Top 55 Quotes & Sayings by Torbjorn Tannsjo

I want to think that there are better ways of obviating murder than to resort to capital punishment, but I realise that this may be wishful thinking on my part.

It is true that it feels very differently to enjoy a good meal, taking part in an interesting conversation, or to think of how successful your children are. Suppose we do all these things at a particular time. How happy are we at the time? We do not need to calculate the value of each such feelings on any singular scale to answer this question. We need not see our happiness at the time as a mathematical function of these items. It is rather that all these experiences, together with many other factors, causally puts us at the time at a certain level of happiness, i.e. in a certain mood.

I look at the most promising putative moral theories. I construct crucial thought experiments in areas where they give conflicting advice. I confront their conflicting advice with my own moral sensitivity, my moral intuition. I take the theory that can best explain the content of my intuitions as gaining inductive support through an inference to the best explanation.

Moral nihilism comes with a price we can now see.

We should not accept moral nihilism unless we find strong arguments to do so.

The kind of values for which I was supposed to kill, such as democracy and national independence, were better served, I thought, through non-violent action.

I do believe that what I have called populist democracy is to be preferred to what I have called elitist democracy.

You should not take the content of your intuitive response as evidence until you have submitted your psychological reaction to what I call cognitive psychotherapy. You should do what you can to learn as much as possible about the origin of your reaction.

I believe that one basic question, what we ought to do, period (the moral question), is a genuine one. There exists a true answer to it, which is independent of our thought and conceptualisation.

You are only allowed to treat the content of your intuition as evidence if the intuition stays after you have exposed it to cognitive psychotherapy; in some cases you have to reject it even if it does indeed stay.

It is true (independently of our conceptualisation) that it is wrong to inflict pain on a sentient creature for no reason (she doesn't deserve it, I haven't promised to do it, it is not helpful to this creature or to anyone else if I do it, and so forth). But if this is a truth, existing independently of our conceptualisation, then at least one moral fact (this one) exists and moral realism is true. We have to accept this, I submit, unless we can find strong reasons to think otherwise.

Different areas present us with possibilities to test different theories.

Normative ethics, pursued as a free, systematic, and critical attempt to find moral truth, regardless of religious and other authorities, is a rather new adventure. Let's wait and see what will happen!

It is of note that even if utilitarianism has proved to be superior to deontology and the libertarian moral rights theory in the area of killing, we are not allowed to say that it has been finally vindicated; it has to face other challenges in other areas, in particular in situations of distributive justice.

One way of submitting your moral intuitions in relation to some issue to cognitive therapy is to learn more about how people in other cultures think about it.

The democratic thought is based on that 'ordinary people' are suitable to rule themselves.

The US two party system is very different, of course. Here the people decides about who should rule them, but it is not reasonable to claim that the people rules itself through the political institutions. In comparison, I find that the standard European system is better, also as a model for global democracy.

It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy.

I am now a decided non-naturalist realist. And today we may even speak of a trend towards non-naturalist moral realism.

Are there any good arguments in defence of moral nihilism? I think not.

I was conscripted to military service, and my gut feeling was to refuse to serve. I did not want to kill other people. This seemed to me wrong, if not in principle, so at least in practice.

These theories, deontology, the moral rights theory, and utilitarianism, contradict one another. Moreover, they give conflicting (inconsistent) recommendations. It is hence not possible to hold them together, in a pursuit of moral truth.

I am indeed a hedonistic utilitarian. I have defended hedonistic utilitarianism for quite a while.

If two norms conflict, if they are mutually inconsistent, then at least one of them must be false.

The best explanation why people agree is that they have converged on true answers.

The possibility to go on indefinitely with our lives may become a reality and it will present us with a temptation.

The Chinese are generally speaking much more reluctant than Westerners to killing as a means to the rescue of lives.

People in different cultures think very differently about abortion. Abortion is not seen as a moral problem for example in Sweden or Russia, but it is seen as a difficult moral problem in China and in the USA.

