Philosophers From The United States

"Poetry, like Art, is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual."

"Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things. Whatever is in the world, whatever person, has meaning because it or he has to do with the whole universe: immeasurable and crowded reality. The technique of poetry aims for the intensification of a thing through showing the likeness of what is in that thing to something else--to everything else, as different."

"ONE QUESTION I - Why?"

"A pessimist is a person who finds an oyster in a pearl."

"The quiet of this afternoon is strange, haunting, awful; Hear that buzzing in the hot grass, coming from live things; and those crows' cries from somewhere; There is a sluggish, sad brook near here, too. The bird is gone now, so graceful, fair as it was, And the sky has nothing but the brightness of air in it. The clean color of air. The sun makes it be afternoon here;..."

"Art is a way of showing greater fairness to things than is customary."

"Wrongfully to be contemptuous of other human beings is inviting mental unhealth for oneself."

"If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake."

"According to Aesthetic Realism, the greatest sin that a person can have is the desire for contempt. Because as soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don't want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person."

"Incarceration in prison or a local jail sets poor people up for exploitation in a forced labor system. New Deal laws once prohibited the use of prison labor except for state institutions. Businesses won the right to use prison labor in 1979. They won an exception from minimum wage laws for prison workers in 1995. This led to the employment of hundreds of thousands of inmates of federal and state prisons for mere pennies per hour. Many are forced to work in unsafe conditions without protective equipment, because workplace health and safety laws do not apply to prison workers."

"We are used to rhetoric that casts “government” as a threat to our liberties. By making it clear that the workplace is a form of government (that the state is not the only government that rules us), we can make clear how the authority that employers have over workers threatens their dignity and autonomy. By naming that government as “private” — that is, as kept private from the workers, as something employers claim is none of the workers’ business — we can make more vivid the fact that workers are laboring under arbitrary, unaccountable dictatorships."

"If free market prices don't give people what they morally deserve, should we try to regulate factor prices so that they do track producers' moral deserts? Hayek offered two compelling arguments against this proposal. First, if you fix prices on a backward-looking standard, they will no longer be able to perform their informational function. Producers will produce for what was demanded last quarter, even if it isn't demanded today. This creates enormous waste and generates huge opportunity costs. We'd be much poorer in an economy that worked like this. […] Hayek was right. It might sound like a compelling idea, to make sure that people receive the income they morally deserve. But orienting the economy around this goal, assuming it is achievable at all (and there are principled doubts about that), would doom us to poverty and serfdom. It would abolish capitalism, along with its chief virtues. It isn't worth the draconian costs."

"In Bentham's vision, the poor should be treated like criminals, forced to labor in prison for the private profit of capitalist entrepreneurs. Such a totalitarian idea might seem remote from purportedly enlightened twenty-first-century practices in liberal democracies. Yet both the criminalization of poverty, and the subjection of the criminalized poor to unpaid labor for corporate profit, exist in the United States today."

"Several implications follow from Hayek's insights into the nature of capitalism.(a) The claim "I deserve my pretax income" is not generally true. Nor should the basic organization of property rules be based on considerations of moral desert. Hence, claims about desert have no standing in deciding whether taxation for the purpose of funding social insurance is just. (b) The claim that people rocked by the viccisitudes of the market, or poor people generally, are getting what they deserve is also not generally true. To moralize people's misfortunes in this way is both ignorant and mean. Capitalism continuously and randomly pulls the rug out from under even the most prudent and diligent people. It is in principle impossible for even the most prudent to forsee all the market turns that could undo them. (If it were possible, then efficient socialist planning would be possible, too. But it isn't.) (c) Capitalist markets are highly dynamic and volatile. This means that at any one time, lots of people are going under. Often, the consequences of this would be catastrophic, absent concerted intervention to avert the outcomes generated by markets. For example, the economist Amartya Sen has documented that sudden shifts in people's incomes (which are often due to market volatility), and not absolute food shortages, are a principal cause of famine. (d) The volatility of capitalist markets creates a profound and urgent need for insurance, over and above the insurance needs people would have under more stable (but stagnant) economic systems. This need is increased also by the fact that capitalism inspires a love of personal independence, and hence brings about the smaller ("nuclear") family forms that alone are compatible with it. We no longer belong to vast tribes and clans. This sharply reduces the ability of individuals under capitalism to pool risks within families, and limits the claims they can effectively make on nonhousehold (extended) family members for assistance. To avoid or at least ameliorate disaster and disruption, people need to pool the risks of capitalism."

