BLACKBURN Quotes

“As we already saw, there is no getting behind ethics, because the decision to live a tolerant 'non-judgemental' life is itself an ethical decision, and not obviously one that can be sustained for very long, or defended for very long as likely to lead to wholly good consequences. Certainly people may moralize too much and too quickly and about the wrong things. But people may also be too slow to praise good behaviour, or to feel anger at behaviour that deserves it: cruelty, ingratitude, injustice of all kinds.”
― Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning

“We thus combine unreasonable optimism about what people might be like, with unreasonable hatred of them when they are not like that (pp269)”
― Simon Blackburn, BLACKBURN:RULING PASSIONS PAPER: A Theory of Practical Reasoning

“... consider the many ways of failing that await the poet who makes his or her own consciousness of emotions into the subject of a poem, instead of the emotion itself.”
― Simon Blackburn, BLACKBURN:RULING PASSIONS PAPER: A Theory of Practical Reasoning