Philosophy 313 Reading: "The Meaning of Life" and others

Material covered: 

"The Meaning of Life" by Richard Taylor
"Euthyphro" by Plato
"Natural Goodness" by Philippa Foot
"Moral Motivation and Human Nature" by Joel Feinberg
"The Ethics of Emergencies" by Ayn Rand
A portion of "Moral Thinking" by R. M. Hare
"Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism" by J. J. C. Smart
"The Singer Solution to World Poverty" by Peter Singer


"The Meaning of Life" 

• "The question whether life has any meaning is difficult to interpret, and the more you concentrate your critical faculty on it the more it seems to elude you, or to evaporate as any intelligible question." 
• "A perfect image of meaninglessness, of the kind we are seeking, is found in the ancient myth of Sisyphus... [in which] we have the picture of meaningless, pointless toil, of a meaningless existence that is absolutely never redeemed." 
• "[Sisyphus] does not awaken, for there is nothing for him to awaken to." 
• "Nothing ever comes of what he is doing, except simply, more of the same. Not by one step, nor by a thousand, nor by ten thousand does he even expiate by the smallest token the sin against the gods that led him into this fate. Nothing comes of it, nothing at all." 
• "Now, what stands out in all such pictures as oppressive and dejecting is not that the beings who enact these roles suffer any torture or pain, for it need not be assumed that they do. Nor is it that their labors are great, for they are no greater than the labors commonly undertaken by most people most of the time... It is not that his great struggle comes to nothing, but that his existence itself is without meaning." 
• "Again, it is not the fact that the labors of Sisyphus continue forever that deprives them of meaning. It is, rather, the implication of this: that they come to nothing." 
• After the gods introduce in Sisyphus an obsession with and love for rolling stones up hills, "the only thing that has happened is this: Sisyphus is reconciled to it, and indeed more, he has been led to embrace it. Not, however, by reason or persuasion, but by nothing more rational than the potency of a new substance in his veins." 
• "Meaninglessness is essentially endless pointlessness, and meaningfulness is therefore the opposite. Activity, and even long, drawn out and repetitive activity, has a meaning if it has some significant culmination, some more or less lasting end that can be considered to have been the direction and purpose of the activity. But the descriptions so far also provide something else; namely, the suggestion of how an existence that is objectively meaningless, in this sense, can nevertheless acquire a meaning for him whose existence it is." 
• "Some birds span an entire side of the globe each year and then return, only to insure that others may follow the same incredibly long path again and again. One is led to wonder what the point of it all is, with what great triumph this ceaseless effort, repeating itself through millions of years, might finally culminate, and why it should go on and on for so long, accomplishing nothing, getting nowhere." 
• "We at one point imagined that the labors of Sisyphus finally culminated in the creation of a temple, but for this to make any difference it had to be a temple that would at least endure, adding beauty to the world for the remainder of time." 
• "This is the nearest we may hope to get to heaven, but the redeeming side of that fact is that we do thereby avoid a genuine hell." 
• "If the builders of a great and flourishing ancient civilization could somehow return now to see archaeologists unearthing the trivial remnants of what they had once accomplished with such effort see the fragments of pots and vases, a few broken statues, and such tokens of another age and greatness they could indeed ask themselves what the point of it all was, if this is all it finally came to. Yet, it did not seem so to them then, for it was just the building, and not what was finally built, that gave their life meaning." 
• "Nor would it be any salvation to the birds who span the globe every year, back and forth, to have a home made for them in a cage with plenty of food and protection, so that they would not have to migrate anymore. It would be their condemnation, for it is the doing that counts for them, and not what they hope to will by it." 
• "The point of living is simply to be living, in the manner that it is your nature to be living. You go through life building your castles, each of these beginning to fade into time as the next is begun; yet it would be no salvation to rest from this." 

"Euthyphro"

• "What is the charge? Well, a very serious charge, which shows a good deal of character in the young man, and for which he is certainly not to be despised. He says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who are their corruptors. I fancy that he must be a wise man, and seeing that I am the reverse of a wise man, he has found me out, and is going to accuse me of corrupting his young friends. And of this our mother the state is to be the judge. Of all our political men he is the only one who seems to me to begin in the right way, with the cultivation of virtue in youth; like a good husbandman, he makes the young shoots his first care, and clears away us who are the destroyers of them. This is only the first step, he will afterwards attend to the elder branches; and if he goes on as he has begun, he will be a very great public benefactor." 
• "You are reserved in your behavior, and seldom impart your wisdom. But I have a benevolent habit of pouring out myself to everybody, and would even pay for a listener, and I am afraid that the Athenians may think we too talkative." 
• "For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most righteous of the gods?- and yet they admit that he bound his father (Cronos) because he wickedly devoured his sons, and that he too had punished his father (Uranus) for a similar reason, in a nameless manner. And yet when I proceed against my father, they are angry with me. So inconsistent are they in their way of talking when the gods are concerned, and when I am concerned." 
• "The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods." 