"Liberals disagree about the scope, nature, and weight of the liberties they consider basic. High liberals have a thin conception of economic liberty. They think that freedom of occupation and freedom to own personal property are among the basic liberties. In contrast, classical liberals, libertarians, and neoclassical liberals think that the basic liberties also include strong rights to freedom of contract, freedom to own and use productive property, freedom to buy and sell on voluntary terms, and so on. They regard these rights as on par with civil liberties, while high liberals regard them as lesser rights, or in some cases, not rights at all. High liberals tend to interpret the civil liberties broadly. They assume that the civil liberties have a wide scope and are quite weighty. Neoclassical liberals hold that economic liberties have the same weight and wide scope as the civil liberties. (High liberals will want to ask: Why?)"

"In general the claim can be supported that a view of classical political economy as committed to extreme laissez-faire or unmitigated economic individualism misrepresents or at the very least analytically overgeneralizes their circumscribed theoretical and practical aims. In general then, with regard to both political and economic liberty, the classical political economists might be seen to be united in their efforts to theorize and systematize the productive and allocating functions of the mechanism of the market as the most efficient means to engender the growth of wealth. At the same time, classicals such as Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill recognized that the market, of necessity, operated in a larger context of restriction – not only legal, but equally as important, within political, religious, moral, and conventional restrictions – which could not be readily or in some cases even desirably overcome."

"In academic philosophy, people tend to use the term ‘libertarian’ in a restrictive way, to refer to people who 1) hold that property rights and other rights are absolute or nearly absolute, 2) who ground their theories of rights and justice on the concept of self-ownership, 3) who reject social justice, and 4) who reject the idea that positive liberty really is liberty, and is a valuable form of liberty which society should project and promote. Libertarians hold that justice requires that we respect property rights, period, even if that means a large percentage of people will starve, lead poor and desperate lives, or have no stake in their society. If that’s libertarianism, count me out."

"Most liberals agree that some rights and liberties are more basic than others. All liberals include some economic liberties on their list of basic liberties. The purpose of these liberties is (at least in part) to protect citizens’ ability to act as independent decision-makers over a wide range of choices they face in their lives, to facilitate them facing each other as autonomous and equal citizens, and to allow them to develop their moral powers."

"The Treatise is also one of the most important books of Western thought ever written. Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state."

"In sum, the accommodation of the Republic is not to the spokesmen for the many, which is to say that it is not political. Instead, the accommodation is to the few, or the few as they were in their youth, like Glaucon and Adeimantus, who must be tested by the conversation in order to determine their fitness for philosophy. This is the peculiarity of the Republic: to speak out on the most dangerous of things and to exercise restraint or a rhetoric of indirection in the discussion of that which seems least likely to endanger the city, real or imagined. In slightly different terms, what Socrates calls dialectic enters the city surreptitiously, and it must do so in order to make the city safe for philosophy. In exchange for this safety, philosophy offers to the city a foundation for justice that is exaggerated in the account of the beautiful city but in its more sober version is verified by the course of Western history."

"The world probably would have been much better off had macroeconomics never been devised. Although I have in mind Keynesian macroeconomics above all, I include other types of macro models as well. I even include, somewhat reluctantly, the whole quantity theory approach descended from David Hume to the Friedmanites, now known as monetarism. … In short, among its many other deficiencies, as spelled out by Mises and his followers, monetarism’s most fundamental flaw is identical to the most fundamental flaw of Keynesian, Post-Keynesian, New Classical, and other theories advanced by macroeconomists during the past seventy or eighty years: not only does the theory leave out critical variables, but it is too simple, being expressed in huge, all-encompassing aggregates that conceal the real economic action taking place within the economic order."

"A failure to help that polar bear – or any individual animal in a comparable condition, regardless of our responsibility (direct or indirect) for that suffering – is. Nor can lack of action be defended by some alleged concern for the course of nature ('We must not interfere!') or the gene pool of the species ('Let the weak die!'). Consider someone who would use those same arguments to justify not intervening to help relieve the suffering of particular human beings during a famine or after a tsunami, or someone who would use such arguments to say that we should not give antibiotics to a child with pneumonia. Such an attitude, reminiscent of various Charles Dickens characters, would be rejected out of hand as immoral. If the only morally relevant factor is 'can they suffer?', there is no relevant moral difference when animals suffer pain that we can alleviate."

