Far from justifying principles that are shown to be “natural”, a biological explanation is often a way of debunking the lofty status of what seemed a self-evident moral law. We must think again about the reasons for accepting those principles for which a biological explanation can be given.
Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology, Oxford, 1981, p. 71
He who was ready to sacrifice his life […] would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, London, 1871
Of a few years later we have these illuminating glimpses from Gabriel Pierné:
[Debussy] was a gourmet, but not a gourmand. He loved good things to eat and the quantity mattered little. I remember very well how he used to delight in a cup of chocolate which my mother invited him to take at the Café Prévost, and how, at Bourbonneux’s [a famous pâtisserie], he used to choose some delicate little pastry from a case specially reserved for the produits de luxe, while his friends were more likely to be content with something more substantial. This poor boy, who had come from a most ordinary class of society, had in everything the taste of an aristocrat. He was particularly attracted to minute objects and delicate and sensitive things. My father had a beautifully bound set of Le Monde illustré. When Achille came to the house we used to look at the pictures with delight. He preferred those which took up little space and were surrounded by a huge margin.
Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy, London, 1936, p. 6
I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.
Alan Sokal, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword’, in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, New York, 1998, p. 269
Moderation! Moderation! […] What is moderation of principle, but a compromise between right and wrong; and attempt to find out some path of expediency, without going to the first principles of justice. Such attempts must always be delusive to the individual and fatal to mankind. If there is anything sacred, it is principle! Let every man investigate seriously and solemnly the truth and propriety of the principles he adopts, but having adopted, let him pursue them into practice: let him tread on the path which they dictate.
John Thelwall, The Tribune, ix, May 19, 1795
J[ohn ]W[atkins]: “Karl, you are dishonest. You hate criticism.”
K[arl ]R[aimund ]P[opper]: “You are dishonest. Your statement refers to my state of mind; it is irrefutable. Only dishonest people raise irrefutable criticism.”
Imre Lakatos, Letter to Paul Feyerabend, February 5, 1970, in Matteo Motterlini (ed.), For and Against Method: Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, Chicago, 1999, p. 189
He that, in the ordinary affairs of life, would admit of nothing but direct plain demonstration, would be sure of nothing in this world, but of perishing quickly.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, bk. 4, chap. 11, sect. 10
Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age. All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies.
Bertrand Russell, ‘An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish’, in Unpopular Essays, London, 1950
[T]he active rights of man are all of them superseded and rendered null by the superior claims of justice.
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, London, 1793, bk. 2, chap. 5
We have to stop allowing economics to be used as a trump card. Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it’s bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society.
Charley Reese, ‘Is Economics All There Is?’, July 18, 2003
If politics is to become scientific, and if the event is not to be constantly surprising, it is imperative that our political thinking should penetrate more deeply into the springs of human action. What is the influence of hunger upon slogans? How does their effectiveness fluctuate with the number of calories in your diet? If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?
Bertrand Russell, ‘Nobel Lecture’, December 11, 1950
We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child?
Richard Dawkins, ‘The Future Looks Bright’, The Guardian, June 21, 2003
Der letztere, der die Waage des Rechts und nebenbei auch das Schwert der Gerechtigkeit sich zum Symbol gemacht hat, bedient sich gemeiniglich des letzteren, nicht um etwa bloß alle fremde Einflüsse von dem ersteren abzuhalten, sondern wenn die eine Schale nicht sinken will, das Schwert mit hinein zu legen (vae victis)[.]
Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden, 1795, Zusatz 2
[I]n acceptable usage, just about any phrase containing the word “free” is likely to mean something like the opposite of its actual meaning.
Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Tucson, 1992, p. 87
If we decide on a positive programme to change our nature, this will be a central moment in our history, and the transformation might be beneficial to a degree we can now scarcely imagine.
Jonathan Glover, What Sort of People Should There Be?, Harmondsworth, 1984
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere –
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir –
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.Here once, through and alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul –
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll –
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole –
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere –
Our memories were treacherous and sere, –
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!) –
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here) –
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn –
As the star-dials hinted of morn –
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn –
Astarte’s bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.And I said: “She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs –
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies –
To the Lethean peace of the skies –
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes –
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes.”But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: “Sadly this star I mistrust –
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Ah, hasten! -ah, let us not linger!
Ah, fly! -let us fly! -for we must.”
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust –
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust –
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.I replied: “This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendour is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty tonight! –
See! -it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright –
We safely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night.”Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom –
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb –
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: “What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?”
She replied: “Ulalume -Ulalume –
‘Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere –
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: “It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed -I journeyed down here! –
That I brought a dread burden down here –
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber –
This misty mid region of Weir –
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ulalume’, 1847
The great difficulty is that respect for law is essential to social order, but it is impossible under a traditional régime which no longer commands assent, and is necessarily disregarded in a revolution. But although the problem is difficult it must be solved if the existence of orderly communities is to be compatible with the free exercise of intelligence.
Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis, London, 1938, p. 68
It is clear that the power of complex modern states depends on the deeply ingrained tendency of most of their members to follow the rules, obey the laws, and do what is expected of them by the established authorities without deciding case by case whether they agree with what is being done. We turn ourselves easily into instruments of higher-order processes; the complex organizational hierarchies typical of modern life could not function otherwise—not only armies, but all bureaucratic institutions rely on such psychological dispositions.
This gives rise to what can be called the German problem. The generally valuable tendency to conform, not to break ranks conspicuously, not to attract attention to oneself, and to do one’s job and obey official instructions without substituting one’s own personal judgment can be put to the service of monstrous ends, and can maintain in power the most appalling regimes. The same procedural correctness that inhibits people from taking bribes may also turn them into obedient participants in well-organized official policies of segregation, deportation, and genocidal extermination. The problem is whether it is possible to have the benefits of conformity and bureaucratic obedience without the dangers.
Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality, Oxford, 1991, pp. 149-150
Imagine that there is a button that, if pushed, will cause all sentient life to painlessly cease to suffer forever. […] Would there be no obligation to press the button?
John Harris, ‘Organ Procurement: Dead Interests, Living Needs’, Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 29, no. 3 (2003), p. 134
De todas las enseñanzas que la vida me ha proporcionado, la más acerba, más inquietante, más irritante para mí, ha sido convencerme de que la especie menos frecuente sobre la Tierra es la de los hombres veraces.
José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Verdad y perspectiva’, in El espectador, vol. 1, Madrid, 1916
Aristotle’s genius ranged widely. […] There are works on logic and on language; on the arts; on ethics and politics and law; on constitutional history and on intellectual history; on psychology and physiology; on natural history—zoology, biology, botany; on chemistry, astronomy, mechanics, mathematics; on the philosophy of science and the nature of motion, space and time; on metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. Choose a field of research, and Aristotle laboured it; pick an area of human endeavour, and Aristotle discoursed upon it. His range is astonishing.
Jonathan Barnes, ‘Aristotle’, in Greek Philosophers, Oxford, 1999, p. 197
I think my greatest usefulness lies in what I’ve had the opportunity to demonstrate—that the most “hopeless” criminal in existence can be salvaged; that he’s worth salvaging, on both humanitarian and hard-headed social grounds.
Retributive justice and the execution chamber aren’t the answer. In seeking a solution to the crime problem, I believe that vision can and should be substituted for vengeance. I’m convinced that there is much that is narrow and negative and wrong in society’s attitude toward and treatment of the man who is said to be at “war” with it, and who often is at war with himself.
Caryl Chessman, Cell 2455, Death Row, New Jersey, 1960, p. 372
The Blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall’s finest achievement; it had evoked the qualities of the English at their subtlest. Its authors had grown to love it for its own sake; it included some recent improvements, which would be wasted if it came to an end; it was very complicated, and a vast organization had established a vested interest
John Maynard Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs’, in Two Memoirs, London, 1949
Science and religion are direct competitors over all the great questions about the origin of the universe, the question of what it contains, the question whether it has an exogenous purpose, and the question of how it functions. Everything from the various creation myths of various religions to the logical coherence of the idea of miracles is comprehended here and the most rudimentary scientific understanding shows that belief in supernatural agencies and events is nonsense. A simple test demonstrates this: ask yourself what grounds we have for believing that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden; consider what tests might be supposed to test the hypothesis that such things exist; ask yourself how reasonable it would be to organise your life on the supposition that such fairies exist. The evidential basis of belief in gods and other supernatural forces is no different from this.
A. C. Grayling, ‘House Philosopher: An Interview with AC Grayling’
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
Arthur Miller, ‘Why I Wrote The Cubicle: an Artist’s Answer to Politics’, The New Yorker, October 21-28, 1996, pp. 163-164
[O]ur virtues and our vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world.
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, London, 1793, bk. 1
The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, in Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays, London, 1965, p. 186
Scepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it. Moreover, if scepticism is to be theoretically defensible it must reject all inferences from what is experienced; a partial scepticism, such as the denial of physical events experienced by no one, or a solipsism which allows events in my future or in my unremembered past, has no logical justification, since it must admit principles of inference which lead to beliefs that it rejects.
Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Its Limits, London, 1948, p. 9
Analytic philosophy does not only develop the intellectual conscience, train the mind, and combine subtlety with scrupulous precision; above all, it teaches people to think critically and makes them instinctively antiauthoritarian. There is something democratic in this way of thinking: a proposition is a proposition, whether written by a student, a professor, or a Plato; the laws of logic are no respecters of persons.
Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, Princeton, 1958, p. 25