"Natural Goodness"

• "Judgments of goodness and badness can have, it seems, a special 'grammar' when the subject belongs to a living thing, whether plant, animal, or human being." 
• "The goodness predicated in these latter cases [such as good/bad weather], like goodness predicated to living things when they are evaluated in a relationship to members of species other than their own, is what I should like to call secondary goodness." 
• "Natural goodness, as I define it, which is attributable only to living things themselves and to their parts, characteristics, and operations, is intrinsic or 'autonomous' goodness in that it depends directly on the relation of an individual to the 'life form' of its species. On barren Mars there is no natural goodness, and even secondary goodness can be attributed to things on that planet only by relating them to our own lives, or to living things existing elsewhere."
• "I want to suggest that moral defect is a form of natural defect not as different as is generally supposed from defect in sub-rational living things." 
• "Eating, for instance, is essentially, conceptually, related to nourishment, and could not be conclusively identified by a story about the taking in, crushing, transforming, and spewing out of substances since, for all that, its purpose might not be the maintenance of tissue but, say, skunk-like defence." 
• "It is only in so far as 'stills' can be made from the moving picture of the evolution of species that we can have a natural history account of the life of a particular kind of living thing. And it is only in so far as we have a 'natural history account' that we can have a 'vital description' of individuals here and now."
• "In fact, he says that if we have a true natural-history proposition to the effect that S's are F, then if a certain individual S-- the individual here and now or then and there-- is not F it is therefore not as it should be, but rather weak, diseased, or in some other way defective." 
• "What is crucial to all teleological propositions is the expectation of an answer to the question 'What part does it play in the life cycle of things of the species S?' In other words, 'What is its function?' or 'What good does it do?'"
• "The idea of human good is deeply problematic. One may be inclined to think of it as happiness, but much would have to be said before that could be so understood as to be true, and I shall discuss this in a later chapter. Here I want only to recall that Wittgenstein famously said on his deathbed, 'Tell them I have had a wonderful life.' The example should teach us not to be too ready to speak of every good life as 'a happy life': Wittgenstein surely did not have a happy life, being too tormented and self-critical for that." 
• "Nevertheless, for all the diversities of human life, it is possible to give some quite general account of human necessities, that is, of what is quite generally needed for human good, if only by starting from the negative idea of human deprivation." 
• Foot's main issue seems to be the Is-Ought Problem. Just because human nature is a certain way, does not mean that it should be so. 

"Moral Motivation and Human Nature"

