There's Hobbes, who understood in the 1640s that the sovereign is not an appointee of God, or even a figure of superior virtue and wisdom, but just a functional device whose role is to keep people from hurting and killing… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
The Epicureans denied that the gods had created the world and also denied that they played any role in it. — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
A moral rule is essentially 'advantage-reducing.' It prohibits you doing something you could do that would serve your interests at someone else's expense. — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
Atomism had no absolute 'above' and 'below' and no such rulers, so favoured the undersranding of justice as an agreement amongst equals. — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
We have to gamble, and sometimes lose as George Ainslie argues; this keeps the appetite for life sharp. — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
There is no single test or formula for producing moral progress anymore than there is for generating scientific truths. It is a process involving… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
Epicurus thought that friendship and conviviality, which require present attention rather than being in an alcoholic stupor, as well as trying to understand and… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
For seventeenth-century astronomers, the Epicurean doctrine of multiple worlds separated by void space was seen to fit with the new Copernican system in which… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
Leibniz accepted the argument that there must be indestructible simple entities if there is to be a complex world, but Epicurean morals and politics… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
I had the idea that there were secret laws of the universe that could explain the baffling human reality around me, and that philosophers… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
The higher the coefficient of inequality (Gini coefficient) in a society, the worse things tend to be for those at the bottom. — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
We call 'Slavery is wrong' a moral truth because there is a specific history of theoretical investigation of a particular kind of slavery. We… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
Moral theory develops from the divine command theory of medieval Christian philosophy, mixed up with a bit of ancient pagan virtue theory, to the… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
Human courtship has some wild extremes. At one end of the spectrum, there is harassment, pestering, blackmail, and an abuse of institutional power, which… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
