Experiments in Ethics Quotes

“We can't be content with knowing the kind of people we are. It matters, too, the kind of people we hope to be.”
― Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics

“Being deluged with trolley problems is one of the professional hazards of modern moral philosophy.”
― Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Flexner Lectures)

“And that, as we've seen, seems consistent with our broader explanatory habits-with the observation that much of what
we say when we're explaining what we've done is confabulation: stories we've made up (though quite sincerely) for ourselves and in response to others. In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.1a”
― Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Flexner Lectures)

“Yet in making our choices we must sometimes start with a vision, however inchoate, of what it is for a human life to go well. That was one of Aristotle's central insights. It is my argument that we should be free to avail ourselves of the resources of many disciplines to define that vision; and that in bringing them together we are being faithful to a long tradition. In the humanities,
I think, we are always engaged in illuminating the present by drawing on the past; it is the only way to make a future worth hoping for.”
― Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Flexner Lectures)