Monthly Archives: May 2008

Richard Dawkins

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins, ‘God’s Utility Function’, Scientific American, vol. 273, no. 5 (November, 1995), p. 85

Kent Berridge

Emotional reactions typically involve extensive cognitive processing, but affective neuroscience is distinguishable from cognitive neuroscience in that emotional processes must also always involve an aspect of affect, the psychological quality of being good or bad.

Kent Berridge, ‘Pleasures of the Brain’, Brain and Cognition, vol. 52, no. 1 (June, 2003), p. 106

Eric Hobsbawm

Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective, and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours. On the other hand, like sex it implies some physical action—marching, chanting slogans, singing—through which the merger of the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression. […] When, in British isolation two years later, I reflected on the basis of my communism, this sense of ‘mass ecstasy’ (Massenekstase, for I wrote my diary in German) was one of the five components of it—together with pity for the exploited, the aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, ‘’dialectical materialism’, a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism.

Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, New York, 2002, pp. 73-74

Henry Sidgwick

We have next to consider who the “all” are, whose happiness is to be taken into account. Are we to extend our concern to all the beings capable of pleasure and pain whose feelings are affected by our conduct? or are we to confine our view to human happiness? The former view is the one adopted by Bentham and Mill, and (I believe) by the Utilitarian school generally: and is obviously most in accordance with the universality that is characteristic of their principle. It is the Good Universal, interpreted and defined as ‘happiness’ or ‘pleasure,’ at which a Utilitarian considers it his duty to aim: and it seems arbitrary and unreasonable to exclude from the end, as so conceived, any pleasure of any sentient being.

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., London, 1907, bk. 4, chap. 1, sect. 1

Samuel Scheffler

[C]ommon-sense deontological morality, standing between egoism and consequentialism, sometimes seems to be caught in a kind of normative squeeze, with its rationality challenged in parallel ways by (as it were) the maximizers of the right and of the left: those who think that one ought always to pursue one’s good, and those who are convinced that one should promote the good of all.

Samuel Scheffler, ‘Agent-Centred Restrictions, Rationality, and the Virtues’, Mind, vol. 94, no. 375 (July, 1985), p. 415

John Broome

Epicurus’s hedonism actually implies that death normally harms you. Epicurus thinks it implies the opposite, but he is mistaken. He is right that there is no time when death harms you, but it does not follow that death does not harm you. It may harm you, even though it harms you at no time.

John Broome, ‘What Is Your Life Worth?’, Dædalus, vol. 137, no. 1 (January, 2008), p. 52

Arthur Prior

[H]alf the time I personally have forgotten what the date is, and have to look it up or ask somebody when I need it for writing cheques, etc.; yet even in this perceptual dateless haze one somehow communicates, one makes oneself understood, and with time-references too. One says, e.g., “Thank goodness that’s over!”, and not only is this, when said, quite clear without any date appended, but it says something which it is impossible that any use of a tenseless copula with a date should convey. It certainly doesn’t mean the same as, e.g. “Thank goodness the date of the conclusion of that thing is Friday, June 15, 1954”, even if it be said then. (Nor, for that matter, does it mean “Thank goodness the conclusion of that thing is contemporaneous with this utterance”. Why should anyone thank goodness for that?)

Arthur Prior, ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’, Philosophy, vol. 34, no. 128 (January, 1959), p. 17

Stephen Grover

The evidentialist objection to belief in God cannot be sidestepped through any analogy with beliefs that we hold in the absence of evidence, but which it is clearly rational for us to believe. The beliefs about matters of fact and existence that we do hold without evidence in their support—beliefs like Plantinga’s strictly and loosely basic beliefs or Kenny’s fundamental beliefs—are related to sense-experience or to our trust in procedures of belief-formation on the basis of sense-experience in ways quite different from the ways in which religious beliefs are related to that experience and those procedures. Not can religious beliefs which arise directly out of experience other than ordinary perceptual experience be directly evident, for they manifest few of the signs of reliability which ordinary perceptual claims manifest and show signs of unreliability as well. If we regard the belief that God exists as an unjustified and unjustifiable presupposition of the theist’s world picture then we either relinquish any claim to rationality for that belief, or attain the required rationality only at the cost of abandoning the claim to objectivity which genuinely theistic belief cannot go without.

Stephen Grover, God and the Absence of Evidence, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1987, p. 185

David Lewis

Many […] Christians […] are sincerely compassionate; they genuinely forgive their enemies. Yet they knowingly worship the perpetrator. Perhaps they do not like to think about it, but they firmly believe that, in the hereafter, their God will consign people they know, some of whom they love, to an eternity of unimaginable agony. Moved by this thought, they do whatever they can to urge others to join them in faith. Their deep sympathy with the unbelievers is expressed in efforts to persuade others to play by the rules the perpetrator has set. In worshiping the perpetrator, however, they acquiesce in those rules. They are well aware that many will not fall in line with the rules. They think that, if that happens, the perpetrator will be right to start the eternal torture. They endorse the divine evil. And that’s bad enough.

David Lewis, ‘Divine Evil’, in Louise Antony (ed.), Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, New York, 2007, p. 239

John Broome

[On Parfit’s view], the boundaries within lives are like the boundaries between lives. So we do not regard people as the morally significant units. This only means that if we are concerned with distribution at all, we shall be concerned with distribution between what are the morally significant units—namely, person-segments or whatever these divisions of a person are. So certainly the fact that a person has suffered more in the past will not make us give extra weight to relieving her suffering now. But if she is suffering more now, we may give extra weight to it. We may be concerned to equalize the distribution of good between person-segments. So all this argument does is remind us that we have changed the units of distribution. It does not suggest that we should be less interested in distribution between them.

