16 quotes
If evolution is a struggle for survival, why hasn't it ruthlessly eliminated altruists, who seem to increase another's prospects of survival at the cost of their own?
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
Everyday we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate-change, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)