In the academic setting, you take (typically) lonely, interesting middle-aged men and beautiful, intelligent young women, and everybody's motivations for display and conquest are engaged to the max. Sublimated, this can be a powerful force for the good - Plato… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share Image
Gentlemanly, principled, helpful behaviour by older men vis-a-vis young women goes unnoticed, but it deserves real moral credit, and we could use more first-person testimony from the beneficiaries and practitioners about that too. — 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
