p.x "No doubt a lot of academic work is of very minor value to the world, motivated more by the pressure to publish than by the discovery of priceless truths..."

"Most people are naturally superstitious and insufficiently reflective, and that religious hierachies have been successful in getting political power or at least influence, as demonstrated by Christianity through most of its history..."

p.xi "This book appears at a remarkable juncture in human history, namely, the point at which the secrets of human genetic endowment have been unlocked and laid open not just to our view but our intervention. Increasingly, the human beings who people our planet in the decades and centuries to come will be different from us now and from our ancestors. Utopian expectations have it that they will be more beautiful and intelligent than we are..."

[Yet there is an obescity epidemic along with declining IQ, so what gives? Is there a 'select' few who will enjoy the utopia, and at the detriment to the rest of us? And what of AI? Will this benefit the masses; if the former is anything to go by then likely not. The "good life" it appears, is not for the masses.]

"...once these trifles (cancer and the rest) have been dealt with... [other things] will come under the geneticists' expensive care... Many now find this picture disturbing, but mainly out of a nervous sense of prospective inferiority."

p.xii "'Religions of the Book' - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are Oriental faiths..."
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Ch.1 Introduction: Shadows and Shapings

p.6 "...it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a sterotyped world..."

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Ch.2 The Classical Conception of the Good Life

p.10 "...in fundamentals human nature varies little across time or cultures..."

"...the Greek view of life appears at its best [...with] its absence of mysticism and false sentimentality... [it] specifies living nobly and richly in spirit as the aim of life... Plato... [encapsulates this with the word] sophrosyne... standardly translated as 'temperence', 'self-restraint', or 'wisdom'.

[On the other hand] St Paul, who in excited language denounced homosexuality... [and the] accumulation of wealth..."

p.11 "[St Paul's] morality is mainly a war against natural human impulses and interests - because he believed that a Second Coming was imminent, and thought he was legislating for years, or at most decades, rather than millennia."

p.12 "Nudity, in the orthodox Judaeo-Christian view, is... a state of shame. [Consider the Adam and Eve story.]

"Christians came to accept that the Kingdom was not coming particularly soon [so] the preparation metamophosed instead into one for the 'next world', demoting this world and making everything unimportant by comparison... or at worst... a huge set of snares set by the devil to impede the individual's chances of getting int o heaven..."

p.13 "If Greeks used such phrases as 'doing things that are pleasing to the gods', they did not thereby mean that the chief point of life was spiritual or other-worldly... Life was unquestionably for living in the hear and now, with human interests at the fore."

p.18 "...discussion and debate mattered because they brought office, fame, civic honours and financial gain to any citizen who sought them ably enough. For that reason teachers of rhetoric flourished, and many of them became famous for their skill not just in teaching the forensic arts of oratory and advocacy but in showing how to argue about the great political and moral issues of the day."

[Today we have Youtube and other online platforms for this, and can consider the likes of Jordon Peterson and Joe Rogan.]

p.21 "For Socrates... happiness consists in what he described as 'the perfection of the soul'."

p.23 "Gorgias what a Sophist, a teacher of rhetoric, who claimed that since the highest good is freedom to do as one wishes, and since rhetoric - the art of persuading and influencing others - is the instrument that will get one that freedom, it follows that to live the good life one should studyn rhetoric... Socrates demolishies Gorgias' view. There are, he says, two kinds of persuasion: one gives rise to knowledge, because it involved giving reasons for acepting a belief, whereas the other does not... but simply consists in using rhetorical tricks to sway the minds of hearers to accept a proposition, whether or not it is true... [The] rhetorician [doesn't] need knowledge of the difference between right and wrong... Gorgias... insists that rhetoric itself is morally neutral: a bad person will use it for bad ends, a good person for good ends."

p.24 "One... thought [is[ that an unjust person will be denied the friendship of the gods... [Another] is... that to live well is to have an ordered soul, one which is in harmony with itself."

"Achieving internal harmony is... 'the object of the intelligent man's life'."

p.25 "...a man without a sense of justice... will not be able to set a limit to his desires, and will therefore be discontented. Another argument is that an individual who lives justly will know, as a result of reflecting on his life in order to make it balanced and harmonious, which pleasures are true pleasures, and in particular he will know that the pleasures of the mind far outweigh those of the body."

