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Acts are right in virtue of the goodness of their consequences.

Dale Jamieson

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Dale Jamieson
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Virtue
Right
Consequences
Acts
Consequence
Goodness

More quotes by 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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If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions.
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 only way major change in environmental policy is going to happen, the only way, is if there is a very strong, very active popular movement that demands it and such a movement would be unparalleled because it would be a popular movement that says, Raise our taxes so that we change our behavior.
Dale Jamieson
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The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.
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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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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We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.
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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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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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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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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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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I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.
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 Paris climate conference in December, 2015 was a recognition that countries bring their climate policies to international meetings rather than create them during the negotiations (much less do they receive orders from the international community and then go home and implement them).
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 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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We're highly adaptable and have developed some powerful systems of representation.
Dale Jamieson