Top 146 Quotes & Sayings by Allen W. Wood - Page 2

Consequentialist theories pretend that we can set some great big ends (the general happiness, human flourishing), provide ourselves with definite enough conceptions of them to make them the objects of instrumental reasoning, and then obtain enough reliable information about what actions will best promote them that we could regulate our conduct by these considerations alone.

It is actually a nice question how far Descartes himself endorses the monological and metaphysically dualistic theory of mind associated with his name and his legacy in early modern philosophy. But Fichte does reject this tradition, by suggesting that an immaterial thinking substance is an incoherent notion, and a rational being whose rationality was not developed through communication with others is a transcendental impossibility.

That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.

Fichte takes an I or free will to be not a thing or being but an act which is not undetermined but self-determined, in accordance with reasons or norms rationally self-given.

Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself.

Adam Smith was aware of the way that economic interests could have a distorting and destructive effect both on the market and on politics.

No theory about our bodies as mere objects of observation and calculation (as distinct from partners in communicative interaction, assumed to be free) can comprehend human nature.

Hegel's theory of recognition is basically derived from Fichte, who is its real author.

I don't think Kant's theory looks bad to people except insofar as they have misunderstood it (for instance, as heartless and ironheaded, or as committed to an absurd metaphysical conception of freedom that violates Kant's own philosophy).

When people think that moral problems can be solved by some simple strategy of calculation, that sets them up for ghastly overreaching. They think they can turn everything into a "science" the way mechanics was turned into a science in the seventeeth century. They want to turn everything over to technocrats and social engineers. They become shortsighted or simplistic about their ends, and they disastrously overestimate their ability to acquire the information they need to make the needed calculations.

Consequentialist theories begin with a very simple and undoubtedly valid point: Every action aims at a future end, and is seen as a means to it.

We usually can't know how, and we probably should not even ask, how our lives contribute to a better world.

Empiricist philosophy always tends to be anti-philosophy (and is often proud of it).

It was an important part of Mendelssohn's philosophical and religious view that the traditional rationalist proofs for God's existence should be sound an convincing. Kant thought they were not. So Kant's critique was world-shaking for Mendelssohn.

The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I think just about any moral theory, worked out intelligently, and applied with good judgment, would get just about the same results as any other.

It is a culturally interesting (but also deeply depressing) fact that many religious claims seem to retain their emotional power for believers only if taken in ways that are intellectually unsupportable and even morally contemptible.

In fact people do not know enough about themselves and what is good for them to form a sufficiently definite conception of the general happiness (or whatever the end is) to establish definite rules for its pursuit.

When consequentialist theories are developed in terms of an equally shallow psychology of the good - such as a crude form of hedonism - the results can sometimes strike sensible people as revolting and inhuman. People can be reduced to simple repositories of positive or negative sensory states, and their humanity is lost sight of entirely.

Many who are committed to reason and science have turned against religion altogether and treat it with fear and contempt.

When Marx, in the Theses on Feuerbach, says that only idealism up to now has understood the active side of material Praxis, what he says is more true of Fichte than of any other philosopher in the classical German tradition.

It is both theoretically mistaken and morally wrong to regard others as objects of investigation rather than partners in free rational communication.

Kant is not saying - about freedom or any other subject - anything of the form: "Not-p but we must assume that p." That's close to self-contradictory, like Moore's paradox: "p, but I don't believe that p".

Capitalism has not proven to be a transitional form, a gateway to a higher human future.

It is absurd for anyone to think that Soviet "Marxism" is a correct application of the thought of Karl Marx. No doubt Soviet propaganda represented it this way. But who believes Soviet propaganda? It is remarkable (but maybe not so remarkable after all, when you consider their motives) that apologists for capitalism, who would not accept Soviet propaganda on any other point, are eager to agree with it on this point.

Karl Marx left it to others to find the way beyond capitalism to a higher form of society. He saw his role as giving them as accurate a theory as he could of how capitalism works, which would also show them the reasons why it needs to be abolished and replaced by a freer and more human form of society.

Smith could not be expected to have anticipated the horrors that were to come. But even in his own time, he was a defender of certain state actions that he thought necessary in order to safeguard the good effects of commercial society (Smith did not speak of 'capitalism' and was acquainted only with an early undeveloped form of it). Among these state actions the chief was general public education.

As long as the Republican party exists in its present form, our nation cannot endure as a free society. Still worse, under their policies the human race is being rapidly propelled toward its extinction.

