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 and anti-theology dismayed him. His 'monadology' which said that the true atoms of nature were unextended 'living mirrors,' was an imaginative and beautiful system, and even in many ways more modern than Epicurean atomism, than Epicurean… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share
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 discussed it for centuries in metaphysical, economic, biological, and philosophical terms; we listened to all the arguments pro and con, we read all the testimonies of slaves and witnesses, and we decided. Though this 'we" is… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share
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 its targets rightly fear and loathe. At the other end is love, which as Nietzsche said, is beyond good and evil and always deserves our respect and compassion even when it is doomed or destructive. In… — Catherine Wilson Copy Share
