Allen W. Wood Quotes About Choices

Quotes about: Choices

• It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

  Allen W. Wood

  Real, Mean, Simple

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Character, Law, Choices

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• In the mid-1960s, as hard to believe as it may be now, choosing to go into academic philosophy was not an imprudent career choice. There were lots of academic jobs in philosophy then.

  Allen W. Wood

  Jobs, Philosophy, Believe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• From the beginning, there has been a tension in the reception of the Kantian idea of autonomy. If you emphasize the 'nomos' (the law), then you get one picture: the objectivity of ethics. If you emphasize the 'autos' - the self - you get the idea that we make the law. Kant never hesitated in his choice between the two emphases. He emphasizes the nomos (the universal and objective validity of the law).

  Allen W. Wood

  Self, Objectivity, Law

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• There is no author or legislator of the moral law. It is simply valid in itself in the nature or essence of things. We become autonomous only when we obey it, because then our will aligns itself with the objectively valid law, and our choice follows the same law as that we give ourselves. We can think of rational faculty (or the idea - the pure rational concept, not exhibitable in experience) as the legislator or author of the law because reason recognizes an objective standard, and to that extent is already aligned with objective moral truth.

  Allen W. Wood

  Thinking, Law, Essence

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Kant does not think that along with choice of an action we also choose in each case the motive from which we do it. He thinks all is well if I act beneficently, realizing that it is my duty but also having sympathetic feelings for the person I help. But I ought to strive to be the sort of person who would still help even if these feelings were absent. And it is such a case that he presents when the sympathetic friend of humanity finds his sympathetic feelings overclouded by his own sorrows, and still acts beneficently from duty.

  Allen W. Wood

  Thinking, Choices, Feelings

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• There is a very common, though also very silly, picture of Kant according to which as empirical beings we are not free at all, and we are free only as noumenal jellyfish floating about in an intelligible sea above the heavens, outside any context in which our supposedly "free" choices could have any conceivable human meaning or significance. Part of the problem here is that Kant faces up honestly to the fact that how freedom is possible is a deep philosophical problem to which there is no solution we can rationally comprehend.

  Allen W. Wood

  Silly, Philosophical, Sea

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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