Dale Jamieson Quotes

"One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Our differences should not be exaggerated." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Progressive Consequentialsm requires us to make the world better but we are under no obligation to bring about the best possible world." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Acts are right in virtue of the goodness of their consequences." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "You can't imagine anything like nature as we know it without predators." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "In much of the world today there are no more chilling words than "I'm from the United States and I'm here to help you."" ~ Dale Jamieson

 "We're good at noticing sudden movements of middle size objects in our immediate visual field, but what is out of sight is for us is largely out of mind." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "We're highly adaptable and have developed some powerful systems of representation." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "I begin with human psychology and then see what we can say about ethics." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Climate change involves fundamental choices about how we want to live and what kind of world we want." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "We can use economic instruments to help realize our goals but economics does not tell us what our goals should be." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Ethics is prescriptive and can change behavior, but usually only at the margins." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities." ~ Dale Jamieson

 "We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think." ~ Dale Jamieso

 "We live in a world in which everyone wants solutions. But we can't find solutions if we don't understand the problems, and we can't understand the problems without knowing how we got here." ~ Dale Jamieson