• "'Psychological egoism' is the name given to a theory widely held by ordinary people, and at one time almost universally accepted by political economists, philosophers, and psychologists, according to which all human actions when properly understood can be seen to be motivated by selfish desires." 
• "No psychological egoist denies that people sometimes do desire things other than their own welfare-- the happiness of other people, for example; but all psychological egoists insist that people are capable of desiring the happiness of others only when they take it to be a means to their own happiness." 
• "Every action of mine is prompted by motives or desires or impulses which are my motives and not somebody else's. This fact might be expressed by saying that whenever I act I am always pursuing my own ends or trying to satisfy my own desires."
• "That every voluntary act is prompted by the agent's own motives is a tautology..."
• "The source of the confusion in this argument is readily apparent. It is not the genesis of an action or the origin or its motives which makes it a 'selfish' one but rather the 'purpose' of the act or the objective of its motives; not where the motive comes from (in voluntary actions it always comes from the agent) but what it aims at determines whether or not it is selfish." 
• Lucius Garvin: "To say that an act proceeds from our own... desire is only to say that the act is our own. To demand that we should act on motives that are not our own is to ask us to make ourselves living contradictions in terms." 
• "It has been said that the characteristic psychological problem of our time is the dissatisfaction that attends the fulfillment of our very most powerful desires." 
• "The immediate inference from even constant accompaniment to purpose (or motive) is always a non sequitur."
• "The fact that we get pleasure from a particular action [helping someone else] presupposes that we desired something else-- something other than our own pleasure-- as an end in itself and not merely as a means to our own pleasant state of mind." 
• "There is reason to think that people have as often sacrificed themselves to injure or kill others as to help or to save others, and with as much 'heroism' in the one case as in the other. The unselfish nature of malevolence was first noticed by the Anglican Bishop and moral philosopher Joseph Butler (1692-1752), who regretted that people are no more selfish than they are." 
• "Happiness has a way of 'sneaking up' on persons when they are preoccupied with other things; but when persons deliberately and single-mindedly set of in pursuit of happiness, it vanishes utterly from sight and cannot be captured. This is the famous 'paradox of hedonism': the single-minded pursuit of happiness is necessarily self-defeating, for the way to get happiness is to forget it; then perhaps it will come to you." 
• "The parents least likely to raise a happy child are those who, even with the best intentions, train their child to seek happiness directly."
• "It is the child (and the adult for that matter) without 'outer-directed' interests who is the most likely to be unhappy." 
• "Some statements only appear to be empirical hypotheses but are in fact disguised tautologies reflecting the speaker's determination to use words in certain (often eccentric) ways. For example, a zoologist might refuse to allow the existence of 'Australian swans' to count as evidence against the generalization that all swans are white, on the grounds that the black Australian swans are not 'really' swans at all."

"The Ethics of Emergencies"

• "If a man accepts the ethics of altruism, he suffers the following consequences (in proportion to the degree of his acceptance): 
• "(1) Lack of self-esteem-- since his first concern in the realm of values is not how to live his life, but how to sacrifice it.
• "(2) Lack of respect for others-- since he regards mankind as a hard of doomed beggars crying for someone's help.
• "(3) A nightmare view of existence-- since he believes that man are trapped in a 'malevolent universe' where disasters are the constant and primary concern of their lives.
• "(4) And, in fact, a lethargic indifference to ethic, a hopelessly cynical amorality-- since his questions involve situations which he is not likely ever to encounter, which bear no relation to the actual problems of his own life and thus leave him to live without any moral principles whatever."
• "It [altruism] has indoctrinated men with the idea that to value another human being is an act of selflessness, thus implying that a man can have no personal interest in others-- that to value means to sacrifice oneself-- that any love, respect or admiration a man may feel for others is not and cannot be a source of his own enjoyment, but is a threat to his existence, a sacrificial blank check signed over to his loved ones." 
• "'Sacrifice' is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue."
• "The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one." 
• "Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love. A 'selfless,' 'disinterested' love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values." 
• "Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one's selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a 'sacrifice' for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies."
• "Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice-- nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival." 
• "The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one's own rational self-interest and one's own hierarchy of values: the time, money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one's own happiness." 
• "If a man is able to swim and to save his drowning wife, but becomes panicky, gives in to an unjustified, irrational fear and lets her drown, then spends his life in loneliness and misery-- one would not call him 'selfish'; one would condemn him morally for his treason to himself and to his own values, that is: his failure to fight for the preservation of a value crucial to his own happiness."
• "The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one's convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one's values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality. If a man professes to love a woman, yet his actions are indifferent, inimical, or damaging to her, it is his lack of integrity that makes them immoral." 
• "If the gadget means more than the friend's suffering, one had no business pretending to be his friend." 
• "What, then, should one properly grant to strangers? The generalized respect and good will which one should grant to a human being in the name of the potential value he represents-- until and unless he forfeits it." 
• "Since men are born tabula rasa, both cognitively and morally, a rational man regards strangers as innocent until proved guilty, and grants them that initial good will in the name of their human potential. After that, he judges them according to the moral character they have actualized." 
• "If one values human life, one cannot value its destroyers." 
• "An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible-- such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men's primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger, and restore normal conditions... It is only in emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers, if it is in one's power. For instance, a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should help to save his fellow passengers (though not at the expense of his own life). But this does not mean that after they all reach shore, he should devote his efforts to saving his fellow passenger from poverty, ignorance, neurosis or whatever other troubles they might have." 
• "In the normal conditions of existence, man has to choose his goals, project them in time, pursue them and achieve them by his own effort. He cannot do it if his goals are at the mercy of and must be sacrificed to any misfortune happening to others. He cannot live his life by the guidance of rules applicable only to conditions under which human survival is impossible."
• "Observe also that the advocates of altruism are unable to base their ethics on any facts of men's normal existence and that they always offer 'lifeboat' situations as examples from which to derive the rules of moral conduct... The fact is that men do not live in lifeboats-- and that a lifeboat is not the place on which to base one's metaphysics." 

