Dale Jamieson Quotes

Some philosophers think that the idea of a consequentialist virtue theory is strange, but the real strength of consequentialism is that it can emulate the requirements of other moral theories when it is the case that acting on those theories would improve the world.

Climate change involves fundamental choices about how we want to live and what kind of world we want.

In the last few centuries we’ve managed to reduce how much we kill each other, we’ve learned some basic lessons about public health, and life is relatively good for more people than ever before.

When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.

Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.

Apocalypses don’t happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.

The idea that Bentham and Mill were maximizers is the greatest stretch of all. They were progressivists, committed to improving the societies in which they lived, not utopian maximizers.

Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.

If we don’t have historical consciousness we can’t really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can’t understand problems than we can’t find solutions.

The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.

I became religious and at 14 went to a boarding school 500 miles from home to begin theological studies. By the time I started university, politics had replaced religion in the economy of my enthusiasms but I had no idea what to study. My boarding school emphasized languages which I was bad at, and deemphasized math and science which I was good at.