yourself, and some of your related attitudes. In particular, you may come to realize more fully that, even as you yourself most deeply believe, after several more decades at most, you will cease to exist, completely and forever. In the light of this awareness, and according to your deepest values, perhaps you will make the most of your quite limited existence.

Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness, and Value, New York, 1990, p. 3

Timothy Sprigge

If one goes for a long time without serious pain, one can more or less forget its distinctive nature. But then, when it comes, one is reminded only too well of what it is like, that is, of its reality as a distinctive quality of experience.

Timothy Sprigge, ‘Is the esse of Intrinsic Value percipi?: Pleasure, Pain and Value’, in Anthony O’Hear (ed.), Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Cambridge, 2000, p. 127

Quentin Smith

Most of the time, we live in an illusion of meaningfulness and only some times, when we are philosophically reflective, are we aware of reality and the meaninglessness of our lives. It seems obvious that this has a genetic basis, due to Darwinian laws of evolution. In order to survive and reproduce, it must seem to us most of the time that our actions are not futile, that people have rights. The rare occasions in which we know the truth about life are genetically prevented from overriding living our daily lives with the illusion that they are meaningful. As I progress through this paper, I have the illusion that my efforts are not utterly futile, but right now, as I stop and reflect, I realise that any further effort put into this paper is a futile expenditure of my energy.

Quentin Smith, ‘Moral Realism and Infinite Spacetime Imply Moral Nihilism’, in Heather Dyke (ed.), Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, Dordrecht, 2003, p. 53

Ayn Rand

He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain’s unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it has his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony.

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, New York, 1943, pt. 2, chap. 1

Peter Railton

[W]e may, without realizing it or even being able to admit it to ourselves, develop patterns of behaviour that encourage or discourage specific behaviors in others, such as the unconscious means by which we cause those whose company we do not enjoy not to enjoy our company.

Peter Railton, ‘Moral Realism’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 95, no. 2 (April, 1986), p. 187

Jens Timmermann

According to his early biographers, at a certain point in his life Kant had a ‘maxim’ not to smoke more than a single pipe a day, tempted though he was. He adhered to this maxim rigorously. After a while, however, he bought a bigger pipe.

Jens Timmermann, ‘Kant’s Puzzling Ethics of Maxims’, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol. 8 (2000), p. 39

Allen Wood

Analytical philosophers often aim at producing moral principles that may be very complex in structure, full of subclauses and qualifications, because these principles enable them to capture “our moral intuitions” and the precisely worded epicyclic subclauses enable us to deal cleverly with threatened counterexamples of various kinds. […] But the resulting principles often do more to disguise than to state the fundamental value basis on which decisions are to be made.

Allen Wood, ‘The Supreme Principle of Morality’, in Paul Guyer (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, 2006, p. 346

Jeff McMahan

[I]t is difficult to believe that the way in which an agent is instrumental in the occurrence of an outcome could be more important than the nature of the outcome itself. Consider the value of an entire human life—of all the good that the life contains. Now suppose that one must choose between killing one person to save two and allowing the two to die. Is it really credible to suppose that how one acts on that single occasion matters more in moral terms than the whole of the life that will be lost if one lets the two die rather than killing the one?

Jeff McMahan, ‘Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid’, Ethics, vol. 103, no. 2 (January, 1993), p. 279

George Orwell

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man […] with no means of filling up time is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, London, 1933, chap. 33

William Talbott

[I]f there were a drug that caused one to hallucinate one’s doctor calling to say that one was not susceptible to the effects of the drug, presumably doctors would find some other way to inform their patients of their immunity than by calling them on the telephone!

William Talbott, ‘The Illusion of Defeat’, in James Beilby (ed.), Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, Ithaca, 2002, p. 163

Richard Layard

In 1998 the king of Bhutan, the small, idyllic Buddhist kingdom nestling high in the Himalayas, announced that his nation’s objective would be the Gross National Happiness. What an enlightened ruler!

Yet one year later he made a fateful decision: to allow television into his country.

Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, London, 2005, p. 77

I. L. Humberstone

[T]he appropriate circumstantial perspective to take in an honest and open discussion of what ought to be done (never mind who it may be ‘up to’ to do it) is that of all parties influenceable by the discussion—which one presumes to include one’s interlocutors. This gives rise to an invisible (or unarticulated) ‘we’ in the superscripted position of all ought-judgments. The grain of sense in the saying ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk’ is in its recommendation to plan for the future, taking it as fixed that the milk has been spilt. The same goes for the milk that will be freely spilt by others whose conduct cannot be influenced by us.

I. L. Humberstone, ‘Two Kinds of Agent-Relativity’, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 163 (April, 1991), p.166

Peter Geach

As Descartes himself remarked, nothing is too absurd for some philosopher to have said it some time; I once read an article about an Indian school of philosophers who were alleged to maintain that it is only a delusion, which the wise can overcome, that anything exists at all; so perhaps it would not matter all that much that a philosopher is found to defend absolute omnipotence.

Peter Geach, Providence and Evil: The Stanton Lectures 1971-2, Cambridge, 1977, p. 8

William Rowe

[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. 5, no. 2 (April, 2006), pp. 79-92

Roger Crisp

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 (October, 2003), p. 129

Claudio Tamburrini

—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 Tamburrini, Pase libre: Crónica de una fuga, Buenos Aires, 2002, pp. 92-93

Oscar Terán

[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 De utopías, catástrofes y esperanzas: un camino intelectual, Buenos Aires, 2006, p. 49

Jeremy Waldron

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’, in Edward Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2004, sect. 5

  H. L. A. Hart

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 (February, 1958), p. 596

Branko Milanovic

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, New Jersey, 2005, pp. 149-150

Thomas Pogge

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 Pogge, ‘An Egalitarian Law of Peoples’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 23, no. 3 (Summer, 1994), p. 212

Kok-Chor Tan

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 (January, 1998), p. 293