Allen W. Wood Quotes

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.

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 says that we may regard ourselves as legislator of the moral law, and consider ourselves as its author, but not that we are legislators or authors of the law.

The relation of the law to the self is only a helpful way of thinking about the law, that helps us better understand its validity for us.

In general, those who defend capitalism are basically out of touch with reality.

Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.

Our procedures of deliberation are not ways of finding out independent moral truths but instead ways of "constructing" these truths, in the process of deciding what to do.

People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed.

Fichte is concerned with freedom as non-domination.

Descartes recommended that we distrust the senses and rely on the ... use of our intellect.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.