I wish that our culture could retain the symbolism and emotional power of traditional religion while combining it with reason and science and using the combination to enhance our humanity rather than impoverishing it by choosing the one side or the other.

The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I think just about any moral theory, worked out intelligently, and applied with good judgment, would get just about the same results as any other.

Our decisions need not be seen as resting on procedures that are merely instrumental in making judgments that are reliably truth-tracking. The procedures might be more directly related than that to truths about what is right or good, or about what we ought to do, or to principles that tell us what is true about these matters. And I have no metaphysical theory about the truth-conditions of such truths, except to say that as objective truths, they must be independent of the attitudes, decisions or actions that they are supposed to justify or for which they are to offer reasons.

Consequentialist theories begin with a very simple and undoubtedly valid point: Every action aims at a future end, and is seen as a means to it.

We cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.

There is a lot in Adam Smith that reflects the insights of Rousseau and anticipates those of Marx.

Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it; the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.