"With these dramatic words, Kant alludes to the two great problems and accomplishments of his philosophical career. On the one hand, he wants to know how we who as creatures are a mere part of nature can discover how all of nature … does and even must work. On the other hand, he wants to display the unconditional value that we have as rational rather than merely natural beings, … and that we are always free to act in accordance with and indeed for the sake of this principle, thus free to realize the unconditional value for which we unlike anything else in nature have the potential."

"It may seem as if Kant was content with such a radically dualistic view of human action, but ultimately he was not. … What Kant is assuming here is that morality is not just a matter of making rightful or virtuous choices, but also requires us to put those choices into practice by attempting to realize the goals or ends that they entail in the arena of action, that is, nothing less than the realm of spatial, temporal, and causal nature in which we live and act."

"Indeed, once Kant had discovered the Humean problem of skepticism about the universality and necessity of first principles, he generalized it not only to the first principles of “speculative philosophy,” that is, theoretical cognition, but also to the first principle of practical philosophy, the fundamental principle of morality. Thus, from a methodological point of view, Kant’s project in philosophy became that of undermining both Humean and Pyrrhonian skepticism in both theoretical and practical philosophy, and, much more incidentally, along the way refuting Cartesian skepticism about external objects as a nagging but by no means central problem in theoretical philosophy."

"Thus Kantian autonomy, once it is understood, will (and ought to) disappoint those shallow minds and immature souls who are attracted to the doctrine of autonomy for the wrong reasons. They were hoping for some radical individualist revolution in morality, in which paroxysms of human self-will overthrow the divine will’s numinous majesty (thereby replacing, as many such revolutions sadly do, one arbitrary and unjust tyranny with another and bringing to power merely a different mob of unprincipled scoundrels). The sober rationalism of Kantian ethics is equally incompatible with voluntarism in its theological and its Promethean forms."

"Kant’s theory of freedom, and especially the idea that we are free only in the intelligible world beyond nature, has also been the chief stumbling block to the acceptance of his moral philosophy. The scandal has only increased with the passage of time, as fewer and fewer moral philosophers find it tolerable to burden morality with an extravagant supernaturalist metaphysics."

"Here is a conceptual truth about reasons: If it is impossible for us to do otherwise, that can never be because there is a reason to act as we do."

"Free will is as philosophical a question, in that sense, as there is. Kantian ethics should not represent itself as having a solution to it. If the problem of freedom is a philosophical open wound, then the right way to think about Kant’s utterly unacceptable theory of noumenal freedom is that it is the salt that philosophers have a professional obligation to rub in the wound so that they can’t forget about it."

"There are two main reasons that Kant refuses to allow that sympathy or any other empirical sentiment or desire could constitute the foundation of morality. One is that no sentiment of this kind can yield the kinds of objective and universal principles that morality requires. They can approximate to this only by claiming a greater empirical uniformity in human nature than experience shows to be there. […] Kant’s other main reason for rejecting sympathy or love as the basis of morality involves his view of the empirical psychology of these feelings as they arise in us in our social condition, and especially in the “civilized” condition of modern European society."

"The standard model of ethical theory may seem like merely a necessary consequence of applying to normative ethics the high standards of clarity and rigor prized by all of us who like to think of ourselves as philosophers in the analytic tradition. This way of doing ethics obviously parallels the way analytical philosophers treat many other subjects – by formulating generalizations about this or that and testing them against intuitive counterexamples. But I think the Sidgwickian method of intuitional ethics, or the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, is not the only way to think clearly about ethical theory."

"A moral imperative is categorical because its function is not to advise us how to reach some prior end of ours that is based on what we happen to want but instead to command us how to act irrespective of our wants or our contingent ends. Its rational bindingness is therefore not conditional on our setting any prior end."

"Good will is obviously present also in the case where the innocently goodhearted person acts beneficently because she enjoys it. As already mentioned, certain moral psychologies even encourage us to think that this innocent good-heartedness is the only thing we could possibly mean by a “good will.” Kant’s claim is that it is not, and that the true value of good will “shines forth more brightly” when it is found in the contrasting case, where it must struggle to overcome adversity. This claim certainly has an air of paradox about it, because it means that what is most essentially deserving of moral esteem is found only in cases where the moral agent is faced with conflicting motivations, or at least with an absence of any natural, spontaneous motivation to do the right thing."

