[Pain] is a bad thing in itself. It does not matter who experiences it, or where it comes in a life, or where in the course of a painful episode. Pain is bad; it should not happen. There should be as little pain as possible in the world, however it is distributed across people and across time.
John Broome, ‘More Pain or Less?’, Analysis, vol. 56, no. 2 (April, 1996), p. 117
Dear Imre,
If the worst comes to the worst, we have 8 days together. Now, let me suggest how to spend them. First day morning: my flat business in London; afternoon: Sussex. There remain seven days. Now I suggest that you send me (1) your MS of AM with all the cuts, changes etc. suggested by you and (2) as much as you have of the clean copy of my translation with your comments in the margin and suggestions for change, and dictionary. […] So by the time I come to London we shall not need more than two days to discuss what remains. […] There still remain five days. Now you may have finished MAM before I come. If there is still enough time to send it to me I shall have had time to read it and to make my first informal comments. I shall also have made a sketch of my answer. One day for discussing both. There remain four days to chase after girls—and this if the worst comes to the worst[.]
Paul Feyerabend, Letter to Imre Lakatos, July 19, 1972, in Matteo Motterlini (ed.), For and Against Method: Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, Chicago, 1999, p. 286
I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, New York, 1943, pt. 4, chap. 18
Libertarians believe either or both that people have a right to be mostly left alone to conduct their own affairs inasmuch as they don’t harm others, or that things will on balance work out best for everyone if they are.
Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, New York, 2007, p. 4
Mill’s sex life is important in terms of understanding him as a man, of course, but there are some philosophical implications too. Mill was his century’s pre-eminent thinker on the content of a good life—of which sex must surely form a part. More specifically, in his version of utilitarianism, Mill insisted that it was not only the quantity of pleasure that counted but its intrinsic quality. He distinguished between lower pleasures, defined as ‘animal appetites’ consisting of ‘mere sensation’ and ‘higher’ pleasures ‘of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments’. Mill suggested sampling, to see which was preferable: ‘Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.’ Mill’s view was that the majority of people who had experienced the pleasure of, say, having sex and reading poetry, would find the latter a more intrinsically valuable pleasure; but according to his own philosophical rules he would have been prohibited form making any such judgement unless he had himself experienced both.
Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, London, 2007, p. 154
Because it is often easy to detect the operation of motivated belief formation in others, we tend to disbelieve the conclusions reached in this way, without pausing to see whether the evidence might in fact justify them. Until around 1990 I believed, with most of my friends, that on a scale of evil from 0 to 10 (the worst), Communism scored around 7 or 8. Since the recent revelations I believe that 10 is the appropriate number. The reason for my misperception of the evidence was not an idealistic belief that Communism was a worthy ideal that had been betrayed by actual Communists. In that case, I would simply have been victim of wishful thinking or self-deception. Rather, I was misled by the hysterical character of those who claimed all along that Communism scored 10. My ignorance of their claims was not entirely irrational. On average, it makes sense to discount the claims of the manifestly hysterical. Yet even hysterics can be right, albeit for the wrong reasons. Because I sensed and still believe that many of these fierce anti-Communists would have said the same regardless of the evidence, I could not believe that what they said did in fact correspond to the evidence. I made the mistake of thinking of them as a clock that is always one hour late rather than as a broken clock that shows the right time twice a day.
Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 136-137, n. 16
The principle of contradiction has, to be sure, no logical worth, since it is valid only as an assumption; but as a consequence it carries a practical-ethical value, which is all the more important. The principle of contradiction is the sole weapon against error and falsehood. Were we not to recognize this principle and hold joint assertion and denial to be possible, then we could not defend other propositions against false or deceitful propositions. One falsely accused of murder could find no means to prove his innocence before the court. At most, he could only manage to prove that he had committed no murder; this negative truth cannot, however, remove its contradictory positive from the world, if the principle of contradiction fails. If just one witness is found who (not shirking from committing perjury) implicates the accused, his false assertion can in no what be contradicted and the defendant is irretrievably lost.
Jan Łukasiewicz, ‘On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle’, Review of Metaphysics, vol. 24 no. 3 (1971), p. 508
There can be an experience-oriented and a person-oriented version of hedonism. On the former view, it is the experience of happiness that is good, wherever it occurs; on the latter view what is good is that people are happy. On the former view people matter, so to speak, only as containers of happiness—it is the total quantity of happiness that really matters. On the latter view the starting point is impartial concern for the happiness of actual people. Real and important ethical differences can flow from this very deep contrast.
John Skorupski, ‘The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 1 (2007), p. 189
The idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But many contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and social sciences. If facts are needed, they rely on their “intuition”, or they simply invent them. The results of philosophy done in this way are typically sterile and often silly. There are no proprietary philosophical questions that are worth answering, nor is there any productive philosophical method that does not engage the sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals, language, culture and more. To make progress on them we need to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that works.
