Immanuel Kant

Perhaps, as Kant thought, making transgressors suffer is a truly worthy goal, just for its own sake. But if that’s right, it’s a remarkable coincidence. How strange if the true principles of justice just happen to coincide with the feelings produced by our punishment gizmos, installed in our brains by natural selection to help us stabilize cooperation and thus make more copies of our genes. Knowing how our brains work and how they got here, it’s more reasonable to suppose that our taste for justice is a useful illusion.

Joshua Greene, Moral tribes: emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them, London, 2013, p. 274

[Kant] said that he had to read Rousseau’s books several times, because, at a first reading, the beauty of the style prevented him from noticing the matter.

Bertrand Russell, A history of western philosophy: and its connection with political and social circumstances from the earliest times to the present day, London, 1946, p. 731