Sublime

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although many paid lip service to Bentham’s vision, governments, corporations and laboratories focused on more immediate and well-defined aims.

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we sho

The following instances of the application of fables to particular occasions are recorded. The fable of The Belly and the Members, which is reputed to be the oldest in existence, is of sterling excellence, as well as of venerable antiquity.[43] Its lucid moral is truth in essence. The logic of its conclusion is as invulnerable as the demonstration

For utilitarian thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and his contemporary followers, life as the maximizing of pleasure and the minimizing of pain implies that we can measure what is valuable. This fallacy equally applies to GDP, which fails to count unpaid work, all manner of relational goods and the shadow economy.

Di tutt’altra natura è l’attaccamento e la fedeltà di quelle razze che hanno nelle vene sangue lupino. In luogo del persistente attaccamento infantile che distingue soprattutto i nostri comuni cani domestici, discendenti dallo sciacallo dorato, prevale in quelli una fedeltà virile. Mentre lo sciacallo è in sostanza un animale selvatico stanziale e