T. M. Scanlon famous quotes

I take facts about reasons to be fundamental in two ways. First, I believe that facts about reasons are not reducible to or analyzable in terms of facts of other kind, such as facts about the natural world. Second, I believe that reasons are the fundamental elements of the normative domain, and other normative notions, such as goodness and moral right and wrong can be explained in terms of reasons.
-- T. M. Scanlon

#Believe #World #Moral

I agree that science is the best way of understanding the natural world, and therefore that we have reason to believe what the best science tells us about the objects in that world and the relations between them. But this does not mean that the natural world is the only thing we can have true beliefs about. The status of material objects as things that are "real" is a matter of their having physical properties, such as weight, solidity, and spatio-temporal location. In order to be real, such things need not have, in addition to these properties, some further kind of metaphysical existence.
-- T. M. Scanlon

#Real #Believe #Mean

History must judge John F. Kennedy not only by what he was able to accomplish in a thousand days, but also by what he inspired all of us to volunteer to do for our country.
-- T. M. Scanlon

#Country #Volunteer #Judging

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.

I'm still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I'm now a reverant agnostic. Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance.

Psychoanalysts believe that the only "normal" people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?

Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

Money has no moral opinions.

Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

Christians belong in American politics because there is not and cannot be a fundamental separation between our moral vocation and our citizenship.