What is central to morality is rational self-constraint (acting from duty), in cease where there is no other incentive to do your duty except that the moral law commands it.

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.

Adam Smith was aware of the way that economic interests could have a distorting and destructive effect both on the market and on politics.

Kant's system of duties constitutes a Doctrine of Virtue because the duties also indicate what kinds of attitudes, dispositions and feelings are morally virtuous or vicious.

When consequentialist theories are developed in terms of an equally shallow psychology of the good - such as a crude form of hedonism - the results can sometimes strike sensible people as revolting and inhuman. People can be reduced to simple repositories of positive or negative sensory states, and their humanity is lost sight of entirely.

Freedom is a permanent problem for us, both unavoidable and insoluble.

In my acquaintance with John Rawls, I found him to be a simple and honest man, who just by chance also happened to be the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century. I would like to think that I could emulate at least his modesty - his refusal to exaggerate his perception of himself and his place in the larger scheme of things - even if my work never compares with his in its importance.