The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: J. Budziszewski

J. Budziszewski

In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam’s Razor but Occam’s Beard: “Multiply entities unnecessarily.

monotheism, occams-razor, parallel-universes, universe

J. Budziszewski

The problem was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts, but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription.

morality, principles

J. Budziszewski

If all meaning were relative, then the meanings of the terms in the proposition “All meaning is relative” would be relative. Therefore the proposition “All meaning is relative” destroys itself. It is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people.

justification, morality, relative, relative-truth, relativity

J. Budziszewski

Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don’t. We don’t eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.

guppy, human-race, morality, species, survival

J. Budziszewski

The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men’s wives.

adultery, fidelity, morality, morals

J. Budziszewski

Those are just platitudes. Everyone has his own idea of “playing fair.” “Does he? Try making up your own idea of what’s fair–say, “giving the greatest rewards to the laziest workers”–and see how seriously people take you.

fair, fairness, morality, natural-law, platitudes

J. Budziszewski

Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.

conscience, guilt, moral-law, morality, paradox, rationalization

J. Budziszewski

Are we really moral monkeys? I don’t think so. We only strike the nihilist pose selectively, to put to shame rules we no longer try to keep. When it suits us, we can be quite Puritanical: Right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, .’ The veneer is skeptical, but the core is rigid and punitive. The whole affair looks more like a fence around conduct that cannot bear close examination, than like a serious intellectual position. The whole idea of a moral law is that it binds us whether we like it or not. If it really were just a social convention –St. Thomas denies that the basic structure of morality is a construct. It is not rooted in human will and power. Rather it is rooted in nature, in structure of creation, in the constitution of the human person – in something we cannot change by human will and power. The good and the right are not things we invent, but things we discover. They are not constructs, but gifts. These gifts are the fount of the law.

J. Budziszewski

Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.

image-of-god, imago-dei, man, mankind

J. Budziszewski

To be evil at all, Satan needs good things he can abuse, things like intelligence, power and will. Those good things come from God.

evil, god, how-to-stay-christian-in-college

J. Budziszewski

In the same way, filling a cavity restores to the tooth its natural function of chewing. Healing does not transcend our nature; it respects it.

healing, natural-law, nature

J. Budziszewski

Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.

morality, self-love, suicide