Quotes About Philosophy

Many philosophers and other writers have proposed the principle of equal consideration of interests, in some form or other, as a basic moral principle; but not many of them have recognized that this principle applies to members of other species as well as to our own.

In this passage Bentham points to the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration.

the argument is really about equality rather than about rights.

In short, if the demand for equality were based on the actual equality of all human beings, we would have to stop demanding equality.

the idea that there are objective ethical truths that are independent of what anyone desires.

If the foundations of an ideological position are knocked out from under it, new foundations will be found, or else the ideological position will just hang there, defying the logical equivalent of the laws of gravity.

Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning....

The central argument against abortion, put as a formal argument, would go something like this: First premise: It is wrong to kill an innocent human being. Second premise: A human fetus is an innocent human being. Conclusion: Therefore, it is wrong to kill a human fetus. The usual liberal response is to deny the second premise of this argument.

There is no rule that says that a potential X has the same value as an X or has all the rights of an X. There are many examples that show just the contrary. To pull out a sprouting acorn is not the same as cutting down a venerable oak. To drop a fertile egg into a pot of boiling water is very different from doing the same to a live chicken. Prince Charles is (at the time of writing) a potential King of England, but he does not now have the rights of a king.

Probably the best-known tenet of modern moral philosophy: the doctrine that there is an unbridgeable gulf between facts and values, between descriptions of what is and prescriptions of what ought to be.

To explain our conventional ethical attitudes, is not to justify them.

There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.

In the absence of any general inference from 'A is a potential X' to 'A has the rights of an X', we should not accept that a potential person should have the rights of a person, unless we can be given some specific reason why this should hold in this particular case.

Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

Effective altruists, as we have seen, need not be utilitarians, but they share a number of moral judgments with utilitarians. In particular, they agree with utilitarians that, other things being equal, we ought to do the most good we can.

First premise: If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it. Second premise: Extreme poverty is bad. Third premise: There is some extreme poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance. Conclusion: We ought to prevent some extreme poverty.

You're dying to hear what she said. And you will. The three principles are: "One. If something is free to be taken, take it. "Two. Other people exist so that you may use them. "Three. Nothing on earth means anything, or can mean anything, but what it is.

Plato considered the golden section proportion the most binding of all mathematical relations, making it the key to the physics of the cosmos.

Wise men contemplate the world," he thinks, "knowing full well that they are contemplating themselves.

Nearly our entire intellectual education originates from the Greeks. A thorough knowledge of their origin is the indisputable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence.

Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525)

The Praise of Folly.

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra was the source of the 'profoundest error in human history – namely the invention of morality'.