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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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Dale Jamieson
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Comes
Something
Good
Aspiration
Nightmare
Enlightenment
Easily

More quotes by 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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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 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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If you look globally you see a patchwork of jurisdictions (nations, states, provinces, cities) that have taken aggressive action on climate change, and a patchwork of jurisdictions that have not. These various policies reflect the politics of each jurisdiction and the values of its citizens.
Dale Jamieson
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When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.
Dale Jamieson
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Attitudes are changing very quickly.
Dale Jamieson
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In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.
Dale Jamieson
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Acts are right in virtue of the goodness of their consequences.
Dale Jamieson
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A great deal of our math, science, philosophy, and everyday behavior presupposes that stability and equilibria are the default states, and everything else involves some perturbation. This is a mental model, a conceptual frame, a tacit belief, a presupposition - whatever you want to call it.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as reduce suffering) and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.
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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Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.
Dale Jamieson
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Our traditional systems of decision-making are just not up to preventing changes in fundamental earth systems that are driven by a constant barrage of individually negligible emissions of an invisible, odorless gas, by billions of people all over the world.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they are in paying attention to the shlumpy diversity of defensible values that people actually have, and then trying to figure out how these might be negotiated in the life of an agent or community.
Dale Jamieson
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The erosion of agency has consequences for our politics. As a result of all this, the fundamental ethical challenge of the anthropocene is the recovery of agency, or alternatively to come to terms with its loss and to understand how to go on.
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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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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The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction.
Dale Jamieson
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Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.
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