What are we to think of the shortsightedness of the great mass of people who are content to do nothing about it, and even worse, the greed or venality of the rich and powerful who deliberately bar the way to human survival?

Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself.

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.

We can never prove that we are free or integrate our freedom in any way into our objective conception of the causal order of nature.

I think it is clear that what we ought to do has to be independent of our decisions about what to do, and independent of any procedures we might use in making such decisions.

It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones, but I think it is already clear that John Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century.

Karl Marx left it to others to find the way beyond capitalism to a higher form of society. He saw his role as giving them as accurate a theory as he could of how capitalism works, which would also show them the reasons why it needs to be abolished and replaced by a freer and more human form of society.