30 quotes
The notion that we "have a nature" far from threatening the concept of freedom, is absolutely essential to it.
The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death.
Animals and Why They Matter (1983)
All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Let us start by considering why the attempt to glorify science on its own cannot work.
Are You an Illusion (2014)
But if it only means "likely to have many descendants," then there is no reason for treating it as an advantage at all.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Selection does not work by cutthroat competition between individuals, but by favouring whatever behavior is useful to the group.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
They refuse the mere fact of competing, that is, of needing to share out a resource with the motive of competitiveness or readiness to quarrel.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
I have tried to show these capabilites as continuous with our animal nature, connected with our basic structure of motives.
It is because our culture is changing so fast, because it does not settle on everything that we need to go into these questions.
An obsessive creature, constantly dominated by one kind of motive, would not survive.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
The preliminary outward movement of thought—holism—is everybit as necessary as the inward, atomizing one and in any investigation it usually needs to come first.
Are You an Illusion (2014)
And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
We are not just rather like animals; we are animals. Our difference from other species may be striking, but comparisons with them have always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves.
Animals are not machines; one of my main concerns is to combat this notion. Actually only machines are machines.
This would again be like saying that the carburetor had won the race, instead of the car of the driver. Carburators do not even know how to enter races, let alone win them.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.
Trying to answer this by collecting information about our own neurones would be no more use than doing it, like the Roman augur, by inspecting the entrails of a goat.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
The trouble with words like "fit" in these discussions is that, if taken in a wide sense they are liable to become vacuous, and if taken more narrowly they easily become tendentious.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Everybody, including himself is partial in the sense of starting somewhere, of selecting something for emphasis. The fatal thing is not this. It is being confused about ones reasons for doing so.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)