“Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it. But it can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope and the adherents of each are willing to pay the price necessary to secure coherence and consistency. Hence the peculiar flavor of so much contemporary analytic writing—by writers less philosophically self-aware than Rorty or Lewis—in which passages of argument in which the most sophisticated logical and semantic techniques available are deployed in order to secure maximal rigor alternate with passages which seem to do no more than cobble together a set of loosely related arbitrary preferences; contemporary analytic philosophy exhibits a strange partnership between an idiom deeply indebted to Frege and Carnap and one deriving from the more simple-minded forms of existentialism”
“We talk about society because we want to align ourselves with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself *against*, and you don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.”
“Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled.”
“What is more, we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeing to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an original example...even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.”
“It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.”
“What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy. Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea. If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.”
“What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.”
“At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.”
“There s no room for hate and violence in this world. We must learn to be more kind, compassionate, empathetic, and sympathetic to humanity.”
“A revolutionary who is out to defeat his enemies could use their weapons, but not their rules.”
“Rose pivoted. “Alainn, can I ask you something about ethics?” Alainn nodded, slowly. “Sure.” Rose’s inhuman eyes met hers, and she asked, “Would you die to save a million people?”
“Enough of medical ethics. Let Uncle Hippocrates rest in peace. It’s time to send an S.O.S to Uncle Omar Khayyam instead.”
“Life in accordance with intellect is best and pleasantest, since this, more than anything else, constitutes humanity.”
“We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good—for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It’s called ‘moral vanity’.”
“Happiness seems to depend on leisure, because we work to have leisure, and wage war to live in peace.”
“Me siento inclinado a decir que la expresión lingüística correcta del milagro de la existencia del mundo -a pesar de no ser una proposición en el lenguaje- es la existencia del lenguaje mismo”
“Rules are rules was stuffed into him from the crib like he was a Thanksgiving turkey.”