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Quote by Philip Kitcher

“Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.”

Quote by Philip Kitcher

Author

Philip Kitcher, born on February 20, 1947, is a philosopher, writer, and academic. His research interests are primarily in the fields of philosophy of science, epistemology, and moral philosophy. more

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“I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious.”

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“A different vision of ethics is that of a collection of resources people can use to act better. The resources might be firm rules that could always be relied on. Or they might be ideals that could often be followed without thinking but that sometimes conflicted with one another.”

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“One goal of ethical inquiry might be to uncover strategies available for use when values conflict or when rules are incomplete.”

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“My ethical naturalism sees us as facing the predicament of being social animals without evolved adaptations that make social life easy. The fundamental problem that sparks the ethical project lies in our limited responsiveness to one another. The only way we have to address that problem is through a representative, informed, and engaged conversation.”

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“I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.”

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“The expert is a midwife. The expert is not someone who has the authority to pronounce the last word on the subject.”

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“In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.”

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“Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily - ethics is objectively constrained. It's not the case that "anything goes".”

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“When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.”

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