Monthly Archives: May 2010

Alastair Norcross

I have experienced pains no more severe than a broken wrist, torn ankle ligaments, or an abscess in a tooth. These were pretty bad, but I have no doubt that a skilled torturer could make me experience pains many times as bad.

Alastair Norcross, ‘Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives’, Philosophy & Public Affairs (Spring, 1997), vol. 26, no. 2, p. 146

John Broome

A few extra people now means some extra people in each generation through the future. There does not appear to be a stabilizing mechanism in human demography that, after some change, returns the population to what it would have been had the change not occurred.

John Broome, ‘Should We Value Population?’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 4 (December, 2005), pp. 402-403

Carlos Santiago Nino

Estoy convencido de que la subsistencia de la controversia entre positivistas jurídicos e iusnaturalistas a través del tiempo se debe a las confusiones que contaminan esta polémica y que impide percibir con claridad qué tesis defiendedn los contrincantes. En realidad, debo ser más drástico, ya que me parece que muchos participantes en esta polémica no tienen mucha claridad sobre las tesis que ellos mismos defienden.

Carlos Santiago Nino, Derecho, moral y política: Una revisión de la teoría general del Derecho, Barcelona, 1994, p. 17

Patricia Highsmith

There was a faint air of sadness about him now. He enjoyed the change. He imagined that he looked like a young man who had had an unhappy love affair or some kind of emotional disaster, and was trying to recuperate in a civilized way, by visiting some of the more beautiful places on Earth.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, New York, 1955, p. 186

George Hartmann

If happiness be one of the major goals of living, if not the only consciously acceptable end of life itself (most people in practice behave as though they were hedonists or eudaemonists), surely an analysis of the conditions fostering or hindering its attainment is an intellectual obligation of the first order, since upon it rests the merit of all other human and social values.

George Hartmann, ‘Personality Traits Associated with Variations in Happiness’, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol, 29, No. 2 (July, 1934), p. 203

C. D. Broad

It seems to me that many theories of the universe may be dismissed at once, not as too good, but as too cosy, to be true. One feels sure that they could have arisen only among people living a peculiarly sheltered life at a peculiarly favourable period of the world’s history. No theory need be seriously considered unless it recognises that the world has always been for most men and all animals other than domestic pets a scene of desperate struggle in which great evils are suffered and inflicted. No theory need be seriously considered unless it recognises how utterly alien most of the non-human life even on this small planet is to man and his ideals; how slight a proportion ostensibly living matter bears to the matter which is ostensibly inanimate; and that man himself can live and thrive only by killing and eating other living beings, animal or vegetable. Any optimism which is not merely silly and childish must maintain itself, if it can, in spite of and in conscious recognition of these facts.

C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, Cambridge, 1938, vol. 2, p. 774

C. D. Broad

In the controversies of party politics, which move at the intellectual level of a preparatory school, it is counted a score against a man if he can be shown ever to have altered his mind on extremely difficult questions in a rapidly changing world. In the less puerile realm of science and philosophy it is not considered disgraceful to learn as well as to live, and this kind of stone has no weight and is not worth throwing.

C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, Cambridge, 1938, vol. 2, p. lxxiii

Derek Parfit

Why ought I to do what I know that I ought to do?

[…] I might ask [this] if I knew that I ought to do something, but I didn’t know, or had forgotten, what made this true. Such cases raise no puzzle. Suppose next that, though I know both that and why I ought to do something, I ask why I ought to do this thing. The only puzzle here would be why I asked this question. When we know why something is true, we don’t need to ask why this thing is true.

Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Oxford, forthcoming