Quotes for All
The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning. Eliezer Yudkowsky
Nothing could be more reckless than to base one’s moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science. Edward Abbey
All good moral philosophy is … but the handmaid to religion. Francis Bacon
Democracy may have arisen in the West as the way of striving for the universal aspiration to dignity and freedom, but it isn’t alien to the underlying concepts that infuse religion and moral philosophy everywhere. Flora Lewis
The Consequentialist trinity is typically regarded in this way: Bentham is crude, Mill’s writings are full of howlers and inconsistencies, and Sidgwick was too smart to fully embrace Consequentialism. All of these great traditions in moral philosophy express strands of our moral consciousness and they should all be treated as research programs rather than as … Read more
We are now returning to the 18th century empirical approach with the new interest in the evolutionary basis of ethics, with ‘experimental’ moral philosophy and moral psychology. As a result, we understand better why moral formulas are experienced as ineluctable commands, even if there is no commander and even if the notion of an inescapable … Read more
We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach. Bertrand Russell
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing. Anthony Burgess
To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on. Anne … Read more
I think that both Mill and Sidgwick are great and admirable philosophers, from whom we still have a lot to learn. I would not favor a form of Kantianism (if there is such a form) that treats Mill’s or Sidgwick’s moral philosophy with disrespect. Allen W. Wood