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In the last few centuries we've managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we've learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.

Dale Jamieson

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Dale Jamieson
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Ever
Lessons
Much
Kill
Good
Health
Life
Learned
Relatively
People
Century
Managed
Public
Reduce
Lasts
Centuries
Last
Basic

More quotes by Dale Jamieson

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Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.
Dale Jamieson
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When it comes to climate change it's all the usual barriers: greed, mendacity, ignorance, short-sightedness and so on, manifest in the extreme power of corporations, the weakness of government, and the indifference of citizens.
Dale Jamieson
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Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.
Dale Jamieson
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I played with English and Sociology in college but dropped out to work in the anti-war movement. I was going around denouncing the Viet Nam war as immoral but one day it dawned on me that I didn't know what that meant. I signed up for an ethics class at San Francisco State to find out the answer.
Dale Jamieson
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Environmental philosophy just is philosophy full stop. It only sprung up as distinct subfield because mainstream philosophy was ignoring some of the most important philosophical challenges of our time.
Dale Jamieson
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Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions.
Dale Jamieson
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It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address.
Dale Jamieson
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If you have a flat, fixed view of state interest then it is difficult to understand why some states adopt aggressive climate change policies, even when that risks economically disadvantaging them, and other states do not even when it would be in their economic interests to do so.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change involves behaviors that are individually negligible, whose impacts go far beyond the spatial and temporal constraints that define our sense of community.
Dale Jamieson
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The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.
Dale Jamieson
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In trying to develop an impartial, expansive ethic we are trying to get ethical systems to do something which they did not evolve in order to do. This doesn't mean that it can't be done or that we shouldn't try to expand the reach of our ethical frameworks, only that there are reasons to be skeptical about its success.
Dale Jamieson
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The idea that Bentham and Mill were maximizers is the greatest stretch of all. They were progressivists, committed to improving the societies in which they lived, not utopian maximizers.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophy isn't reading Emmanuel Kant. Philosophy is about thinking hard about what the right thing to do is in a situation and approaching that kind of question in an open-minded and open-hearted way, receptive to a broad range of considerations and interests of other people and other things.
Dale Jamieson
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The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring.
Dale Jamieson
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The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!
Dale Jamieson
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Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.
Dale Jamieson
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Attitudes are changing very quickly.
Dale Jamieson
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Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change involves fundamental choices about how we want to live and what kind of world we want.
Dale Jamieson