[this is akin to adictions and endorphin release when experiencing pleasure."

p.27 "If we start from the endoxa, Aristotle says, we can see what the good is most commonly held to be. Followin the familiar Pythagorean classification of types of men,n Aristotle says that 'persons of low tastes (alwasys the majority)' hold that the greatest good is pleasure, while the businessman thinks it is wealth and 'the gentleman' holds that it is honour."

p.29 "If one cannone oneself be practically wise... one should imitate those who are" - Aristotle. Eventually this has a good chance of helping one learn how to be prudent... [it] is a matter of developing habits of practical wisdom, and becoming skilled in ethical judgement."

'weakness of will' or akrasia

p.30 "...shallow forms of friendship [that] last only as long as the pleasure or utility they afford... whereas true friendship lasts because it is 'grounded in good'..."

p.31 "We ought not to listen to those who counsel us to think as mere mortal men should think, and to remember mortality. Rather we ought to strive towards attaining something great, and leave nothing unattempted in the effort to live comfortably with the highest thing in us."

p.32 "the intellect, more than anything, is the thing of the man."

"This is the avocation of theb philosopher - though Aristotle concedes that it is not to everyone's taste, nor within everyone's grasp. This means that the very highest kind of life is restricted to a small group of people who have the requires intellectual capacity, and a sufficiency of wealth to give them enough leisure to devote themselves to thinking for its own sake."

"...good fortune plays its part in helping some to live the best kind of life by providing the necessary opportunities..."
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Ch.3 - The Philosphic Ideal

p.36 Thinkers did not ask , 'How is the state to be organised so that its citizens can have the best life possible?' Rather they asked 'What should the individual do to live with as much fortitude and tranquility as he can, in this uncertain and insecure world?' [to find atraxia]

p.37 "People devote themselves to worthless aims, wasting themselves in the futile and shallow endeavour of pursuing them, and fretting themselves when failure ensues. Man's suffering is the result of his passions, his anxiety and ambition, his attraction to vacuous pleasures, and his enslavement to desire for wealth and fame. In such a life people are dependent on others, trapped in obligations and stress, doomed to disappointments, vulnerable to external accidents of fate over which they have no control. The remedy, said Diogenes, is to turn one's back on the whole rat race... autarchy [self-government and self-sufficiency], apathy [indifference to what the world outside oneself can do to one] and freedom.. from dependence on other people and on material possessions. Animals provide a model of such a life."

p.38 Diogenes went about clad in a dirty cloak... he did not wash, and he let his hair and beard grow matted and long. He performed all his natural functions, including masturbation when he felt the need, in public."

p.40 Epicurus wrote: "Let no one when young delay to study philosophy, nor when he is old grow weary of the task; for nobody can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul."

"...the idea of such a deity as a model to emulate; its peacefulness, detachment and unending pleasure..."

p.42 According to Epicurus "the absence of physical pain [is] aponia, and the absence of mental pain [is] atracia which as noted means peace of mind. The latter is attained by understanding the nature of the universe, thereby seeing that it is not a frightening or threatening place."

p.46 "the Cynics' advocacy of cosmopolitanism, life in accordance with nature, and the supreme value of 'autarchy' (individual self-government), was a major factor in the development od Stoic ethics."

"Just as the soul or mind is the principle of individual life, so 'god' is the soul of the universe; and just as the soul of a man is interested in the man it inhabits and his welfare, so the soul of the universe is benevolent and cares for its well-being. Indeed the sould of an individual man is a part, as spark, of the world soul."

p.48 "desires and appetites are not necessarily bad. According to one view, passions are, in effect rebellions against reason, forcing people to act contrary to what reason dictates. But the Stoics regarded the passions as natural, and said that the way to deal with them properly is to master them by understanding them."

p.51 "Fortune can only snatch away what she has given... but she does not give virtue, and therefore she cannot take it away. Virtue is free, inviolable, unmoved, unshaken..."

p.52 the key item of knowledge [is] that [it] liberates us from the false beliefs and hopes that make us unhappy slaves of fortune; for once we grasp it, and live and think accordingly, we are free and possess eudaimonia."

p.53 "People are essentially social creatures - using 'essentia' here in its primary philosophical sense to mean that they cannot on pain of impossibility be otherwise - and this means that the attainment of good by an individual cannot take place other than in a social setting... The community's interests neither outweigh nor regate individual interests..."

