A.A. Allen Quotes
Leaders of nations, and people whose wealth or fame gives them power over the lives of others quite often do more harm than good.
Kant's system of duties constitutes a Doctrine of Virtue because the duties also indicate what kinds of attitudes, dispositions and feelings are morally virtuous or vicious.
In the mid-1960s, as hard to believe as it may be now, choosing to go into academic philosophy was not an imprudent career choice. There were lots of academic jobs in philosophy then.
Teaching and writing about philosophy is about the only thing I've ever been really good at.
It is probably not a good idea to ask someone to expound a position they do not accept and do not feel they even fully understand.
Kant thinks of judgment as a special faculty or talent of the mind, not reducible to discursive reasoning but cultivated through experience and practice.
We can make mistakes about what we ought to do, and these are not the same as making bad decisions about what to do.
In any matter of moral importance, our first task, before we plunge ahead and decide what to do, is to figure out what we ought to do.
I think it is clear that what we ought to do has to be independent of our decisions about what to do, and independent of any procedures we might use in making such decisions.
I do not know how much my own work has achieved, and I must not pretend it has done more than it has.
Clearly no working class movement ever came about that was able to do what Marx was hoping for.
It seems to me self-evident that it is worthwhile to understand the best thoughts of the past, to appropriate them, to criticize them.
Marx's writings still have something to teach us about capitalism. They have little or nothing to teach us about any alternatives to it. Anyone who had read them knows that.
The problem is that many who reject Marx do not read him, or read him only by bringing prejudices to their reading that prevent them from understanding him.
My own view is that Kant's conception of the duality of the good (morality and happiness, the good of our person and the good of our state or condition) is a distinctively modern view.
Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics.
Capitalism has not proven to be a transitional form, a gateway to a higher human future.
Adam Smith was aware of the way that economic interests could have a distorting and destructive effect both on the market and on politics.
There is a lot in Adam Smith that reflects the insights of Rousseau and anticipates those of Marx.
We usually can't know how, and we probably should not even ask, how our lives contribute to a better world.
Those who employ their modest talents as best they can do make a contribution to a better human future.
Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself.
Hegel's theory of recognition is basically derived from Fichte, who is its real author.
That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.
It is both theoretically mistaken and morally wrong to regard others as objects of investigation rather than partners in free rational communication.
We commit not only theoretical error but also moral wrong in objectifying ourselves or other rational beings, ignoring their capacities for free action and communicative interaction with us.
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.
I think the contribution people make is not proportionate to their fame or success. In fact, I think the relation is often inverse.
What I most fear now is that within a century or so there may not be any human future at all.
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.
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.
Kant thinks that a free will is a will under moral laws and that freedom and the moral law are distinct thoughts that reciprocally imply each other. Fichte thinks they are the same thought.
Fichte would identify all states of our minds with states of our body - perhaps not merely of our brain, but the whole body as an acting organism.
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.
Reason necessarily expresses itself through emotions and emotions are healthy only insofar as they are expressions of reason.
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.
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.
Many who are committed to reason and science have turned against religion altogether and treat it with fear and contempt.
Sometimes when a philosopher's views are widely rejected by the world, the fault is not with the philosopher but with the world.
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.
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.
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.
Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it; the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.
If being "iron headed" is to be lacking such feelings, then Kant's position is that an ironheaded person could not be a moral agent because such a person would not be rational.
What is central to morality is rational self-constraint (acting from duty), in cease where there is no other incentive to do your duty except that the moral law commands it.
Some empirical feelings, such as sympathy, are indispensable parts of certain moral virtues.
Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.