Since we cannot know too much about the long term effects of our particular lives, and since success and fame are not good measures of the value of what we have done, it should be enough for any of us that as far as we can tell, in some small way we have made humanity's future better rather than worse.

Kant does not think that along with choice of an action we also choose in each case the motive from which we do it. He thinks all is well if I act beneficently, realizing that it is my duty but also having sympathetic feelings for the person I help. But I ought to strive to be the sort of person who would still help even if these feelings were absent. And it is such a case that he presents when the sympathetic friend of humanity finds his sympathetic feelings overclouded by his own sorrows, and still acts beneficently from duty.

One rational standard of action is how well it promotes the end it seeks. Another standard is whether it aims at ends which are good. Both of these, but especially the former, depend on judgments of fact.

Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. Philosophy is more about the latter than the former.

It seems to me self-evident that it is worthwhile to understand the best thoughts of the past, to appropriate them, to criticize them.

Kant does not think that the silly commandment "universalize your maxims" is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides us with some sort of general decision procedure that is supposed to tell us what to do under all circumstances.

In fact people do not know enough about themselves and what is good for them to form a sufficiently definite conception of the general happiness (or whatever the end is) to establish definite rules for its pursuit.