R. W. K. Paterson - Moral Quotes

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For many years the best minds in moral philosophy have been less concerned with the content of morality than with its form, less with the actual truth of our many value judgements than with their logical standing.

R. W. K. Paterson
When we entrust the domain of values to those whose intellectual concerns are essentially centred on empirical facts, and whose conceptual frameworks are inevitably constructed around sets of empirical facts, we need not be surprised if the result is moral confusion.

R. W. K. Paterson
The less familiar and more complex something is, the less we can rely on our immediate feelings, and the greater the risk of error in our ultimate moral judgements. … But equally the more remote or unusual some physical event, the less we can rely on our unaided senses. … The arguments which supposedly show that values are in some vitiating sense 'subjective' would also show that the physical world itself is essentially subjective.

R. W. K. Paterson
The patrician is recognizable by his passionate idealism. … The material content of our experiences and achievements has value for him only to the extent that it enshrines symbols of beauty and grandeur. He judges events and actions less by their material and social efficacy than by the qualities of mind and character to which they bear witness, because this is where he holds that their truth is to be found, in the romantic kingdom of irrevocable moral fidelities rather than in the calculating republic of material probabilities.

R. W. K. Paterson
Endurance means that failures have to be both accepted and refused: accepted as a sign that fresh efforts now need to be made, and refused as a signal that we may now desist from effort altogether. … Courage means that the external risks and adversities we face (as distinct from or own moral and spiritual failures) are to be assessed at their true importance: that is, for the patrician, as being in themselves of no importance, as objects not of fear but of disdain.

R. W. K. Paterson
Sociologists, economists, and anthropologists, who notoriously decline to distinguish between the value judgements men make and the moral realities about which men make these judgments, are occupationally prone to treat all value judgements, however sharply opposed, as if they were of equal merit.

R. W. K. Paterson