Monthly Archives: July 2004

Robert Nozick

Does life have meaning? Are there objective ethical truths? Do we have free will? What is the nature of our identity as selves? Must our knowledge and understanding stay within fixed limits? These questions moved me, and others, to enter the study of philosophy. I care what their answers are. While such other philosophical intricacies as whether sets or numbers exist can be fun for a time, they do not make us tremble.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 1

Derek Parfit

Until this century, most of mankind lived in small communities. What each did could affect only a few others. But conditions have now changed. Each of us can now, in countless ways, affect countless other people. We can have real though small effects on thousands or millions of people. When these effects are widely dispersed, they may be either trivial, or imperceptible. It now makes a great difference whether we continue to believe that we cannot have greatly harmed or benefited others unless there are people with obvious grounds for resentment or gratitude.

Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, 1984, p. 86

Jeremy Bentham

It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider.

Jeremy Bentham, MSS 29, 32, University College Collection

G. A. Cohen

When aggregate wealth is increasing, the condition of those at the bottom of society, and in the world, can improve, even while the distance between them and the better off does not diminish, or even grows. Where such improvement occurs (and it has occurred, on a substantial scale, for many disadvantaged groups), egalitarian justice does not cease to demand equality, but that demand can seem shrill, and even dangerous, if the worse off are steadily growing better off, even though they are not catching up with those above them. When, however, progress must give way to regress, when average material living standards must fall, then poor people and poor nations can no longer hope to approach the levels of amenity which are now enjoyed by the world’s well off. Sharply falling average standards mean that settling for limitless improvement, instead of equality, ceases to be an option, and huge disparities of wealth become correspondingly more intolerable, from a moral point of view.

G. A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000, pp. 113-114

J. J. C. Smart

I regard Peter as one of the great moralists, because I suspect that more than anyone he has helped to change the attitudes of very many people to the sufferings of animals. Peter is a utilitarian in normative ethics, and a humane attitude to animals is a natural corollary of utilitarianism. Utilitarian concern for animals goes back to Bentham, who, presumably alluding to the Kantians, said that the question was not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer.

J. J. C. Smart, ‘Reply to Singer’, in Philip Pettit, Richard Sylvan and Jean Norman (eds.), Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J. J. C. Smart, Oxford, 1987, p. 192

Bertrand Russell

Very few people deliberately do what, at the moment, they believe to be wrong; usually they first argue themselves into a belief that what they wish to do is right. They decide that it is their duty to teach so-and-so a lesson, that their rights have been grossly infringed that if they take no revenge there will be an encouragement to injustice, that without a moderate indulgence in pleasure a character cannot develop in the best way, and so on and so on.

Bertrand Russell, ‘The Elements of Ethics’, in Philosophical Essays, 1910, sect. 21

Vance Packard

[P]robing and manipulation […] has seriously antihumanistic implications. Much of it seems to represent regress rather than progress for man in his long struggle to become a rational and self-guiding being. Something new, in fact, appears to be entering the pattern of American life with the growing power of our persuaders.

Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, New York, 1957, p. 6

Noam Chomsky

It is important to learn to be surprised by simple things—for example, by the fact that bodies fall down, not up, and that they fall at a certain rate; that if pushed, they move on a flat surface in a straight line, not a circle; and so on. The beginning of science is the recognition that the simplest phenomena of ordinary life raise quite serious problems: Why are they as they are, instead of some different way?

Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, p. 43

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

‘Méchanique Sociale’ may one day take her place along with ‘Mécanique Celeste’, throned each upon the double-sided height of one maximum principle, the supreme pinnacle of moral as of physical science. As the movements of each particle, constrained or loose, in a material cosmos are continually subordinated to one maximum sum-total of accumulated energy, so the movements of each soul, whether selfishly isolated or linked sympathetically, may continually be realizing the maximum energy of pleasure, the Divine love of the universe.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, London, 1881, p. 12

Ira Gershwin

Why did I wander here and there and yonder,
Wasting precious time for no reason or rhyme?
Isn’t it a pity? Isn’t it a crime?
My journey’s ended, everything is splendid;
Meeting you today
Has given me a wonderful idea – here I stay.

It’s a funny thing –
I look at you, I get a thrill I never knew.
Isn’t it a pity we never met before?

Here we are at last –
It’s like a dream, the two of us a perfect team.
Isn’t it a pity we never met before?

Imagine all the lonely years we’ve wasted
You with the neighbors, I at silly labors –
What joys untasted,
You reading Heine, me somewhere in China.

Let’s forget the past;
Let’s both agree that I’m for you and you’re for me
And it’s such a pity we never, never met before.

Imagine all the lonely year’s we’ve wasted,
Fishing for salmon, losing at backgammon.
What joys untasted,
My nights were sour spent with Schopenhauer.