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Ch.4 - The Ordinances of God

p.56 It is important to understand that the of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca, their notion of deity is profoundly different from any figures in the major historical forms of religion which make expressly moral demands of their adherents... The Stoic conception of deity is of a universal rational principle that governs the functioning of the cosmos in accordance with inherent laws. The called it the logos, reason, the ether, the eternal fire, the unifying priciple, and other such things."

p.57 As regards the cults, educated Romans shared the view of Polybius that indulging popular religions was a way of managing the mass of the population, who were kept in some sort of order by their superstitious beliefs and the rituals and ceremonies that came with them. 'This would not be necessary if it were possible to have a state peopled by the wise only,' Polybius remarked; 'but as every multitude is fickle, appetitive, unreasoning, passionate, and given to violent anger, it must be held in check by the thought of invisible terrors and a lot of pageantry.'

p.67 Jesus said that you lose your soul by trying to gain the world. But your soul is the crucial thing.

The soul aspires to reach that [higher] realm, but the other, the physical appetites, keeps trying to plunge back to earth.

The demotion of the body and promotion of the mind or soul, as exemplified in Plato's views about non-physical love being the highest form of that sentiment, was adopted by the CHurch for its teachings on sexuality... deformed or otherwise blighted children are the result of women feeling sensual pleasure when conceiving...

p.72 The Church typically tries to recruit among the lonely, desperate,, uncertain, directionless, timid, the anxious.

p.73 Persecution is a good way to ensure the survival of what is persecuted.

p.74 ...resting on the natural ignorance, stupidity, superstitiousness and gullibility of manking.

Some people thing that religion is the result of the way the brain works.

p.75 The majority of people may be passive consumers or spectators of culture, but significant minorities have a crucial influence on cultural development and content - chief among such people are religious leaders, demagogues, writers, and thinkers - and the ordinarily vague grasp of the majority is a set of diluted versions of what they think and say.

p.79 We are overapt to interpret symmetries and conincidences as evidence of purpose - for obviously advantageous evolutionary reasons. [What?]

p.80 The implication of malice or evil on the designer's part.

p.81 The claims that Neanderthals lived for up to three hundred years, and are therefore suitable candidates for Methuselah and the patriarchs.

"A book of fifty PhDs is in the end not amusing because it makes one dispair. If people can still base their lives on belif in ancient superstitions... then the world has an uphill task in trying to reach sanity and peace."

p.82 Fundamentalits rejecting the discoveries of science...

p.83 The continued existence of religions is largely the product of religious education in childhood - itself a scandal, since it amounts to brainwashing and abuse, for small children are not in a position to evaluate what they are taught as fact by their elders. (The vast majority of religious educational institutions are for very young children.)

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Ch.5 - The Second Enlightenment

p.86 "No discussion of the Renaissance begins without much foot-shuffling by scholars about what it was, when it happened, or even whether there was truly a thing. The brightest minds of the period itself were in no doubt; the man who inaugurated, if not the Renaissance itself, then at least the humanism distinctive of it, Francesco Petrarch, himself coined the term 'Middle Ages'...

p.91 [A] point was to contest the standard medieval view (the religious view) that man's life is one of durance vile in a vale of tears, a brief and agonising exile in the flesh before - if the temptations of the devil and his own weakness do not defeat him - a man is able to escape into bliss"

p.91 [In the] Christian tradition in which the body was to be feared for its proneness to rebel against the soul's interest, needing to be mortified to be kept under control."

Henry Agrippa had said that Noah's Ark had been designed to conform to human proportions.

p.98 Erasmus believed that the Church required cleansing and renewing. He especially disliked its corrupt practices, the laxity of its morals, and its cruel pursuit and punishment of 'heretics'... He also disliked what he called the 'pharisaism' of certain of the pious, especially some of the religios orders, in their rigid adherence to outward forms of ritual, dress, fasting and vigils."

p.99 "a suspicion of learning as a thing harmful to prospects of salvation... its supporters could quote St Paul to great effect on the folly of the wise."

Erasmus defended the value of Pagan literature against attacks by theological conervatives. "Whatever is pious and conduces to good manners ought not to be called profane." he wrote in his tract 'Against the Barbarians'. "Perhaps the spirit of Christ diffuses itself farther than we imagine, and that there are more saints we should enrol in our calendar."

p.100 He wished to liberalise the Church, to purify its doctrines, and to educate a class of men able to administer the Church humanely, and to diffuse into society at large the generous and mature spirit of an attitue to life enriched by all that the ancient world had to teach."