John Broome, ‘Utilitarian Metaphysics?’, in Jon Elster and John Roemer (eds.), Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being, Cambridge, 1991, p. 94

Galen Strawson

[I]t is true that ‘I seem to see a table’ does not entail ‘I see a table’; but ‘I seem to feel a pain’ does entail ‘I feel a pain’. So scepticism loses its force—cannot open up its characteristic gap—with regard to that which ultimately most concerns us, pleasure and pain.

Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief, Oxford, 1986, p. 223, n. 29

G. E. Moore

If the reader wishes to form an impartial judgment as to what the fundamental problems of Ethics really are, and what is the true answer to them, it is of the first importance that he should not confine himself to reading works of any one single type, but should realize what extremely different sorts of things have seemed to different writers, of acknowledged reputation, to be the most important things to be said about the subject.

G. E. Moore, Ethics, London, 1912, p. 253

Henry Sidgwick

[T]he inhuman severity of the paradox that ‘pleasure and pain are indifferent to the wise man,’ never failed to have a repellent effect; and the imaginary rack on which an imaginary sage had to be maintained in perfect happiness, was at any rate a dangerous instrument of dialectical torment or the actual philosopher.

Christianity extricated the moral consciousness from this dilemma between base subserviency and inhuman indifference to the feelings of the moral agent. It compromised the long conflict between Virtue and Pleasure, by transferring to another world the fullest realisation of both; thus enabling orthodox morality to assert itself, as reasonable and natural, without denying the concurrent reasonableness and naturalness of the individual’s desire or bliss without allow.

Henry Sidgwick, ‘Hedonism and Ultimate Good’, Mind, vol. 2, no. 5 (January, 1877), p. 30

Karl Duncker

The degrees of intensity are often more accurately described as degrees of saturation (of an experience with pleasantness) that are characteristic of the experience in question. Lust, for instance, is so highly saturated with pleasantness that is has usurped its very name.

Karl Duncker, ‘On Pleasure, Emotion, and Striving’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 1, no. 4 (June, 1941), p. 408

Leonard Katz

I think that while some parts of natural human morality may rest on illusion, hedonically grounded practical reasons, and at least those parts of morality that rest on them, very likely have some objective normative standing.

Leonard Katz, ‘Hedonic Reasons as Ultimately Justifying and the Relevance of Neuroscience’, in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008, p. 409

G. A. Cohen

[A]nalytical Marxists do no think that Marxism possesses a distinctive and valuable method. Others believe that is has such a method, which they call ‘dialectical’. But we believe that, although the word ‘dialectical’ has not always been used without clear meaning, it has never been used with clear meaning to denote a method rival to the analytical one[.] […] I do not think that the following, to take a recent example, describes such a method: “This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic: a logic or form of explanation specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history.” (Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, p. 97.) If you read a sentence like that quickly, it can sound pretty good. The remedy is to read it more slowly.

G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, exp. ed., Oxford, 2000, p. xxiii

Timothy Sprigge

Our view does not deny the importance, and indeed inevitability, of our sustaining the construction of a world in which values pertain to things which are not conceived as anyone’s mere personal experience. It will, however, think that for critical reflection the values of the constructed world only matter to whatever extent they, or the belief in them, are values realized in immediate experience.

Timothy Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics, London, 1988, p. 182

Jon Elster

Delay strategies might seem to hold out the best promise for dealing with emotion-based irrationality. Since emotions tend to have a short half-life, any obstacle to the immediate execution of an action tendency could be an effective remedy. As I note later, public authorities do indeed count on this feature of emotion when they require people to wait before making certain important decisions. It is rare, however, to observe people imposing delays on themselves for the purpose of counteracting passion. The requisite technologies may simply be lacking.

Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 2007, p. 242

Gina Trapani

Picture this: You sit down at your computer to write a report that’s due the next day. You fire up a web browser to check the company intranet for a document. For a split second, you glance at your home page. “Wow!” you say. “The Red Sox won in the 17th inning! Let me see what happened…”

Three hours later, no report’s been written, and you want to throw yourself out of the window.

Sound familiar?

It’s too easy to scamper down the rabbit hole of the Web when you’ve gt pressing tasks to work on. At one point or another, you’ve probably burned a few hours clicking around Wikipedia, Amazon.com, eBay, Flickr, YouTube, or Google News when you had a deadline to meet. Surfing efficiently is an exercise in discipline and sometimes outright abstinence. This hack uses the LeechBlock Firefox extension to blank out certain web sites during times you’re supposed to be working. […]

[A] particularly determined procrastinator might say, “If it’s a block I can disable, I’ll do it.” If you find yourself blocked from a time-wasting site that you insist on visiting (and to hell with your deadline), you could go into LeechBlock’s options and undo the block. However, LeechBlock comes with a clever feature built to prevent just that. In LeechBlock’s options dialog, check off “Prevent access to options for this block set at times when these sites are blocked.”

Gina Trapani, Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Indianapolis, 2008, pp. 140-141, 146

Jeff McMahan

Almost any shift away from the ways in which meat is currently produced and consumed would be better for both animals and people.

Jeff McMahan, ‘Eating Animals the Nice Way’, Dædalus, vol. 137, no. 1 (Winter, 2008), p. 76