Ian Hacking Quotes

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

If the Soviet Government orders me to act against my conscience, I do not obey …. Conscience is above the law. No law which is against the conscience can bind.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

Ethics is inescapable.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.