Raymond Smullyan Quotes

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.

There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must.

Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.

To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.

I find it significant that, even though contemporary philosophy tends towards forms of determinism, in the wider culture people are deeply into naming, shaming and blaming each other. So we haven't lost that sense of conscience.

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

free will is a theologian's artifice.

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

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.

I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

This is plainly to ascribe divinity to 'free will.'

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty.

[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.

He [man] knows that when he is not what he ought to be; when he does what he ought not to do; or omits what he ought to do, he is chargeable with sin

Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.

There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility.

What is guilt? It is moral self-reproach-I did wrong when it was possible to have done otherwise.

T is the will that makes the action good or ill.