Torbjorn Tannsjo Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

I am a left winger, thought.

I am indeed a moral realist.

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

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.

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

Different areas present us with possibilities to test different theories.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Global governance need not take a democratic form.

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

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

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

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).

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.

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