Annette Baier Quotes
Annette Claire Baier was a New Zealand-born moral philosopher and one of the most distinctive analytic voices in late twentieth-century ethics. After studies at Otago and Oxford she taught at Carnegie Mellon and for two decades at the University of Pittsburgh. The quotes below are attributed to Annette Baier, organized by topic.
Browse Annette Baier by topic
Annette Baier on Happiness
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“Hume describes (E, 235) as a “fancied monster” a man who has “no manner of concern to his fellow-creatures but to regard the happiness and misery of all sensible beings with greater indifference than even two contiguous shades of the same color” (ibid.). To limit one's concern to those sensible beings who are of one's own species is to be part-monster, but such monsters, alas, are not merely fancied ones.”
p. 75
Annette Baier on Knowledge
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“Animals can not disapprove, but they can complain and protest, at least until their vocal chords are cut to spare experimenters their protests.”
p. 73
Annette Baier on Love
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“Trust is more like the air we breathe than a thing we choose.”
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“We can only learn what trust is by being entrusted, and by trusting in turn.”
Annette Baier on Virtue
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“The ethics of trust is more fundamental than the ethics of justice.”
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“Hume is the moral philosopher of women's experience.”
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Attributed to Annette Baier:
“Moral life is mostly carried on in the second person.”
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“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.”
p. 63 -
“I think there is at least one moral theory of respectable lineage and good independent credentials that can accommodate such fairly minimal intuitions about us and animals. This is the theory Hume offers us. I do not consider Hume a forerunner of utilitarianism , and therefore what I shall go on to say in defense of Hume is not intended as a defense of any version of utilitarianism. I see Hume to be much closer to Aristotle than to Mill , to be offering us a theory about human virtues, not a theory about utility maximization and the duties that might involve.”
p. 68