“that, when it comes to humanity, “the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society.” — Joseph Heath Copy Share Image
“The scientific method is famous for requiring objectivity and emotional detachment on the part of the investigator. Scientific experimentation also involves extensive manipulation of conditions. When dealing with nature, this is fine, but with people it becomes problematic. “Being objective” can easily be taken to mean “treating people as objects,” emotional detachment can translate into indifference to human suffering, and… — Joseph Heath Copy Share
“The environments that are the most hostile from the standpoint of rationality are those that are the most commercial.” — Joseph Heath Copy Share Image
“The idea that people could get along fine with just markets, and no government, turned out to rest upon a version of what economists… — Joseph Heath Copy Share Image
“One of the downsides of working in philosophy is that it attracts a lot of people with mental-health problems.” — Joseph Heath Copy Share Image
“There may be important things right in front of you that you aren’t noticing due to the illusion of attention. Now that you know about this illusion, you’ll be less apt to assume you’re seeing everything there is to see. You may think you remember some things much better than you really do, because of the illusion of memory. Now… — Joseph Heath Copy Share
“Our environment has changed so that the correlations we relied upon in the environment of evolutionary adaptation no longer obtain. This makes it so that our hardwired problem-solving routines, rather than producing answers that are approximately correct, will increasingly provide answers that are exactly wrong. Furthermore, a number of our social institutions encourage this tendency. Doing something to counteract this… — Joseph Heath Copy Share
“More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animals—with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment.” The irony is that, “unlike the animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex… — Joseph Heath Copy Share
“It’s all well and good to have a mountain of psychological research detailing the different ways in which we routinely fail to think and act rationally. But the obvious practical implication is not that it’s okay to be irrational: it’s that we need to work a lot harder at becoming rational, and that where we fail, we need to develop… — Joseph Heath Copy Share
“if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others,… — Joseph Heath Copy Share Image
“our ability to enter into cooperative relations with one another is based upon the rational insight that we can all be better off if… — Joseph Heath Copy Share Image
“Everyone always has a reason to reject a compromise, because everyone thinks that their own view is correct, their own cause is just, or… — Joseph Heath Copy Share Image
“If you had to give a child just one piece of advice upon entering a shopping mall, a good suggestion might be “Remember that… — Joseph Heath Copy Share Image