Utilitarianism condones killing of innocent human beings, even murder, if it makes the world a better place.

We own ourselves. This is the core of a libertarian theory of rights. But on this theory, while we are at liberty to kill ourselves (regardless of the consequences of others), we are not allowed to kill others, not even if this means that there we be fewer murders in the future, totally speaking.

I have been brought up in a culture where capital punishment is indeed anathema. I have always thought of myself as a principled opponent to capital punishment. However, when thinking about how the topic is handled in other cultures, in particular the American, Russian and Chinese ones, I have realised that my own tack on the issue was utterly superficial.

How could it be that I had a legal obligation to kill people I did not know, and who did certainly not consent to it, while my father's doctor could not help my father to die when my farther asked for it? My consternation brought me to moral philosophy and a life-long search for an answer to the question when and why we should, and when we shouldn't, kill.

I have now come to the conclusion (roughly) that capital punishment is defensible, if it can be shown to have a deterrent effect on murder. In that case, a few executions save not only some people from being murdered but also some people from becoming murders.

What we need is legislation, not negotiation, for the entire globe.

I am indeed a moral realist.

There are some particular moral truths that I believe we have access to (such as the one not to inflict pain on a sentient being for no reason).

According to deontology it is wrong to kill an innocent human being, period.

It is hard to tell if capital punishment has such an effect. And even if, in some contexts it has (such as in the American South with a very high incidence of murder), this effect may very well go away if a decent welfare state was replaced for the existing social order.

Being a moral realist I see normative ethics as a search of the truth about our obligations and a search of explanation; the idea is that moral principles can help us to a moral explanation of our particular obligations.

My conjecture is that most people will refuse to let go, even when their lives have become boring (at least in comparisons with possible lives lived by new generations). If this happens, there will eventually be no room for new generations. A kind of collective irrationality will lead to a bleak life for the last generation that decides to stay around. Unless we put and end to the human race (through global warming, for example), before this happens, individual egoism will block the path to a better world.

I wanted to know what it means to know something, whether we can know at all, and, if so, how.

Actually, I defend the right to free abortion.

It is quite possible that we will soon come to live under some sort of global despotism, enlightened or not. This is not a nice prospect. And there is only one way of avoiding that this happens: to establish a global democracy. And it is not too late to strive for such a democracy, of a straightforward populist nature, where people on the globe elect a world parliament, which in turn elects a world government.

We can be certain that, if there are conflicting views in different cultures, some of these views must be false. This may help us to transcend our own narrow cultural horizon.

In many European countries we have populist indirect democratic systems. The people elect, in a proportionate manner, a parliament. The parliament with all its parties is representative of the political opinions among the citizens. It is reasonable to claim that the people rule itself through the political institutions.

There comes a time where next to everyone will resort to techniques that enhance cognitive, mental including emotive, physical, and other capacities. When this has happened, if not before, the ban on doping in sport will have been lifted.

Even where people in different cultures agree they may all have gone wrong.

It is obvious that humanity faces existential threats of a global nature. They are global in the sense that is not possible to deal with them unless we resort to global governance.

Once we realise that utilitarianism comes with the idea of blameworthy rightdoing (such as when you push a big man onto the tracks in order to save five lives) and blameless wrongdoing (such as when you don't push a big man onto the tracks in order to save five lives), then utilitarianism all of a sudden appears to give the right answers.

It is obvious, I think, that national democracy withers. This has to do with globalisation.

The perspective that many today are beginning to see as fully realistic is that democracy in our country, and in our part of the world, will suffer the same fate as the Swedish monarchy did before. The democracy is beeing emptied of all power political content at the same time as the forms remain, treated with reverence and preservasion.

When I was in my late teens I was already interested in philosophy.

To kill or not to kill, that was the question that haunted me.

I am a left winger, thought.

Global governance need not take a democratic form.