These were the predecessors of Effective Altruism. That term didn't exist back then, but the worldview did—these systems are all variants of utilitarianism, a starry-eyed moral calculus invented by Jeremy Bentham two hundred years ago. By the way, Bentham also invented the Panopticon, a prison concept that is the model for today's surveillance capitalism.
1mo ago
We are reluctant to acknowledge the full scope of what we owe to luck, because our vanity rebels against the suggestion that our qualities cannot by themselves have produced our good fortune. It is hard to endure the thought that someone else might equally well have done what we have done.
1mo ago
We are caught in a paradox: the more we study the conditions of courage, the more we see how few people have ever been free enough from want and fear to practice it. Courage is not a virtue but a grace — and perhaps the rarest of all.
1mo ago
We must not measure greatness from the mansion down, but from the manger up. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
2mo ago
It is not reason that gives us our moral principles; it is habit, custom, the slow deposit of human experience. Reason comes after, to justify or to criticize what instinct and tradition have already established.
The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness.
4mo ago
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
5mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