Stephen Stich, in Steve Pyke, Philosophers, Oxford, 2011, p. 192
[T]he demands of morality pervade every aspect and moment of our lives—and we all fail to meet is standards. [F]ew of us believe the claim, and that none of us live I accordance with it. It strikes us as outrageously extreme in its demands[.] The claim is deeply counterintuitive. But it is true.
Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality, Oxford, 1989, p. 2
Many of us care very much whether our cognitive processes lead to beliefs that are true, or give us power over nature, or lead to happiness. But only those with a deep and free-floating conservatism in matters epistemic will care whether their cognitive processes are sanctioned by the evaluative standards tat happen to be woven into our language.
Stephen Stich, ‘Reflective Equilibrium, Analytic Epistemology and the Problem of Cognitive Diversity’, Synthese, vol. 74, no. 3 (March, 1988), p. 109
Everybody knows that the same sum of money is of much greater value to a poor man that to a rich one. Give £10 a year to the man who has but £10 a year, you double his income, and you nearly double his enjoyments. Add £10 more, you do not add to his enjoyments so much as you did by the first £10. The third £10 is less valuable than the second, and the fourth less valuable than the third. To the possessor of £1,000 a year the addition of £10 would be scarcely perceptible; to the possessor of £10,000 it would not be worth slooping for.
The richer a man is the less he is benefited by any further addition to his income. The man of £4,000 a year has four times the income of the man who has but £1,000; but does anybody suppose that he has four times the happiness?
John Stuart Mill, ‘Primogeniture’, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1988, vol. 26, p. 336
A more detailed understanding of the biases that afflict spontaneous epistemic judgments could assist philosophers wondering which epistemic intuitions to trust.
Jennifer Nagel, ‘Epistemic Intuitions’, Philosophy Compass, vol. 2, no. 6 (November, 2007), p. 814
[P]hilosophers defending a given position against opponents have a powerful vested interest in persuading themselves that the intuitions that directly or indirectly favour it are stronger than they actually are. The stronger those intuitions, the more those who appeal to them gain, both psychologically and professionally. Given what is known of human psychology, it would be astonishing if such vested interests did not manifest themselves in at least some degree of wishful thinking, some tendency to overestimate the strength of intuitions that help one’s cause and underestimate the strength of those that hinder it.
Timothy Williamson, ‘Philosophical ‘Intuitions’ and Scepticism about Judgement’, Dialectica, vol. 58, no. 1 (March, 2004), p. 110
It is plausibly argued that, just as artistic and literary achievements flourish in a society held together by a good deal of political and religious repression, so the search for truth is effectively prosecuted in conditions where individual scientists feel as if they have no choice about the theories they accept; the totalitarian scientific community is an efficient device for, so to speak, launching the intellectual energies of individual scientists against the natural world.
Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill, London, 1974, p. 138
The fact is, that good practice can, in no case, have any solid foundation but in sound theory. This proposition is not more important, than it is certain. For, What is theory? The whole of the knowledge, which we possess upon any subject, put into that order and form in which it is most easy to draw from it good practical rules. Let any one examine this definition, article by article, and show us that it fails in a single particular. To recommend the separation of practice from theory is, therefore, simply, to recommend bad practice.
James Mill, ‘Government’, in Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, London, 1825, intro.
[P]rofessional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.
John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, London, 1936, chap. 12, sect. 5
[T]he test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people[.]
John Stuart Mill, ‘Pledges’, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1986, vol. 23, p. 502
People feel obliged to send cards to people from whom they expect to receive them, often knowing that they will receive them only because the senders expect to receive cards in return.
Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior, New York, 1978, pp. 31-32
We know that the Null Possibility does not obtain, but the fact that it is a possibility deprives us of our best opportunity for claiming that the Maximal Possibility obtains instead. Because there could have been nothing we have little reason to believe that there is everything. Instead, there is just something.
Stephen Grover, ‘Cosmological Fecundity’, Inquiry, vol. 41, no. 3 (September, 1998), p. 295
In Marxist writings on education, bureaucracy and indeed on most topics there seems to be an implicit regulative idea that ‘Every institution or behavioural pattern in capitalist society serves the interests of capitalisms and is maintained because it serves those interests.’ Marxists seem to have lost their sense of the ironies of history, whereby societies can generate patterns that lead to their own destruction. In order to substantiate this naïve brand of functionalism Marxists have invented a special gimmick, which is to manipulate the time perspective. If, say, the actions of the State go counter to short-term capitalist interests, this has the function of safeguarding long-term capitalist interests; heads I win, tails you lose. […] Now this is not only an arbitrary procedure, because ‘any argument can be turned to any effect by juggling with the time scale’. It is also a theoretically inconsistent one, because functional analysis cannot invoke indirect strategies […]. To the extent that the state is maintained through the effects of its actions on the capitalist class, the negative short-term effects should make it disappear (or change) before the long-term positive effects come to be felt. Only intentional actors are capable of taking one step backwards in order to take two steps forwards later on, so that the short-term/long-term distinction logically leads to a conspiratorial interpretation of history, given the absence of empirical evidence for such intentions.
Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality, rev. ed., Cambridge, 1984, pp. 34-35.
Every scientist knows that the best research emerges from a dialectic between speculation and healthy scepticism. Ideally the two should co-exist in the same brain, but they don’t have to. Since there are people who represent both extremes, all ideas eventually get tested ruthlessly.
V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of Mind, London, 2005, p. xvi
Since we are for the most part the descendants of the strivers of the pre-industrial world, those driven to achieve greater economic success than their peers, perhaps these findings reflect another cultural or biological heritage from the Malthusian era. The contented may well have lost out in the Darwinian struggle that defined the world before 1800. Those who were successful in the economy of the Malthusian era could well have been driven by a need to have more than their peers in order to be happy. Modern man might not be designed for contentment. The envious have inherited the earth.
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton, 2007, p. 16
When I think of our relationship to string theory over the years, I am reminded of an art dealer who represented a friend of mine. When we met, he mentioned that he was also a good friend of a young writer whose book I had admired; we can call her “M.” A few weeks later, he called me and said, “I was speaking to M. the other day, and, you know, she is very interested in science. Could I get you two together sometime?” Of course I was terribly flattered and excited and accepted the first of several dinner invitations. Halfway through a very good meal, the art dealer’s cell phone rang. “It’s M.,” he announced. “She’s nearby. She would love to drop by and meet you . Is that OK?” But she never came. Over dessert, the dealer and I had a great talk about the relationship between art and science. After a while, my curiosity about whether M. would actually show up lost to my embarrassment of over my eagerness to meet her, so I thanked him and went home.A few weeks later he called, apologized profusely, and invited me to dinner again to meet her. Of course I went. For one thing, he ate only in the best restaurants; it seems that the managers of some art galleries have expense accounts that exceed the salaries of academic scientists. But the same scene was repeated that time and at several subsequent dinners. She would call, then an hour would go by, sometimes two, before his phone rang again: “Oh, I see, you’re not feeling well” or “The taxi driver didn’t know where the Odeon is? He took you to Brooklyn? What is this city coming to? Yes, I’m sure, very soon…” After two years of this, I became convinced that the picture of the young woman on her book jacket was a fake. One night I told him that I finally understood: He was M. He just smiled and said, “Well, yes… but she would have so enjoyed meeting you.”
The story of string theory is like my forever postponed meeting with M. You work on it even though you know it’s not the real thing, because it’s as close as you know how to get. Meanwhile the company is charming and the good is good. From time to time, you hear that the real theory is about to be revealed, but somehow that never happens. After a while, you go looking for it yourself. This feels good, but it, too, never comes to anything. In the end, you have little more than you started with: a beautiful picture on the jacket of a book you can never open.
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, Boston, 2006, pp. 147-148
That which is most conformable to the experienced course of nature, say, to experience, is in every instance most probable. Error and mendacity are more conformable to experience than miracles are.
Jeremy Bentham, Deontology Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, Oxford, 1983, p. 27
A finite limitation cries out for an explanation of why there is just that particular limit, in a way that limitlessness does not. There is a neatness about zero and infinity which particular finite numbers lack.
Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, rev. ed., Oxford, 1991, p. 283
Let us grant that a linguist, qua theoretical and dispassionate scientist, is not in the business of telling people how to talk; it by no means follows that the speakers he is studying are free from rules which ought to be recorded in any faithful and accurate report of their practices. A student of law is not a legislator; but it would be a gross fallacy to argue that therefore there can be no right or wrong in legal matters.
Max Black, The Labyrinth of Language, New York, 1968, p. 70
Being a utilitarian, my interest is in the universe.
Torbjörn Tännsjö, ‘Narrow Hedonism’, Journal of Happiness Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (March, 2007), p. 80
[T]he gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our passion nor our devotion to our country.
It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America—except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Robert Kennedy, speech delivered at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, March 18, 1968
[I]t is crucial for happiness research to focus more on the biochemical correlates of good and bad feelings in order to create a more trustworthy picture of how well we actually feel.
Will Wilkinson, ‘In Pursuit of Happiness Research’, Policy Analysis, no. 590 (April 11, 2007), p. 10