"Although perhaps disproportionately influential, these egalitarian pluralist antiphysicalists still form only a small minority among contemporary philosophers, and today a huge preponderance of current philosophers of mind happily call themselves physicalists (or materialists), as do many other philosophers. Does this mean that in philosophy the question of physicalism has pretty much been settled – and settled in physicalism’s favor? It does not. For the appearance of a prophysicalist consensus in current philosophy of mind and elsewhere is in truth quite misleading. For one thing, philosophers content to assume physicalism in their detailed contributions to highly specific issues like phenomenal consciousness or intentionality rarely do so, I suspect, with an entirely easy conscience, often admitting quite candidly that they are simply taking physicalism for granted. Indeed, for all I know, they may even share the occasionally voiced suspicion that the widespread commitment to physicalism among science-minded philosophers reflects no more than an exaggerated regard for physics. A second, and more serious charge is that a consensus about physicalismat the level of interesting philosophical detail simply does not exist: how exactly to formulate the physicalism that everyone allegedly espouses, how far this physicalism can and should be nonreductive, what sort of empirical evidence does or even could in principle support it, and how it might overcome the major challenges it apparently faces are questions that, so far from being answered uniformly, are very frequently not answered at all. By confronting the issue of physicalism head on, however, this book will at least provide such questions with clear answers. Naturally I hope that these answers are correct as well as clear; but clarity alone would be ample progress."

"The differentiation of the political state from civil society was made historically possible, Marx believed, by the introduction of commodity exchange into the productive life of society, and the resulting opposition between the form of common property corresponding to the tribal Gemeinwesen and the form of private property corresponding to the exchange of commodities. This opposition, present already in the oriental and ancient productive modes, made possible in Marx's view the alienation of the state from civil society which characterized feudal production, and which reaches its extreme form in the fragmented life of capitalist civil society. Here the state, which began in immediate unity with the process of social production, has become a distinct institution operating within this process, which nevertheless still claims to represent society in its totality."

"Kantian ethics is fundamentally committed to a radical critique of human social life, especially of social life in its “civilized” form. This critical tendency is not a mere ancillary feature or contingent concomitant of Kantian ethics. It conditions the fundamental conception of Kantian ethical theory."

"It is far from self-evident why Kant chooses this triad as his vehicle for systematizing the formulas of the moral principle."

"Why forgive? What makes it the commendable thing to do at the appropriate time? It’s not simply a matter of lifting the burden of toxic resentment or of immobilizing guilt, however beneficial that may be ethically and psychologically. It is not a merely therapeutic matter, as though this were just about you. Rather, when the requisite conditions are met, forgiveness is what a good person would seek because it expresses fundamental moral ideals. These include ideals of spiritual growth and renewal; truth-telling; mutual respectful address; responsibility and respect; reconciliation and peace."

"Make sure the person whom you think wronged you is the person who wronged you."

"A third example [of unfortunate failure to check whether a passage was written for 1759 or 1790] is a lapse in a perceptive interpretation of the Moral Sentiments by Professor Charles L. Griswold, bringing out the influence of drama in Smith’s book [Charles L. Griswold, Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (1999)]. He claims that, when Smith writes of the spectator’s moral judgement, he envisages the spectator of a dramatic performance seeing the agent as an ‘actor’ on the stage. The evidence that Griswold adduces is one instance of the word ‘actor’ in place of ‘agent’ in the Moral Sentiments and one instance in the Lectures on Rhetoric. The Moral Sentiments instance occurs in part VI of the book, which was added to the sixth edition of 1790; so Griswold’s evidence cannot apply to Smith’s general conception of the spectator. There was in fact an instance of the word ‘actor’ in the first edition which was replaced by ‘agent’ in subsequent editions, showing that there was clearly no association with actors on the stage. This flaw in Griswold, however, does not lessen the value of his interpretation as a whole."

"Forgiveness does not attempt to get rid of warranted resentment. Rather, it follows from the recognition that the resentment is no longer warranted. And what would provide the warrant can be nothing other than the right reasons."

"Treating a being as an end in itself means respecting the value of what makes it such an end. After we see that this value resides in rational nature, we see it implies that, at least in general, rational beings should not be subjected to deception or coercion. Instead, we should seek to harmonize our strivings with those of other rational beings toward their ends."