His satires on the follies and corruptions of the Church were biting, and intended to prompt internal reform... but [ultimately] at the time of his death and in the decades folowing it, both his writing and his influence were effectively disowned by Catholics."

Hi had a beief in man's rationality and his abiity to take moral responsibility for himself.

"Each man is his own priest before god. He does not need priests, saints or rituals to mediate his relationship with god" according to the author. He is capable of reading the scriptures for himself, and finding his own route to salvation. Such views strike at the very root of the Church of Rome, of course, which would lose its client-base entirely if everyone were to accept such tenets.

p.101 "A principal feature of the the Counter-Reformation is censorship. The Index of Forbidden Books officially came into existence in this troubled period (it had unofficially existed ever since literacy began to increase in the twelfth century)... The Index placed obstacles in the way of historical and philosophical research; and most of all, it entrenched the theology of the universities, whose Scholastic masters insisted that, as a highly complicated sicence on which the safety of human souls depended, theology should only be taught by carefully trained professionals, and only from carefully vetted texts."

p.102 A Congregation for the Index was founded in Rome to supervise matters, reading everything in order to decide whether it should be banned or not, and issuing authority for publications of acceptable works. By the time the Index was officially abandoned in 1966 it was very long indeed, including on it, among many others, works by Abelard, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Calvin, Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, La Fontaine, Descates, Pascal, Milton, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hime, Oliver Goldsmith, Condillac, d'Holbach, d'Alembert, Defoe, Swift, Montesquieu, Swindenborg, Sterne, Mme de Stael, Helveticus, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, Kant, Heine, J. S. Mill, Alexandre Dumas, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Balzac, tendhal, Bergson, Andre Gide, Zola, Maeterlinch, Pierre Larousse, Anatole France, and Jean-Paul Satre - in short, most of Western culture in the last thousand years."

Luther said, because of the disobedience in Eden, man's only hope is redemption through Christ; human nature is corrupt, infected with original sin; there is nothing man can do on his own account to save himself. Likewise Calvin held that unless men see how wrong is their overweening sense of self-importance, recognising instead their fallible, impotent and degenerate state, they will not be saved.

p.103 ...it had been the reflex Christian view that nothing attainable on earth could compare with what was truly the supreme good for man, namely, gaining access to heaven after death in order to enjoy the eternal vision of god."

An alternative way of putting this is to say that ethics is the inquiry into the meaning of life, for by identifying the greatest good it thereby uncovers the purpose of living."

"...the ever-present fear being that pagan thought might seduce the believer away from the true path. 'No one comes to the Father but by me,' Jesus said."

p.104 ...pagan authors were an irrelevance because they had not taken the Fall into account. Not only did they not know that man is born in sin, and carries its setain throughout life, but they also did not know that the Fall had corrupted man's reason, so the instrument they used in devising their ethical views is plawed. Pagan ethics in its entirety, therefore, is on the argument useless."

p.107 Diotima described an ascent through several increasingly rarefied stages of love, rom passion for an individual beautiful body to love of beauty whereever manifested in the physical world; thence to love of the beauty of souls, as something higher than physical beauty; and then, by way of love of the eternal and perfect Form of Beauty itself, from which all beutiful things get their nature."

Christians believed that god created all things, whereas Plato believed that the sublunary realm, including therefore the human bodies in it, was created by demons (not things of evil in his ontology, as they were for Christians, but a species of minor diety or spirit).

p.110 The Renaissance had opened a Pandora's box (from the Churches' point of view) of inquiry and scepticism, and had revived confidence in man's own powers, especially the powers of his intellect. The result was added impetus to scince, and a growing movement towards libery, both in the political sense and in the sense of a concomitant liberty of thought."

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Ch.6 - The Third Enlightenment

p.112 Galileo put under house arrest.

p.114 witch hunts

p.115 "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another." Kant: the intellect needs liberty and freedom.

[Keeping people immature]

Progress of the mind. Religion is a barrier.

p.116 Voltaire claimed to be a deist, that is, one who does not believe in any revealed religion such as Christianity or Islam, but nevertheless believes that there is a supreme being who created the universe. Most deists take it that this being has no personal interest in the affairs of mankind, and does not intervene in what happens in the world, leaving it to the the operation of natural laws alone.

Teaching people to fear invisible despots (gods), teaches people to fear earthly ones, and consequently prevents them from seeking independence and choosing the direction and character of their lives for themselves... This is a project to be undertaken by each individual, of relying on reason and applying the lessons of science as chief guindes to building better lives and societies.

p.117 Autonomy and self-government, independent thought, and possession of the right and the responsibility to make choices about one's own life, not least moral choices.

Autonomy of thought and moral responsibility leading to 'englightenment'.

The aim of enlightenment is to think for oneself and choose for oneself - this autonomy conceived as essential to the life worth living - then it is essential that one should be equipped to think fruitfully and to choose wisely. That requires information; and not just information, but information organised into knowledge; and not just knowledge but knowledge interpreted into understanding.

Diderot: so that our children and those that come after us will become more educated and at the same time become more virtuous and happier.

p.119 The epirical method and the use of reason are keys to knowledge; these are inconsistent with appeals to the authority of scriptures or revelation, and actually controvert them.

p.120 M. Bayle concludes that religion is not as useful in repressing vice as people claim and that atheism does not cause the evil that people assume.

"The morals of [native africans and americans] far surpass most of the idolaters who surround them.

p.122 blushing at nature's pleasures. The pleasure that pulled you out of nothingness.

p.124 Locke argued that the source of authority in society is not tradition or a monarch ruling by divine right, but the people, whose consent is required for all things affecting the common weal, and who have right, some of them inalienable in that no form of government is entitled to abrogate them.

p.126 The main opponent is religion, which claims that revelation, in any form from mystical experience to dictation of scriptures by a deity, conveys from outside the world of ordinary experience truths undiscoverable by human inquiry within it... "all views are valid".

p.127 Scientism - iteself taking the form of a salvation myth, in which science will answer all questions and solve all problems - simply came to replace religion and to exert as malign an influence.

Sceintific rationality... believing its own dreams of progress, intoxicated by the success of rational method, triumphant in increasing mastery over nature, the humanistic dream of the philosophies eventually turned into a nightmare, and the shibbolthes it attempted to destroy all reappeared in new disguises - chief among them, Fascism.

p.128 the repressive nature of the culture industry. Mass culture is another log=term outcome of the Enlightenment's instrumental rationalism, and some rejected it accordingly.

p.129 Hume said that the question that must be asked is whether 'we attain the knowledge of [moral principles] by a chian of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and inner finer sense; whether, like all sound judgement of truth and falsehood they should be the same to every rational intelligent being, or whether... they be founded entirely on the fabric of the human species'.

p.132 Hume was thinking of the fellowship and the pleasures of society as counting among the chief goods of mankind, and saw it as a virtue if an individual possessed - and perhaps cultivated - the required characteristics. One might not be able to will oneself into being handsome... but one can endeavour to be, and succeed in being presentable and clean. [i.e. the best you can be]

He said of the Christian virtues (celibacy, fasting... et al) that they stupefy the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper.

p.134 Free-willed beings are the most valuable things in the world; they are 'ends in themselves' which should never be treated instrumentally as means to other ends.

p.135 Human beings are, figuratively speaking, halfway between the animals and the angels, in the sense that they have both reason and the full complement of animal appetities and instincts...

p.136 Kant insists that no one has a moral entitlement to use others as means to their own ends... Individual worth is not a matter of wealth or birth, luck or fortune, but rather is inherent in the possession of free will and reason.

The enemies of progress are those who impose censorship or conformity, whether of a political or religious kind. Such abuses of power, Kant wrote in What is Enlightenment? 'trample on the holy rights of mankind'.

p.138 Moreover, that we are fully accontable as a reslt of having free will, for everything we have done in life, then we can think of ourselves as being liable for reward or punishment in a posthumous dispensation... Thus, said Kant, the highest good is practically possible only on the supposition of the immortality of the soul.

p.139 The autonomy of the will means that the will obeys laws it imposes on itself and not those prescribed by an outside source such as a deity or soverign...

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Ch. 7 - The Crisis of Outlooks

p.141 Biologists reintegrated mankind into the animal creation...

p.142 The work of Charles Darwin... the consequences of it are still, and with increasing significance, infusing themselves into the life of mankind through biological sciences, most notably in the form of genetic medicine.

When human beings see themselves as an evolving part of a long and tortuous natural history... behaving just like [animals] in conflicts over resources, territory and dominance, they no longer have grounds for quite the same opinion of themselves.

p.142-3 "From the point of view of ruling hierarchies, the supposed threat to religion is even worse, because nothing has ever been so effective in controlling people than the belief that an invisible policeman is watching them everywhere and always.

p.143 Alfred Russel Wallace... encouraged Darwin into publishing his own views, which he had been concealing for fear of the public outcry that he rightly expected they would provoke.