"Moral Thinking"

• "The enterprise on which we are embarking will certainly be misunderstood unless I start by explaining its nature. This is a work of moral philosophy." 
• "We need to know in what respects our moral thinking might be better done if we studied moral philosophy, and how the philosophy would bring this about." 
• "We want the moral philosopher to help us do our moral thinking more rationally. If we say this, we presuppose that there is a rational way or method of going about answering moral questions; and this means that there are some canons or rules of moral thinking, to follow which is to think rationally. The moral philosopher asks what these canons are." 
• "The existence of the philosophies of science and of mathematics indicates that in the opinion of many philosophers, who may well be right, even the questions about the common cold and the prime numbers can have the same sort of inquiry made into them as we shall be making into moral questions." 
• "The first step toward answering a question rationally is to understand it, which entails understanding the words in which it is posed." 
• "Many people think, even now, and in spite of some illuminating things that John Stuart Mill said about the relation between his theory and Kant's, that Kant and the utilitarians stand at opposite poles of moral philosophy. But, as we shall see, the formal, logical properties of the moral words, the understanding of which we owe above all to Kant, yield a system of moral reasoning whose conclusions have a content identical with that of a certain kind of utilitarianism." 
• "Utilitarianism itself is compounded of two ingredients, a formal and a substantial; and the formal element needs only to be rephrased in order to come extremely close to Kant; there is a very close relation to Bentham's 'Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one' and Kant's 'Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.'"
• "In order to decide what we ought to do, we have, according to the utilitarians, to study not only the logical properties of the moral words, but the preferences of the people whom our actions will affect; and it is an empirical question what these are."
• "'How far can we get by the logical study of the moral words?' At what stage do we have to take into account, in our moral thinking, facts about the way things and people are, in the world as it is? Does a moral system for practical use have to be adequate to all logically possible worlds, as some arguments used by moral philosophers assume? Or will it do if it is adequate to conditions in this world?" 
• "A complete moral system will depend both on logical and on empirical theses-- which makes it all the more important to be clear which are which."
• "We can tell when people are contradicting themselves because we know the language they are speaking." 
• "If anybody say that it is all right to torture people for fun, he is differing from the rest of us, but is making no logical or linguistic error." 
• "The two side in the most important moral arguments will have different intuitions..."
• "The appeal to moral intuitions will never do as a basis for a moral system. It is certainly possible, as some thinkers even of our times have done, to collect all the moral opinions of which they and their contemporaries feel more sure, find some relatively simple method or apparatus which can be represented, with a bit of give and take, and making plausible assumptions about the circumstances of life, as generating all these opinions; and then pronounce that that is the moral system which, having reflected, we must acknowledge to be the correct one. But they have absolutely no authority for this claim beyond the original convictions, for which no ground or argument was given... It would be possible for two mutually inconsistent systems to be defended in this way; all that this would show is that their advocates had grown up in different moral environments." 

"Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism"

