Julian Baggini
Julian Baggini
Julian Bagginiis a British philosopher, and the author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience. He wrote The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 other thought experiments and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Philosophers' Magazine...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
philosophy appreciate done
If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.
affordable looking-down ifs
If we now find ourselves looking down on the cheap and convenient, it is only because we now have better things which are affordable.
emotion morality unlikely
Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.
law morality citizenship
It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.
important may golden
It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.
impact matter natural
Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.
leftovers bothered knows
It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered.
satisfaction might flourishing
Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.
broken needs might
Rules matter, and to be rules they need to be universal in form: always do this, never do that. But it is foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that an occasion might arise when normal rules just don't apply. Rules are not there to be broken, but sometimes break them we must.
atheist feel-better giving
The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy.
pain motivation animal
The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.
believe games use
Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.
loyalty practice benefits
True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.
doubt firsts questioning
The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place.