David Edmonds Quotes
What I am concerned about is when tolerance is raised to a political principle and used as a substitute for discourses of justice, equality, or even freedom. What I am suggesting is that when it is raised to the level of a political principle of that sort, it usually cloaks the kinds . . . Read more

-David Edmonds
threnody through the postmortem

-David Edmonds
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Bentham maintained that what mattered about an action was how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided. He enjoined us always to act so as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

-David Edmonds
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Tolerance isn’t just a discourse of power, it is also a discourse of conditionality; that is to say, you will be tolerated unless and until you behave in certain ways, at which point I will no longer tolerate you.

-David Edmonds
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Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”5

-David Edmonds
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Why do we classify all the mental things together as the mental at all? I think action is mental because it’s intentional, in the sense that it’s directed on to something other than itself. So when you act, when you go to buy yourself a coffee, you’re aiming at something beyond . . . Read more

-David Edmonds
Deontology states that there are certain things, like torture, that you just shouldn’t do.

-David Edmonds
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the idea is that the infinite doesn’t stand opposed to anything else—it is all-inclusive—while on the other hand, precisely what that is, is a way of contrasting the infinite with the finite. By definition, you can’t contrast the infinite with the finite, although that’s exa . . . Read more

-David Edmonds
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