“The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring.” PeopleShouldIdeasDreamPossibilityBehaviorEnlightenmentAppreciateThreatResponse Author:Dale Jamieson
“In the last few centuries we've managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we've learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.” PeopleLastsLife IsCenturyLessonsPublic HealthHealth And Life Author:Dale Jamieson
“Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.” PeopleLife IsVery GoodReproduction Author:Dale Jamieson
“One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.” PeopleRealDangerIndifferenceOur Time Author:Dale Jamieson
“People with long memories and a vivid sense of the past have an immediate understanding of politicians like Donald Trump. They are not surprised by the behavior of Google, a corporation that notionally (until recently anyway) espoused the slogan "don't be evil" and then runs over individual people and even entire nations in the pursuit of profit.” PeopleLongRunningPastEvilIndividualNationsUnderstandingMemoriesTrumpPoliticianBehaviorProfitPursuitCorporationsGoogleVividSlogans Author:Dale Jamieson
“Our traditional systems of decision-making are just not up to preventing changes in fundamental earth systems that are driven by a constant barrage of individually negligible emissions of an invisible, odorless gas, by billions of people all over the world.” PeopleWorldEarthDecisionFundamentalsConstantDrivenBillionsInvisibleTraditionalGasDecision MakingEmissionsPreventing Author:Dale Jamieson
“People who go around saying that it is wrong to fly and to eat meat are not so much making appeals to us from within our shared morality, but engaging in something more like "persuasive definition." They want us to look at the world and ourselves in a different way. Someday these prohibitions against flying and eating meat may be written into our moral psychology, but it will only be after there are viable, widely shared alternatives that are beginning to be widely adopted.” PeopleWorldWayWantLooksMayDifferentMoralPsychologyWrittenMoralityEatingDefinitionsFlyingAlternativesAppealsMeatDifferent WaysSomedayEngagingAdoptedWant UProhibitionPersuasiveEating Meat Author:Dale Jamieson
“Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.” PeopleLooksSometimesMoralCrazyRevolutionRevolutionaryCrazy People Author:Dale Jamieson
“It is probably true that the economic benefits of being in the EU are a net positive to the UK, but a large number of people do not share in these benefits and the result is increasing inequality.” PeopleResultsNumbersShareEconomicBenefitsInequalityLarge Numbers Author:Dale Jamieson
“It's possible that we'll screw up the climate so badly that most of us will die and a few breeding pairs will remain somewhere in the arctic. What's more likely is that we'll continue remaking the planet, driving many species to extinction, killing millions of people through the indirect effects of climate change, making life even harder for the poor and powerless than it is now, and making it a little more difficult for the global middle class to live the lives to which they have become accustomed - in other words, business as usual, only worse.” PeopleLittlesDiesDifficultPoorClassMillionsMiddleEffectsPlanetsHarderClimateSpeciesKillingClimate ChangeDrivingMiddle ClassPairsUsualPowerlessScrewsAccustomedExtinctionBreedingScrew UpsArcticIndirect Author:Dale Jamieson
“People will suffer and so will nature, but life is likely to go on with a great deal of loss and mourning. Human adaptability and resilience will still be alive, and so will that great need and resource of ours called love.” PeopleNeedsHumansStillsLife IsSufferingLossDealsAliveGoes OnResourcesResilienceMourningLife Is LikeAdaptability Author:Dale Jamieson
“When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.” PeopleFirstsDifficultStudyIssuesClimateClimate Change Author:Dale Jamieson
“Climate scientists think of nothing but climate and then express their concerns in terms of constructs such as global mean surface temperature. But we live in a world in which all sorts of change is happening all the time, and the only way to understand what climate change will bring is to tell stories about how it manifests in people's lives.” PeopleThinkingWorldWayMeanStoriesTermHappeningsConcernScientistClimateClimate ChangeSurfaceConstructsTemperature Author:Dale Jamieson
“Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions.” PeopleKnowsShouldSometimesBigsWalksSupportSolutionsResearchTablesPhilosopherFundCrackpots Author:Dale Jamieson
“I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.” PeopleThinkingStillsCultureProcessMiddleCenturyEatingCellsMeatFactoriesSyntheticEating Meat Author:Dale Jamieson
“The idea that we would raise billions of sentient animals, treat them horribly, pollute our waterways with their waste, compromise the effectiveness of our antibiotics so that they grow faster, and then slaughter them with little regard to their suffering so that we can feed off their corpses, will seem to most people unthinkably cruel and barbarous - sort of in the way that we think of medieval punishments, or Europeans today think of the death penalty.” PeopleThinkingWayLittlesIdeasSeemsTodaySufferingGrowsAnimalWasteTreatsRegardRaisesBillionsPunishmentCompromiseFasterPenaltiesDeath PenaltyCorpsesEffectivenessMedievalSlaughterThink Of MeAntibiotics Author:Dale Jamieson
“Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they are in paying attention to the shlumpy diversity of defensible values that people actually have, and then trying to figure out how these might be negotiated in the life of an agent or community.” PeopleTryingMightValuesCommunityAttentionFiguresTheoryDiversityPhilosopherAgentsPay AttentionLogicalImplications Author:Dale Jamieson
“Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.” PeopleMeanMightSufferingPrinciplesDistancePhilosopherAbstractUnderestimate Author:Dale Jamieson
“People and countries have done an enormous amount of damage in their attempts to bring about the best possible world. Communism is an obvious example. But so is British imperialism, which was not grubby self-interest all the way down, but at least in part a sincere attempt on the part of people who felt they were superior to other people to magnanimously improve the lot of their inferiors.” PeopleWorldWaySelfCountryDoneFeltInterestExampleAmountObviousBritishEnormousSuperiorsCommunismDamageSincereInferiorsImperialismSelf Interest Author:Dale Jamieson
“On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.” PeopleWantReadingOught Author:Dale Jamieson
“People talk about the idea of special relationships, that is, the morality only really binds people who stand in some kind of contractual relationship with each other but in fact if you take that seriously as a criteria of when we have a moral relationship then it's hard to see why we would have moral obligations to strangers for example or people who live across the sea from us but yet, every decent person believes that we do.” PeopleBelieveKindMoralSpecialMoralityStrangerObligationDecentMoral Obligation Author:Dale Jamieson
“None of us are rational economic men as we're supposed to be portrayed in economic theory where mixes of passions, of desires, of moral principles, of self-deception, of altruism, of concern of others, of concerns for ourselves and an interest in our bank accounts. And social policies have to be responsive to the complexity of who we are as people or else, like the war on drugs, they're simply going to fail.” PeopleMenWarDesirePassionInterestMoralFailingEconomicPolicyDrugConcernRationalComplexityAltruismWar On Drugs Author:Dale Jamieson
“Philosophy is not a body of knowledge to impart to someone, that's why reading philosophy books isn't always the best way of learning philosophy. Philosophy is really more the process of rational engagement, rational reflection with a diversity of views and ideas and opinions and trying to sort of reason your way through to a more reflective position. I think if you look at it that way, philosophizing is to some extent some small way a part of almost everyone's lives although they don't recognize it as such and a lot of people are embarrassed about it.” PeopleThinkingTryingBookReasonPhilosophyReadingOpinionDiversityReflectionRationalEmbarrassed Author:Dale Jamieson
“Philosophy isn't reading Emmanuel Kant. Philosophy is about thinking hard about what the right thing to do is in a situation and approaching that kind of question in an open-minded and open-hearted way, receptive to a broad range of considerations and interests of other people and other things.” PeopleThinkingKindPhilosophyReadingInterestSituationRight ThingConsideration Author:Dale Jamieson
“If you're interested in doing something about climate change as we all should be, all of us who care about future people and creatures that will inhabit this world. Then buying a Prius is a good thing but an even better thing would be to be on the streets demanding urgent action from the United States' Congress.” PeopleWorldCareActionGood ThingsClimate Change Author:Dale Jamieson
“Much of the point of individual action is really to communicate with other people and with political leaders and to demonstrate to them that we are willing to live lives which are less dependent on fossil fuels and we'll show you that now by changing our individual life to some extent but we want you to take action, political leaders, so that we aren't living in a society in which we're dependent on poisoning the future in order to maintain present lifestyles.” PeopleActionPoliticalIndividualLeaderCommunicateLifestyleLive LifeFossil Fuel Author:Dale Jamieson
“I think when it comes to climate change, the single most important thing in the world is for the United States' Congress to pass an effective bill that will put a price in carbon because if it starts costing something to emit carbon, this will provide an incentive, people do act on the basis to some extent of economic incentives to emit fewer greenhouse gases.” PeopleThinkingWorldImportantEconomicClimate Change Author:Dale Jamieson
“If I drive my car to the store, those carbon molecules that are emitted actually get into the atmosphere circulation systems and affect climate in a global basis. This is shocking, this is amazing! No one in the 18th Century would have believed that anything like this were at all possible and I don't think we have, as part of our common sense, morality, norms and values that are really responsive to those kinds of issues, to the kind of power that we now are able to exert over the future and over people who live very far from us.” PeopleThinkingKindValuesCommonCarMoralityCommon SenseAtmosphereNorm18th Century Author:Dale Jamieson
