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In any matter of moral importance, our first task, before we plunge ahead and decide what to do, is to figure out what we ought to do.

Allen W. Wood

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Allen W. Wood
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: January 1
Academic
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Seattle
Washington
Allen William Wood
Plunge
Ought
Task
Moral
Decide
Firsts
Ahead
Matter
Tasks
First
Figure
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More quotes by Allen W. Wood

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We can treat human responses to cognitions as involving law-like connections grounded on free choices which show themselves in our character.
Allen W. Wood
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Fichte takes an I or free will to be not a thing or being but an act which is not undetermined but self-determined, in accordance with reasons or norms rationally self-given.
Allen W. Wood
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What Smith and Marx have in common is that they were both philosophers of great vision and perceptiveness, deep humanity, and a sense of social reality that has been lost in the abstractly formalistic economic theories that have dominated the field since the last third of the nineteenth century.
Allen W. Wood
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Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.
Allen W. Wood
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Many who are committed to reason and science have turned against religion altogether and treat it with fear and contempt.
Allen W. Wood
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Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx.
Allen W. Wood
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Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.
Allen W. Wood
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Our procedures of deliberation are not ways of finding out independent moral truths but instead ways of constructing these truths, in the process of deciding what to do.
Allen W. Wood
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The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I think just about any moral theory, worked out intelligently, and applied with good judgment, would get just about the same results as any other.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant thinks that a free will is a will under moral laws and that freedom and the moral law are distinct thoughts that reciprocally imply each other. Fichte thinks they are the same thought.
Allen W. Wood
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People who enjoy the privileges of success must use these privileges to benefit those who do not have them. These privileges constitute a deep hole they need to climb out of if they are to prevent its being the case that the world would have been better off if they had never been born.
Allen W. Wood
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I could identify for virtually every important figure in the history of modern continental philosophy an idea (or more than one) absolutely central to that philosopher's thought, whose original author was Fichte.
Allen W. Wood
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We are generally forced to choose one way or the other of distancing ourselves from Kant. I suppose I tend to choose the irreligious way. But I regret that Kant's path has not been followed.
Allen W. Wood
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Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking as well as experience is necessary to know anything or get anything right.
Allen W. Wood
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Empiricist philosophy always tends to be anti-philosophy (and is often proud of it).
Allen W. Wood
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Clearly no working class movement ever came about that was able to do what Marx was hoping for.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant was a rational theologian. He did not pretend to be a biblical or revealed theologian.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant says that we may regard ourselves as legislator of the moral law, and consider ourselves as its author, but not that we are legislators or authors of the law.
Allen W. Wood
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Being aware of truths about what is good or right or about what we ought to do is not the same as deciding what to do. Nor can the former truths be derived from decisions about what to do, or about procedures for making such decisions, unless these procedures themselves rest in some way on the apprehension of truths about what we ought to do.
Allen W. Wood
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It is both theoretically mistaken and morally wrong to regard others as objects of investigation rather than partners in free rational communication.
Allen W. Wood