• "Utilitarianism is the doctrine that the rightness of actions is to be judged by their consequences. What do we mean by 'actions' here? Do we mean particular actions or do we mean classes of actions? According to which way we interpret the word 'actions' we get two different theories, both of which merit the appellation 'utilitarian'."
• "According to this doctrine [of Bentham, &c] we test individual actions by their consequences, and general rules, like 'keep promises', are mere rules of thumb which we use only to avoid the necessity of estimating the probable consequences of our actions at every step. The rightness or wrongness of keeping a promise on a particular occasion depend only on the goodness or badness of the consequences of keeping or of breaking the promise on that particular occasion." 
• "To put it shortly, rules do not matter, save per accidens as rules of thumb and as de facto social institutions with which the utilitarian has to reckon when estimating consequences. I shall call this doctrine 'extreme utilitarianism'."
• According to restricted utilitarianism, "moral rules are more than rules of thumb. In general the rightness of an action is not to be tested by evaluating its consequences but only by considering whether or not it falls under a certain rule. Whether the rule is to be considered an acceptable moral rule is, however, to be decided by considering the consequences of adopting the rule." 
• "It should be noticed that the distinction I am making cuts across, and is quite different from, the distinction commonly made between hedonistic and ideal utilitarianism." 
• "Mill seems, if we are to take his remarks about higher and lower pleasures seriously, to be neither a pure hedonistic nor a pure ideal utilitarian. He seems to hold that pleasurableness is a necessary condition for goodness, but that goodness is a function of other qualities of mind as well." 
• "When we say that a state of mind is good I take it that we are expressing some sort of rational preference." 
• "I am doubtful whether 'more deeply enjoyable' does not just mean, 'more enjoyable, even though not more enjoyable on a first look', and so I am doubtful whether quasi-ideal utilitarianism, and possibly ideal utilitarianism too, would not collapse into hedonistic utilitarianism on a closer scrutiny of the logic of words like 'preference', 'pleasure'[,] 'enjoy', 'deeply enjoy', and so on." 
• "Stout distinguishes two forms of the universalisation principle, the causal form and the hypothetical form. To say that you ought not to do an action A because it would have bad results if everyone (or many people) did action A may be mrely to point out that while the action A would otherwise be the optimific one, nevertheless when you take into account that doing A will probably cause other people to do A too, you can see that A is not, on a broad view, really optimific. If this causal influence could be avoided... then we would disregard the universalisation principle. This is the causal form of the principle." 
• "A person who accepted the universalisation principle in its hypothetical form would be the one who was concerned only with what would happen if everyone did the action A: he would be totally unconcerned with the question of whether in fact everyone would do the action A..." 
• "Making use of Stout's distinction, we can say that an extreme utilitarian would apply the universalisation principle in the causal form, while a restricted utilitarian would apply it in the hypothetical form."
• "We have only to read the newspaper correspondence to realise that the common moral consciousness is in part made up of superstitious elements, of morally bad elements, and of logically confused elements." 
• "Even among good hearted and benevolent people it is possible to find superstitious and morally bad reasons for moral beliefs. These superstitious and morally bad reasons hide behind the protective screen of logical confusion." 
• "With people who are not logically confused but who are openly superstitious or morally bad I can of course do nothing." 
• "In practice the extreme utilitarian will mostly guide his conduct by appealing to the rules... of common sense morality. This is not because there is anything sacrosanct in the rules themselves but because he can argue that probably he will most often act in an extreme utilitarian way if he does not think as a utilitarian. For one thing, actions have frequently to be done in a hurry. Imagine a man seeing a person drowning. He jumps in and rescues him. There is no time to reason the matter out, but always this will be the course of action which an extreme utilitarian would recommend if he did reason the matter out." 
• "This trusting to instincts and to moral rules can be justified on extreme utilitarian grounds. Furthermore, an extreme utilitarian who knew that the drowning man was Hitler would nevertheless praise the rescuer, not condemn him. For by praising the man he is strengthening a courageous and benevolent disposition of mind, and in general this disposition has great utility. (Never time, perhaps, it will be Winston Churchill that the man saves!"
• "We must never forget than an extreme utilitarian may praise actions which he knows to be wrong. Saving Hitler was wrong, but it was a member of a class of actions which are generally right, and the motive to do actions of this class is in general an optimific one. In considering questions of praise and blame it is not the expediency of the praised or blamed action that is at issue, but the expediency of the praise. It can be expedient to praise an inexpedient action and inexpedient to praise an expedient one." 
• "Lack of time is not the only reason why an extreme utilitarian may, on extreme utilitarian principles, trust to rules of common sense morality. He knows that in particular cases where his own interests are involved his calculations are likely to be biased in his own favour." 
• "One further point raised by Sidgwick in this connection is whether an (extreme) utilitarian ought on (extreme) utilitarian principles, to propagate (extreme) utilitarianism among the public. As most people are not very philosophical and not good at empirical calculations, it is probable that they will most often act in an extreme utilitarian way if they do not try to think as extreme utilitarians." 
• "The extreme utilitarian, then, regards moral rules as rules of thumb and as sociological facts that have to be taken into account when deciding what to do, just as facts of any other sort have to be taken into account. But in themselves they do not justify any action." 
• "The restricted utilitarian regards moral rules as more than rules of thumb for short-circuiting calculations of consequences. Generally, he argues, consequences are not relevant at all when we are deciding what to do in a particular case. In general they are relevant only to deciding what rules are good reasons for acting in a certain way in particular cases."
• "Suppose that there is a rule R and that in 99% of cases the best possible results are obtained by acting in accordance with R. Then clearly R is a useful rule of thumb if we have not time or are not impartial enough to assess the consequences of an action it is an extremely good bet that the thing to do is to act in accordance with R. But is it not monstrous to suppose that if we have worked out the consequences and if we have perfect faith in the impartiality of our calculations, and if we know that in this instance to break R will have better results than to keep it, we should nevertheless obey the rule?" 
• "Of course the case would be altered if there were a high enough probability of making slips in the direct calculation: then we might stick to the almanack result, liable to error though we knew it to be, simply because the direct calculation would be open to error for a different reason, the fallibility of the computer. This would be analogous to the case of the extreme utilitarian who abides by the conventional rule against the dictates of his utilitarian calculations simply because he thinks that his calculations are probably affected by personal bias." 
• "We must not forget that even if it would be most rational of me to give the money to the hospital it would also be most rational of you to punish or condemn me if you did, most improbably, find out the truth [that a promise had been broken]... Furthermore, I would agree that though it was most rational of me to give the money to the hospital it would be most rational of you to condemn me for it. We revert again to Sidgwick's distinction between the utility of the action and the utility of the praise of it."
• "A right action may be rationally condemned." 
• "So far I have been considering the duty of an extreme utilitarian in a predominantly non-utilitarian society. The case is altered if we consider the extreme utilitarian who lives in a society every member, or most members, of which can be expected to reason as he does. Should he water his flowers [in a drought] now?... Clearly not. For what is rational for him will be rational for others. Hence by a reductio ad absurdum argument we see that it would be rational for none. Even without the edict, no one would water their flowers in a drought.... Notice that in this sort of case the extreme utilitarian in an extreme utilitarian society does not need edicts to keep him in order." 
• "Von Neumann's theory of games will not help us because it is concerned with what we might call 'egoistic' games... whereas we are concerned with what might be called 'beneficent' games. Each extreme utilitarian is, so to speak, trying to gain as many points as possible for humanity as a whole, not for himself alone." 
• "If we are in a county not peopled by anarchists, but by non-anarchist extreme Utilitarians, we expect, other things being equal, that they will keep rules laid down for them. Knowledge of the rule enables us to predict their behavior and to harmonise our own actions with theirs. The rule 'keep to the left hand side', then, is not a logical reason for action but an anthropological datum for planning actions." 
• "As a philosopher I conceive of ethics as the study of how it would be most rationalto act. If my opponent wishes to restrict the word 'morality' to a narrower use he can have the word. The fundamental question is the question of rationality of action in general." 
• "In ordinary language, no doubt, 'right' and 'wrong' have not only the meaning 'most rational to do' and 'not most rational to do' but also have the meaning 'praiseworthy' and 'not praiseworthy'. Usually to the utility of an action corresponds utility of praise of it, but as we saw, this is not always so. Moral language could thus do with tidying up, for example by reserving 'right' for 'most rational' and 'good' as an epithet of praise for the motive from which the action sprang." 

