Daniel Dennett Quotes

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise.

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

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.'

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.

There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.

I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

Ethics is inescapable.

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.

No path leads from a knowledge of that which is to that which should be.

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

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.

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

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

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.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

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.

What is right, what is wrong, how can anyone say? I view very, very, few things as Right with a capital R.

One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.

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