Let’s forget the past;
Let’s both agree that I’m for you and you’re for me
And it’s such a pity we never, never met before.

Ira Gershwin, ‘Isn’t it a Pity’, 1993

Ted Honderich

If I had doubts of being able to light up a room by quicksilver intelligence, something I both envied and suspected, I was confident of having an ability to find my way to clear things of my own to say, some of which might produce a longer light. But what was definitely also needed in order to produce these goods was the onward marching.

Ted Honderich, Philosopher: A Kind of Life, London, 2001, p. 96

R. M. Hare

In these days of intense academic competition, which is supposed to keep us all on our toes, one has to publish or be damned; and for advancing one’s career it is more important that what one publishes should be new, than that it should be true.

R. M. Hare, ‘Methods of Bioethics: Some Defective Proposals’, in L. W. Sumner and Joseph Boyle (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Bioethics, Toronto, 1996, p. 18

Roger Scruton

If animals are conscious, then they feel things—for example, pain, fear and hunger—which is intrinsically bad to feel. To inflict deliberately such experiences on an animal for no reason is either to treat the animal as a thing or else in some way to relish its suffering. And surely both those attitudes are immoral.

Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs, 2nd ed., London, 1998, p. 21

Norman Finkelstein

Once upon a time, dissenting intellectuals deployed robust political categories such as “power” and “interests,” on the one hand, and “ideology,” on the other. Today, all that remains is the bland, depoliticized language of “concerns” and “memory”.

Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, London, 2000, p. 5

Frederick Maurice

“I think him [sc. James Mill] nearly the most wonderful prose-writer in our language.”

“That do not I,” says Morton. “I approve the matter of his treatises exceedingly, but the style seems to me detestable.”

“Oh!,” says Eustace, “I cannot separate matter and style… My reason for delighting in his book is, that it gives such a fixedness and reality to all that was most vaguely brilliant in my speculations—it converts dreams into demonstrations.”

Frederick Maurice, Eustace Conway: Or, The Brother and Sister; a Novel, London, 1834

Dani Rodrik

[E]ffective institutional outcomes do not map into unique institutional designs. And since there is no unique mapping from function to form, it is futile to look for uncontingent empirical regularities that link specific legal rules to economic outcomes. What works will depend on local constraints and opportunities.

Dani Rodrik, ‘Getting Institutions Right’, DICE Report, vol. 2, no. 2 (Summer, 2002), p. 13

Carlos Santiago Nino

[M]ass media is the modern equivalent of the Athenian agora. It is the medium in which politics is exerted. When the mass media is almost completely in private hands—and of an oligopolistic character—the distortion is similar to what would have been produced if the agora had been replaced by a private theater, entrance to which was at the pleasure of the owner.

Carlos Santiago Nino, The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy, New Haven, 1996, p. 162

Jeremy Bentham

Take any two persons, A and B, and suppose them the only persons in existence:—call them, for example, Adam and Eve. Adam has no regard for himself: the whole of his regard has for its object Eve. Eve in like manner has no regard for herself: the whole of her regard has for its object Adam. Follow this supposition up: introduce the occurrences, which, sooner or later, are sure to happen, and you will see that, at the end of an assignable length of time, greater or less according to accident, but in no case so much as a twelvemonth, both will unavoidably have perished.

Jeremy Bentham, Constitutional Code, Oxford, 1983, vol. 1, p. 119

Henry Sidgwick

It is sometimes said that we live in an age that rejects authority. The statement, thus qualified, seems misleading; probably there never was a time when the number of beliefs held by each individual, undemonstrated and unverified by himself, was greater. But it is true that we only accept authority of a peculiar sort; the authority, namely, that is formed and maintained by the unconstrained agreement of individual thinkers, each of whom we believe to be seeking truth with single-mindedness and sincerity, and declaring what he has found with scrupulous veracity, and the greatest attainable exactness and precision.

Henry Sidgwick, ‘The Ethics of Religious Conformity’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 6, no. 3 (April, 1896), p. 280

Jorge Luis Borges

De las generaciones de las rosas
Que en el fondo del tiempo se han perdido
Quiero que una se salve del olvido,
Una sin marca o signo entre las cosas

Que fueron. El destino me depara
Este don de nombrar por vez primera
Esa flor silenciosa, la postrera
Rosa que Milton acercó a su cara,

Sin verla. Oh tú bermeja o amarilla
O blanca rosa de un jardín borrado,
Deja mágicamente tu pasado

Inmemorial y en este verso brilla,
Oro, sangre o marfil o tenebrosa
Como en sus manos, invisible rosa.

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Una rosa y Milton’, in El otro, el mismo, Buenos Aires, 1964