"The Singer Solution to World Poverty"

• "What is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a new one-- knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of kids in need?" 
• "I do not believe that children are more worth saving than adults, but since no one can argue that children have brought their poverty on themselves, focusing on them simplifies the issues." 
• "Comfortably off Americans who give, say, 10 percent of their income to overseas aid organizations are so far ahead of most of their equally comfortable fellow citizens that I wouldn't go out of my way to chastise them for not doing more. Nevertheless, they should be doing much more..."
• "While the idea that no one need do more than his or her fair share is a powerful one, should it prevail if we know that others are not doing their fair share and that children will die preventable deaths unless we do more than our fair share? That would be taking fairness too far." 
• "In the world as it is now, I can see no escape from the conclusion that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be life-threatening." 
• "Now, evolutionary psychologists tell us that human nature just isn't sufficiently altruistic to make it plausible that many people will sacrifice so much for strangers. On the facts of human nature, they might be right, but they would be wrong to draw a moral conclusion from those facts. If it is the case that we ought to do things that, predictably, most of us won't do, then let's face that fact head-on." 
• "If that makes living a morally decent life extremely arduous, well, then that is the way things are. If we don't do it, then we should at least know that we are failing to live a morally decent life-- not because it is good to wallow in guilt but because knowing where we should be going is the first step toward heading in that direction." 
• "When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that railway switch, he must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation."