Hilary Putnam Quotes

In logic, there are no morals.

Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

Right and wrong are not the product of census.

You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?" "It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize." "Must be a human thing." "Exactly.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

Moral truth, resting entirely upon the ascertained consequences of actions, supposes a process of observation and reasoning.

There's math, and everything else is debatable!

Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another.

Right is not right; so is not so. If right were really right it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no need for argument. If so were really so, it would differ so clearly from not so that there would be no need for argument.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience and recent scientific findings.

What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.

I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true." He's not saying, "I'm trying to lie to you." But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

You’re not exempt from math if you’re a Republican, and you’re not exempt from math if you’re a Democrat. You’re not exempt from math if you’re a liberal, and you’re not exempt from math if you’re a conservative. You still have to do math.

We talk so much about one's rights... so little about what is actually right.

You know, there's a right and wrong way to do everything.

Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

Virtue is nothing else than right reason

To say murder is wrong is as much a statement of faith as 'I believe that God said murder is wrong' is a statement of faith