phlogma

Luno’s twelfth notebook, the world is my Vienna, is out at reductio.aporia.net.

We have abolished the true world: what world has remained? the apparent one perhaps? … But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!
(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) [Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became […]

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; only, on the other [405] hand, it is very sad that it cannot well maintain itself and is easily seduced. [Kant, Fundamental Principles of a Metaphysics of Morals, First Section, par. 20 (Abbott trans., pp. 404-5).]
But how can we admire innocence? The fact is we can’t. Or, turning […]

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. [Mill, On Liberty, chapter II, par. 20.]
I think of Socrates and Otto Weininger, the only two philosophers I know of whose deaths were a direct […]

How men commonly come by their principles. This, however strange it may seem, is that which every day’s experience confirms; and will not, perhaps, appear so wonderful, if we consider the ways and steps by which it is brought about; and how really it may come to pass, that doctrines that have been derived from […]

Principles of actions indeed there are lodged in men’s appetites; but these are so far from being innate moral principles, that if they were left to their full swing they would carry men to the overturning of all morality. [Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, Chapter II, “No Innate Principles,” par. 13.]
Unlike in […]

To live a comfortable, even luxurious life it is not necessary to kill anyone; but it is necessary to allow some to die whom we might have saved…
[Peter Singer, Practical Ethics]
If only morality’s demands could be so modest. Rather, to live at all … and then moreover in the realization of a biological imperative to […]

Revulsion is not an argument; and some of yesterday’s repugnances are today calmly accepted—though, one must add, not always for the better. In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter […]

[Joel] Feinberg suggested having interests “presupposes at least rudimentary cognitive equipment” and that plants and trees have “no conscious wants or goals of their own.” So, “there is no possibility of kind or cruel treatment of trees.” [“The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations”]
The exclusion of plants from the realm of interest-capable entities […]

Rawls reminds us in a footnote to his classic paper, “Two Concepts of Rules”:
It is important to remember that those whom I have called the classical utilitarians were largely interested in social institutions. They were among the leading economists and political theorists of their day, and they were not infrequently reformers interested in practical affairs. […]