Darwin was ill for much of his like - a tropical illness acquired on the voyage, or anxiety? - and shunned both publicity and conflict.

p.144 the mechanism by which evolution occurs, namely, 'natural selection', a process involving the success of organisms whose random mutations prove best-adapted to their environments so that they have a a better chance than rivals of surviving and procreating, thereby passing on their adaptations. [Overly simplisting etc?]

Selection means an increase in frequency of individuals with the successful adaptation, diffusing it through the population until it becomes the average characteristic of the species. [like a virus or DNA-manipulating vaccine?]

p.146 [Wilberforce] was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor [is this correct though?]; but he would be ashamed to be connected wiht a man whoused great gifts to obscure the truth.

p.149 Strauss offered his conclusion about how the Bible is to be interpreted, namely as a myth. For example the scriptural stories of miracles, designed to establish that Jesus was indeed endowed with divine authority, are not to be thought of as deliberate fictions or exaggerations of natural events, but as imaginative symbols, expressing the feelings and hopes of the people who recounted them from tradition, usually some length of time after the miracles had supposedly occurred. Myths come naturally as a way of expressing religious sentiment, especially for people living in historical periods when superstitious attitudes and scientific ignorance are jointly prevalent, working together to make it seem obvious that almost everything that happens in the world is the work of gods.

p.151 To Feuerbach is owed the thesis that religion makes man 'alienate' himself from himself, by worshipping a ghost he has himself created.

p.152 Jeremy Bentham bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with his giant appetite to reform the world, his secular rationalism, and his amazing combination of impossible idealism and practical realism.

He thought that the catechism of the CHurch of England taught children insincerity by making them promise what they did not understand, particularly as regards unintelligible things such as 'the devil and all his works'... and the fables of Christ's birth and death.

p.153 John Stuart Mill's son was reading Greek and Latin at an age before other children go to school - as almost to induce a complete mental breakdown by the time he reached early adulthood.

p.156 [he said] that some people are better able to appreciate the higher pleasures - and, symmetrically, more likely to suffer because of their sensitivity - than others...

p.157 ...some people have higher faculties than others, which make them better judges of the value of different pleasures, and secondly, that some pleasures have objectively more or less value than others.

p.158 in On Liberty... If the best life is the happy life, and happiness is pleasure, and the best pleasures are those that are appreciated by man's higher faculties, and if anyone can develop the higher faculties, then it is essential to the best life that everyone should be at liberty to develop those faculties, and to seek the pleasures that will reward their exercise.

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

p.160 Nietzsche wrote 'Without music life would be a mistake.'

Mill and Nietzche shared a belief in the idea of exceptional individuals. Nietzsche's 'Superman' ideal is a familiar feature of his thought, even in caricature.

He described himself as an 'immoralist'. Traditional morality, he argued, 'negates life'. His principal reason is that it requires people to be conformists and mediocrities, to live a life of avoidance - avoidance of suffering, and of risk - and to value safety, submission, and the small reqards given to compliant members of the aggregate. It is 'herd morality'...

p.161 herd morality, said Nietzche, when a 'slave revolt' occurred, prmpted by resentment on the part of the weak, who in self-defence inverted the qualities associated with power into evils, and elevated their own experiences of dispossession, impotence, suffering and meekness into virtues.

He announces that 'God is dead', and that humankind has now to strive towards its proper goal, which is to become a higher type of being, the Ubermensch; and that it has to do tgus vt 'overcoming' itself, by asserting 'the will to mastery' or 'will to power', which is the fundamental life-affirming drive...

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Ch.8 - The Rediscovery of Ethics

p.163 "...we think with special shame of the twentieth century, which was bloody and brutal beyond imagination..."

p.165 Zylon B?

p.166 "It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for manking to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones." [and from the individual]

"revolutionist attempts to persuade us that the Holocaust did not happen, or was 'not as bad as is claimed', are futile@ the mountain of facts is as huge as the event it records."

p.167 how the UN Declaration of Human Rights came as an immediate response to the Holocaust..."

p.168 Eichmann fled rather than putting a stop to the atrocities.

The degradation of life in the camps turned people into animals... "war utterly abolishes notions of humanity... there is no crime a man will not commit to save himself."

p.169 ...denuded them of their names and identities.

