“Just as the attempt to actualize liberal ideals requires ideas and arrangements unfamiliar to liberals, so the effort to make our moral experience resemble more closely what so much of moral thought already supposes it to be like calls for a practice of role defiance and role jumbling that has little place in traditional moral doctrines.”

— Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), pp. 563-564

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Just as the attempt to actualize liberal ideals requires ideas and arrangements unfamiliar to liberals, so the effort t…" by Roberto Mangabeira Unger?

Roberto Mangabeira Unger 94

Brazilian philosopher and politician 1947

Related quotes

“People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.”

Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer

1980s
Source: Interview in Reason Magazine (1983).

“The liberalism with which I am concerned is a version of liberalism prominent in the moral and legal and political philosophy of the day: a liberalism in which the notions of justice, fairness, and individual rights play a central role, and which is indebted to Kant for much of its philosophical foundation.”

Michael J. Sandel book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice

Introduction
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1998

“The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. xiv
Context: The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings. As each culture evolves, a unique Cosmos and Ethos appear in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the first humans, the stories, ceremonies, and art associated with our religions-of-origin are central to our matrix.
I stand in awe of these religions. I am deeply enmeshed in one of them myself. I have no need to take on the contradictions or immiscibilities between them, any more that I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipes coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies.

“Nothing penetrates the liberal's sense of moral outrage.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

Afterburner with Bill Whittle https://web.archive.org/web/20090225020338/http://www.pjtv.com/page/Afterburner_with_Bill_Whittle/127/ ()

“… we English people delight in a moral — not a moral to be deduced or inferred, but a nice, rounded, little moral, in all the starch of set sentences, and placed just at the end”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

“The fundamental premise of liberalism is the moral incapacity of the American people.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Christian Coalition Dinner, February 6, 1999. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/99_02_06christianco.htm.
2009

“Deception, in turn, suggests morality: the morality of deceiving people into thinking something is so when it is not. […] The moral principle is this: whoever attempts to tame a part of a wicked problem, but not the whole, is morally wrong.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, Guest editorial: Wicked problems (1967), p. 142 cited in: Rob Hundman (2010) Weerbarstig veranderen. p. 38

“Admittedly, the tendency to bracket substantive moral questions makes it difficult to argue for toleration in the language of the good. Defining privacy rights by defending the practices privacy protects seems either reckless or quaint; reckless because it rests so much on moral argument, quaint because it recalls the traditional view that ties the case for privacy to the merits of the conduct privacy protects. But as the abortion and sodomy cases illustrate, the attempt to bracket moral questions faces difficulties of its own. They suggest the truth in the "naive" view, that the justice or injustice of laws against abortion and homosexual sodomy may have something to do with the morality or immorality of these practices after all.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

Michael J. Sandel, "Moral Argument and Liberal Toleration: Abortion and Homosexuality" (1989)

“We see the infinite plain of facts, and we impose a moral interpretation upon it. And the moral interpretation is about 'what to do about what is'. That's associated both with security, because we just don't need that much complexity, and aim. So we're mobile creatures, right? We need to know where we're going, because all we're ever concerned about, roughly speaking, is where we're going. That's what we need to know. Where are we going, what are we doing, and why? And that's not the same questions as, 'What is the world made up of?' And so that's the domain of the moral, as far as I'm concerned, which is 'What are you aiming at?' That's the question of the ultimate ideal, in some sense. Even if you have trivial, little, fragmentary ideals, there's something trying to emerge out of that. It's more coherent, and more integrated, and more applicable, and more practical.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

“Placement of both Hayek and Mill in the liberal tradition is suspect to many historians of political thought for various reasons. First, Mill also expressed socialist sentiments, so to classify him as a liberal has seemed inaccurate to some more right-inclined liberals. Second, Hayek is sometimes considered more a conservative by left-inclined liberals, and not in the liberal tradition as it has evolved. Nonetheless, Mill and Hayek were the two greatest liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Roberto Mangabeira Unger 94

Related quotes

Related topics