Sublime

I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying that’s how a good man works himself up to do a terrible thing. It’s Human Behavior 101.”

the place of the passions and desires in human life is his initial assumption that either morality is the work of reason or it is the work of the passions and his own apparently conclusive arguments that it cannot be the work of reason.

Contrary to many claims, there is an ongoing diminution of mental and perceptual capabilities rather than their expansion or modulation.

ethics is about responding not to human beings in general but to human beings in particular—and in all their particularity.

Interestingly, men prefer technological solutions to the presence of guards – perhaps because the types of crime they are more likely to experience are less personally violating.

After we run this little experiment, I stand up in front of the class and make a point they don’t like to hear: the reasoning each and every student used was 100 percent irrational and emotional. “What?” they say. “I made a rational decision.” Then I lay out how they’re wrong. First, how could they all be using reason if so many have made different

impersonal moral dilemma.

One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way—said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but

There are two problems with this objection to our knowledge of premise 2. First, it assumes that atheism is true. If there is no God, then our moral beliefs are selected by evolution solely for their survival value, not for their truth.