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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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Dale Jamieson
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Mean
Abstract
People
Philosopher
Tend
Distance
Principles
Radically
Suffering
Philosophers
Actually
Underestimate
Might
Reduce

More quotes by Dale Jamieson

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Progressive Consequentialsm requires us to make the world better but we are under no obligation to bring about the best possible world.
Dale Jamieson
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We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.
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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In the face of the collective action problems that are at the heart of the environmental crisis, consequentialists should seek to inculcate the green virtues which includes the virtue of cooperativeness. This would not bring about the best possible world but it would set us on the path of making it better.
Dale Jamieson
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The bizarre thing about the anthropocene is that never has humanity been more powerful and never have individual humans felt so powerless. This is because so much that drives the circumstances of the anthropocene is the aggregation of apparently negligible acts, often amplified by technology, rather than decisive acts by autonomous decision-makers.
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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I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.
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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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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It's obvious that there are vast variety of consequentialist views, depending on what we think goodness consists in, what our notion of consequence is, and what level (or levels) of human action we think the principle should be applied.
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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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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It is probably true that the economic benefits of being in the EU are a net positive to the UK, but a large number of people do not share in these benefits and the result is increasing inequality.
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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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 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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We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.
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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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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Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.
Dale Jamieson