Something we wish and need to believe: that moral heroism is no fiction, and that humans can clind to their humanity in the very worst of times, and survive. [movies show this time and again]

p.170 A distinctive feature of the second half of the twentieth century is the proliferation of what, in the jargon of these things, are called 'discources' of special ethical concern - medical... business... environmental... and discussions about animal rights not least among them.

...cases of divided loyalties - as when public-health considerations arise...

The ethical nightmares of contemporary technologised medicine were first prompted by the introduction of life-support system and kidney-dialysis machines.

p.171 the result of early studies showed that patients chosen for treatment tended to resemble the committee members themselves in respect of social and educational profile.

In paediatrics, neurology and psychiatry, practitioners find themselves dealing with patients who are not competent to participate in decisions about their own treatment.

p.172 It is 'fortunate' that many of those who choose to work in medicine are, by inclination, among the best equipped to think [the issues of ethics] through with intelligence, generosity and compassion.

p.173 The concept of autonomy is an idealisation, as Kant himself well knew.

Few patients, however intelligent and informed otherwise, can really be held to know enough about their condition and its available treatments to be full partners in decisions about what should best be done.

p.174 If a patient is carrying a serious communicable disease, the interest of third parties are at stake and a patient can justifiably be required to accept treatment for the disease, or at least be prevented from speading it.

"if one granted that a given body such as the state were licensed to decide what is in other's interests, there would be no obvious limit to the authority it could exercise over them. As Isiah Berlin put it, the state could "bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their 'real' selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man.... must be identical with his freedom.... It takes no effort to see what is wrong with such a view - a view that held sway in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, to take just two recent examples.

p.175 the patient... might seem not to grasp the seriousness of his condition and the availabilit of a given treatment...

Consider a young person who smokes because he wishes to appear sophisticated, or to conform with the behaviour of his peers: on this view, an appropriate authority would be justified in preventing him, on the grounds that he will, in time, himself come to a stable view that smoking is harmful. He is currently distracted and misinformed about his real interests, and is therefore not able to protect them...

p.176 "...considerations about the therapeutic value of the practitioner's assumption of authority, and the confidence this can generate in some patients. Before the advent of technologised and biochemicalised medicine, this and regimen were the physician's principal tools...

p.177 A debate about the right to die would have seemed odd to people in Imperial Rome. Suicide and assisted suicide were commonplaces, and often enough grateful ones...

The idea that life is sacred because 'god-given' introduces a proscription on the taking of life that has been construed in blanket terms when viewed from the perspective of practices such as abortion, infanticide and euthansia... but we also have war. [if were don't believe in God any more, why do we hold 'life' to be so important?]

According to orthodox interpretations in Jewish ethics, the preservation of life is such an important duty that it even justifies non-observance of the Sabbath and the avoidance of non-kosher food... both life and our bodies have been given by a deity for a purpose that is not open to the individual to question or obstruct.

p.179 "...the right to life, the right to be protected from inhumane treatment, the rights to privacy, and the right to freedom of thought and belief..

p.181 The passing of the Suicide Act in 1961...

p.182 ...a sufferer cannot end his own life.... because although it is lawful to take one's own life, it is unlawful for anyone to help.

p.183 The doctor's primary aim is to alleviate suffering.

p.184 "In the United States the clause in the Hippocratic oath states 'To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug, or give advice which may cause my patient's death...' The principal meaning of this is that the practitioner vows not to bow to (say) family, political, or other kinds of third-party pressure to end the life of someone who does not with to die.

p.186 "The strongest drive is sexual, seconded by two others: aggression, and the 'death wish'."

Forms of behaviour regarded as higher or more civilised - those associated with the superego - are not natural in the sense of being innate, but are either acquired or imposed."

p.188 "...it helf that the unconscious is the source of psychic energy, which can be inhibited, sublimated or transferred from one application to another, and that within it can coexist 'dissociated' (split-off) subpersonalities, which manifest themselves in dreams or trances.

Freud early thought that his patients had indeed been sexually abused as children; later he decided that these were fantasies, expressing 'infantile wishes' as described in the Oedipus theory.

p.194 "Religious accounts of fallen man, of humanity as midway between beast and angel, of imperishable souls trapped in disgusting matter and therefore sinful from birth, had lost their grip with many, while at the same time Darwinian views offered no account of why evolution had made man as he is.

p.202 "Humility is a virtue in Christianity but it figures neither in Aristotle's nor Nietzsche's views. Practical wisdom is chief among the Aristotlian virtues but appears nowhere in religious ethics, where  intelligence and knowledge are on the whole regarded as negatives, since they interfere with the simplicity that makes submission (unquestioningness) to a deity (a priesthood) more complete.