"We repeatedly find that in his discussions about knowledge Plato just assumes or asserts that the Ideas exist, and then explains what "knowledge" is (for example, Rep. 476a ff., 507a-b ff., 596a and context, Pho. 100b ff.). We do not seem to get an account of how we know these ontological assumptions to be true. Indeed, one is justified in wondering whether Plato has a "theory" of Ideas at all."

"Here are six popular theses in the philosophical and psychological literature on motivation:1. Motivation is present in the animal kingdom but does not extend throughout it. 2. Motivated beings have a capacity to represent goals and means to goals. 3. A motivation-encompassing attitude may have either a goal or a means as its object. 4. Motivation varies in strength. 5. The stronger an agent’s motivation to A is, in comparison to the agent’s motivation for alternative courses of action, the more likely the agent is to A, other things being equal. 6. Whenever agents act intentionally, there is something they are effectively motivated to do.Divergent conceptions of motivation may be at work in philosophical thought about motivational matters. My concern in this book is a notion of motivation consistent with (among other things) these six claims. Readers who accept all six claims are likely to be more interested in the result than those who do not, but I conjecture that most readers do accept all of these claims, on some reading or other. Also, readers who reject one or more of these theses or who believe that no acceptable conception of motivation is consistent with all of them will be offered good reason to change their minds!"

"Don’t children have the same rights to life and equal concern as adults? Don’t we have moral reasons to concern ourselves with the welfare of nonrational beings, such as animals? Mustn’t that status rest on some value independent of the rational nature in persons? Kantian ethics must answer the last question in the negative, but it answers the other two in the affirmative. I think the right account of the moral status of nonrational living things and of human beings who lack personality in the strict sense can best be derived from Kantian principles, even though Kant himself did not worry about these questions as much as he should have, and some of the things he said about them do not seem to me entirely cogent, or to be the best account available to him."

"Those of us who are sympathetic to Kantian ethics usually are so because we regard it as an ethics of autonomy, based on respect for the human capacity to govern our own lives according to rational principles. Kantian ethical theory is grounded on the idea that the moral law is binding on me only because it is regarded as proceeding from my own will."

"Wolff is logically confronted by a choice between a world of robots subject to authority, on the one hand, and, on the other, a world of human beings subject to no authority whatsoever but responsibly exercising their moral autonomy. … Consequently Wolff fails, as he must, in his attempt to show that authority and autonomy could be reconciled in a state governed by unanimous direct democracy. … In attempting to build the edifice of anarchism on the foundations of responsibility and moral autonomy, Wolff is ultimately self-contradictory. For it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that except in extraordinary circumstances that are rarely attainable in our world, if we wish to maximize autonomy our only reasonable and responsible choice is to seek the best possible state. If a democratic state is the best possible state (as probably few anarchists would deny), then the most responsible way of exercising our moral autonomy is to opt for a democratic state."

"Hegel is one of those thinkers just about all educated people think they know something about. His philosophy was the forerunner to Karl Marx's theory of history, but unlike Marx, who was a materialist, Hegel was an idealist in the sense that he thought that reality was ultimately spiritual, and that it developed according to the process of thesis/ antithesis/ synthesis. Hegel also glorified the Prussian state, claiming that it was God's work, was perfect, and was the culmination of all human history. All citizens of Prussia owed unconditional allegiance to that state, and it could do with them as it pleased. Hegel played a large role in the growth of German nationalism, authoritarianism, and militarism with his quasi-mystical celebrations of what he pretentiously called the Absolute.Just about everything in the first paragraph is false except for the first sentence.What is even more striking is that it is all clearly and demonstrably wrong, has been known to be wrong in scholarly circles for a long time now, and it still appears in almost all short histories of thought or brief encyclopedia entries about Hegel."

"This book is dedicated to the memory of my teacher Rudolf Bultmann. He encouraged me more than thirty years ago to deal more intensively with the extra-canonical writings from the early Christian period. His unwavering insistence upon the consistent application of the historical-critical method and his emphasis upon the investigation of early Christian literature in the context of the history of religions must remain basic commitments of New Testament scholarship."

"Social movements for global democracy and justice should try not only to build on and create global legal and regulatory institutions, but also to expand possibilities for transnational association and public spheres."