Sublime

The only really admirable character amid the madness and blood lust and confusion is Cato, the Stoic defender of the old Republican values, who alone sticks to principle and a life in accordance with nature, even when everyone else has descended to chaos.

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

How is the negative project of avoiding falsehood related to the positive project of seeking the truth? I call this “the Gadfly-Midwife paradox.”

What Lincoln had shown was the practicality, in politics, of a moral standard. I mean by this an external frame of reference that shapes interests and actions, not—like Douglas’s—an internal one that only reflects them. Lincoln’s didn’t arise from faith, or formal ethics, or even the law, a profession necessarily pragmatic in its pursuit of justice

I don’t agree with Aristotle. When the demands of life are pressing, too urgent to be ignored, it would be a mistake to devote all day to contemplation, reading Wordsworth, or playing golf. Being mortal, think of mortal things.

Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement.

Le Mythe de Sisyphe s'ouvre sous les auspices de l'idée de Nietzsche qu'un philosophe mérite l'estime quand il prêche l'exemple.

Today you will hear many presumably learned people say that there is

no such thing as human nature, or that human beings do not have a nature. Now, there is a long historical development back of this view, which we cannot deal with here, and it is not entirely without an important point. But that point is mismade in the statement that human beings d