...the great service of attentive and thoughtful reading: it educates and extends the moral imagination, affording insights into - and therefore the chance to be more tolerant of - othe rlives, other ways, other choices, most of which one will probably never directly experience oneself. And tolerance is a virtue which no list of virtues could well be without, and without which no human existence could be complete or good.

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Ch.9 - Laying the Ghosts

p.203 "...a vacuous species of happiness that could be produced by a pill, or by acceptance of a system of falsehoods and illusions, or by any other means of limitation and ignorance.

In Tzvetan Todorov's book The Imperfect Garden he allegorises,,, as a devil's pact after the fashion of Faust. In this the devil offers Modern Man free will, which means the power to choose how to live; but he hides from Man the triple cost of his gift, which is that it will separate him from god, from his fellow man, and finally from himself. God will vanish becuase there will no longer be reason to believe that there exists a being superior to man, and therefore man will have no more ideals or valies - will be a materialist.

p.205 The notion of supernatural agencies evaporates when mankind attains his majority and assumes moral and intellectual responsibility for himself...

p.206 ...for freedom of speech and belief are essential values, and the very idea of democratic society is premised on the idea of liberty (it should be, but alas it is not, needless to say: responsibility exercised liberty, something which is not always guaranteed by the enthusiasms and dogmatic certitudes of faith).

p.207 Jehovah's Witnesses and the Taliban... literally accept the world view of the writings they regard as sacred, and insist on the morality and way of life prescribed by them.

p.208 It is only where religion is on the back foot, reduced to a minority practice, with an insecure tenure in society, that it presents itself as essentially peaceful and charitable.

p.209 ...religions survive chiefly because they proselytise the very young, before they acquire the intellectual capacity to resist or question what they are being told. (In England over eighty per cent of Church of England schools are primary schools for this reason.) Committed parents and their churches would no doubt continue to propagandise the young, but the absence of public reinforcement, appearing to take the form of official endoresement, would be something of a counterweight.

But less committed people can feel the same, believing - or rather vaguely - that some conception of 'spiritual' values, or at least expressly non-materialistic ones, is required for human flourishing.

p.210 The truth is... more people are happier now than has ever been the case. [do you mean a greater percentage? - are not more people on antidepressants than there have ever been?]

p.211 People are now, accordingly and as a rule, neither unhappy nor empty; to have the satisfaction of a good grumble they are obliged to complain about the weather or our national sports teams - barrel-scrapings by comparison to the harsh realities of life in the Good Old Days mourned by nostalgists... life has become lifestyle and the shopping-mall ethos applies as much in philosophies as in footwear.

p.213 [The] picture is not altogether right. It misses one significant and intriguing twist, which is that in the first three decades of the twentieth century a rapproachment between sceince and religion was mooted by some on both sides, and nearly achieved, but was in the end repudiated not by scientists but by conservative churchmen.

p.215 "...the more scientific treatment there is, and with it general knowledge about the aims, successes and limitations of science, the better.

p.216 "...science since its crucial moment in the seventeenth century has expanded, progressed, risen like a strong upward line on a graph, each phase building on the last and then superseding it, yielding new insights and greater knowledge. The efficacy of science and its cumulative character go together; we seem constantly to be learning more about the world - and knowledge is power.

The three ugly sisters Ignorance, Superstition and Greed have always been enemies of science...

p.217 [Science's defenders] also play down such problems as the risk of radioactive fallout from disasters at nuclear power stations, and environmental damage caused by industry.

Many practices of religion and government throughout the ages have depended pivotally on an understanding of how to manipulate human beings, by identifying and inflaming their baser instincts, chiefly those of greed and fear: greed for wealth, position and honours; fear of death, hell and punishment.

p.218 From classical antiquity to modern philosophy the fundamental idea has been that people possess reason, and that by using it they can choose lives worth living for themselves and respectful of their fellows.

p.219 ...it follows that the chief motivation for religious ethics is the need felt by potentates of many kinds to exert control over individuals, to limit their freedom, to make them conform, obey, submit, follow where led, accept what is meted out to them, and resign themselves to their lot.

END

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