“One ground for suspicion of apparently sincere moral convictions is their link with some special interest of those who hold them. The questions cui bono and cui malo are appropriate questions to raise when we are searching for possible contaminants of conscience. Entrenched privilege, and fear of losing it, distorts one's moral sense.”

— Annette Baier

Source: Knowing Our Place in the Animal World, p. 63

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 "One ground for suspicion of apparently sincere moral convictions is their link with some special interest of those who …" by Annette Baier?

Annette Baier 5

New Zealand philosopher 1929–2012

Related quotes

“The question "cui bono" to what practical end and advantage do your researches tend? is one which the speculative philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake, and enjoys, as a rational being should enjoy, the mere contemplation of harmonious and mutually dependent truths, can seldom hear without a sense of humiliation. He feels that there is a lofty and disinterested pleasure in his speculations which ought to exempt them from such questioning; communicating as they do to his own mind the purest happiness (after the exercise of the benevolent and moral feelings) of which human nature is susceptible, and tending to the injury of no one, he might surely allege this as a sufficient and direct reply to those who, having themselves little capacity, and less relish for intellectual pursuits, are constantly repeating upon him this enquiry.”

John Herschel (1792–1871) English mathematician, astronomer, chemist and photographer

A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831)

“[I]t will not do to act as if the moral question was not the supreme question in public life, and, in a sense, the vera causa of party conflict.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Letter to William Ewart Gladstone (21 November 1891), quoted in J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (eds.), Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton, Vol. I (1917), p. 257
1890s

“[It is] a question of personal appeal and conviction, rather than any argument. The cards I fancy are sympathy, understanding of his hopes, suspicions and disappointments, but above all, striving to convey to him, through what one says, a real echo of the sincerity that pervaded your doings in London.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Letter (16 February 1931), quoted in Birkenhead, Halifax (Hamish Hamilton, 1965), p. 296
Viceroy of India

“Opinions upon moral questions are more often the expression of strongly felt expediency than of careful ethical reasoning; and the opinions so formed by one generation become the conscientious convictions or the sacred instincts of the next.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Saturday Review, 29, 1865, p. 532
1860s

“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

Frédéric Bastiat book The Law

Source: The Law (1850)

“Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Senator Obama.”

Mark Penn (1954) American political consultant

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/351364_joel15.html?source=mypi

“That's one of those questions, whether human beings are really capable of change, or if all seeming changes are really a matter of framing the existing character in a different moral situation.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, Earthborn (1995)

“For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.
Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."
Let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.

“I do not question the sincerity or the good intentions of those who feel that way.”

Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow (1887–1952) British politician, agriculturalist and colonial administrator (1887-1952)

10 January 1940, Speech at Orient Club, Bombay, also quoted in Speeches and Statements of the Marquess of Linlithgow, p. 229.

“If the question be raised, why such an apparently special problem as the quadrature of the circle, is deserving of the sustained interest which has attained to it, and which it still possesses, the answer is only to be found in a scrutiny of the history of the problem, and especially in the closeness of the connection of that history with the general history of Mathematical Science.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), p. 2

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Annette Baier 5

Related quotes

Related topics