Michael Huemer > Quotes

“If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.”
― Michael Huemer

“Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies – almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.”
― Michael Huemer

“Why is it so hard to explain the basis of state authority? The most likely
reason is that there is no explanation for political authority, because political authority is a fiction.”
― Michael Huemer, Justice Before the Law

“We talk about society because we want to align ourselves with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself *against*, and you don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.”
― Michael Huemer

“The same goes for such nonsense sentences as “Time is a concept”, “Infinity is a concept”, and “God is a concept”. Those are all category errors.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“Having feelings does not make you irrational. Believing that the world must be a certain way because of your feelings does.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“Government is an extremely prominent and fundamental feature of the structure of our society. We know that people tend to have a powerful bias in favor of the existing arrangements of their own societies. It therefore stands to reason that, whether or not any government were legitimate, most of us would have a strong tendency to believe that some governments are legitimate, especially our own and others like it.”
― Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey

“According to [this] widely accepted theory…we experience an uncomfortable state, known as ‘cognitive dissonance’, when we have two or more cognitions that stand in conflict or tension with one another – and particularly when our behavior or other reactions appear to conflict with our self-image. We then tend to alter our beliefs or reactions to reduce the dissonance. For instance, a person who sees himself as compassionate yet finds himself inflicting pain on others will experience cognitive dissonance. He might reduce this dissonance by ceasing to inflict pain, changing his image of himself, or adopting auxiliary beliefs to explain why a compassionate person may inflict pain in this situation.”
― Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey

“By studying philosophy, one gradually wakes up and stops saying the things that make no sense.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“Is this a book of extremist ideology? Yes and no. I defend some radical conclusions in the following pages. But although I am an extremist, I have always striven to be a reasonable one. I reason on the basis of what seem to me common sense ethical judgments. I do not assume a controversial, grand philosophical theory, an absolutist interpretation of some particular value, or a set of dubious empirical claims. This is to say that although my conclusions are highly controversial, my premises are not. Furthermore, I have striven to address alternative viewpoints fairly and reasonably.”
― Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey

“​I would like to insist, however, that we should not define God in some completely different way that doesn’t even refer to a conscious being. For instance, please don’t say that God is love, or God is nature, or God is goodness in general. Those statements are category errors or abuses of language. If I define “God” to refer to my couch, then we can easily prove that “God exists”, but this definition would be unhelpful, because it bears no relation to how the word “God” is normally understood, it doesn’t help to illuminate anything, and it only serves to sow confusion. Similar problems beset the attempts to define God as love, nature, goodness, etc.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“​Aside: I know, it often doesn’t seem as if people are trying to learn from each other when they trade arguments! It might seem they are just trying to win some kind of personal contest, or score points for “their side”. When that happens, you’re doing it wrong. Now, maybe people almost always do it wrong. You should still try to do it right.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“The main failures of objectivity are cases where your beliefs are overly influenced by your personal interests, emotions, or desires, or by how the phenomenon in the world is related to you, as opposed to how the external world is independent of you.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“Irrationality and bias can support any ideology, including your opponents’. Nazis, Marxists, flat-Earthers, and partisans of any other crazy or evil view can base their beliefs on irrational biases, and there is no way to reason them out of it if you’ve rejected rationality and objectivity. So don’t attack objectivity and rationality. Unless you’re an asshole and you just want intellectual chaos.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“Why is it so hard to explain the basis of state authority? The most likely reason is that there is no explanation for political authority, because political authority is a fiction.”
― Michael Huemer, Justice Before the Law