Both Kant and Fichte thought of traditions of revealed religion as ways of symbolically (that is, with aesthetic emotional power) thinking about our moral condition. Both thought that religion would become more and not less powerful, emotionally and morally, if the claims of scriptures and religious teachings were taken symbolically rather than literally (whatever 'literally' might mean in the case of claims that are either nonsensical or outdated or historically unsupportable if taken as metaphysical or historical assertions).

I think Fichte did take it further than Kant by arguing that we can regard the moral law as objectively valid only by seeing it as addressed to us by another being, even though Fichte thought God could not literally be a person who could address us.

Sometimes when a philosopher's views are widely rejected by the world, the fault is not with the philosopher but with the world.

It is a cause of shame to any member of the human race to be a member of the same species some of whose members could vote for any candidate for president that has been offered by the Republican party. Such people seem to be motivated only by short-sighted greed, ignorance, fear and hatred.

Those who employ their modest talents as best they can do make a contribution to a better human future.

We cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.

What I most fear now is that within a century or so there may not be any human future at all.

As Kant says, the contribution of any common laborer would be greater than that of the greatest philosopher unless the philosopher makes some contribution to establishing the rights of humanity.

Kant attempted to work out a view of religion and religious belief according to which existing religions could be brought into harmony with modernity, science and reason.

Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.

One rational standard of action is how well it promotes the end it seeks. Another standard is whether it aims at ends which are good. Both of these, but especially the former, depend on judgments of fact.

There is a very common, though also very silly, picture of Kant according to which as empirical beings we are not free at all, and we are free only as noumenal jellyfish floating about in an intelligible sea above the heavens, outside any context in which our supposedly "free" choices could have any conceivable human meaning or significance. Part of the problem here is that Kant faces up honestly to the fact that how freedom is possible is a deep philosophical problem to which there is no solution we can rationally comprehend.

Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking as well as experience is necessary to know anything or get anything right.

Kant did think he had a moral route back to rational faith in God, for those who need it, and he thought that at some level, we all do need something like it.

Some of Kant's particular moral opinions, either because he shared the prejudices of his time, or because of his own personal crotchets, can strike sensible people as ridiculous or offensive. But in my view, his own theory provides us with the resources (the best resources available, I believe) to correct his own personal errors or cultural prejudices.

I don't think Kant's approach to religion is any longer viable in its original form. But that does not mean it is simply wrong or that we cannot learn from it.

There is a lot in Adam Smith that reflects the insights of Rousseau and anticipates those of Marx.

The Russian revolution did not occur until a generation after Marx's death. He was not involved with it, or with what came after it. His works do not describe post-capitalist society, and a fortiori they do not recommend any part of what the Soviet Union did.

Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both be socially and politically successful in the industrial nations of Western Europe, and that it would develop an entirely new way of human social life that would retain and even enhance the productive benefits of capitalism while overcoming the inhumanity and exploitation of capitalist social relations. Marx himself had no solutions to these problems. His object of study was capitalism itself.

Kant takes a free will to be a being or substance with the power to cause a state of the world (or a whole series of such states) spontaneously or from itself.

It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

I think if there were to be a solution to the problem of free will, it would have to be a compatibilist one. Unfortunately, from that it does not follow that there is such a solution. Many philosophers find this an unwelcome message, and as often happens in philosophy, they punish the messenger by ascribing to him an entirely imaginary but untenable position.

I could identify for virtually every important figure in the history of modern continental philosophy an idea (or more than one) absolutely central to that philosopher's thought, whose original author was Fichte.

Kant regards the universalizability test for maxims as focused on a very special sort of situation: one where the agent is tempted to make an exception to a recognized duty out of self-preference. The universalizability test is supposed help the agent to see, in a particular case of moral judgment, that self-preference is not a satisfactory reason for exempting yourself from a duty you recognize. Kant thinks, as a matter of human nature, that this situation arises often enough and that we need a canon of judgment to guard against it.

Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. Philosophy is more about the latter than the former.

The moral law is simply the way we think our own freedom as self-determination.

I think the contribution people make is not proportionate to their fame or success. In fact, I think the relation is often inverse.

Kant does not think that the silly commandment "universalize your maxims" is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides us with some sort of general decision procedure that is supposed to tell us what to do under all circumstances.

What Smith and Marx have in common is that they were both philosophers of great vision and perceptiveness, deep humanity, and a sense of social reality that has been lost in the abstractly formalistic economic theories that have dominated the field since the last third of the nineteenth century.

Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx.

The picture of Kant as the 'theological Robespierre' or the "world-crusher" was first suggested by someone with whom Kant stood in a relation of philosophical disagreement but also great mutual respect: namely, Moses Mendelssohn.

Fichte is concerned with freedom as non-domination.

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.