Philip Kitcher Quotes

Those...who insist that there are some moral limits that they will not violate, are forever surprising themselves.

There is a mean in all things; even virtue itself has stated limits; which not being strictly observed, it ceases to be virtue.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

There are things a man must not do to save a nation.

There ought to be limits to freedom.

I have no confidence in the system of isolation. It does not answer in social life for individuals, nor in politics for nations. Man is a social animal.

One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.

Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal.

Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

Obviously, there are people who constrict themselves and build walls around themselves, whether it's from a moral standpoint or a patriotic standpoint, or just plain old conformity, and who therefore live in those little prisons, and when things breach those walls, it's shocking for them.

False principles, which correspond with the bad as well as with the just aspirations of mankind, are a normal and necessary element in the social life of nations.

The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.

Sometimes when you're the good guy, you're sort of trapped. "Oh, he can't say that." And even when you're playing a real person like a Steven Biko, you're sort of stuck within those confines. So yeah, bad guys do have more fun.

Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls.

We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research--and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's--shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line.

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.

The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that lies.

Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don´t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

The Almighty implanted in us these inextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes. They are the guardians of His image in our heart. They distinguish us from the herd of common animals.

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.