We totally misunderstand both his aims and his contribution if we try to read into Marx some anticipation of either the modest successes or the disastrous failures of those who later thought they were acting in his name.

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.

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.

Fichte takes an I or free will to be not a thing or being but an act which is not undetermined but self-determined, in accordance with reasons or norms rationally self-given.

Kant thinks of judgment as a special faculty or talent of the mind, not reducible to discursive reasoning but cultivated through experience and practice.

In general, those who defend capitalism are basically out of touch with reality.

The species of anti-Enlightenment religion we find among evangelical protestants is far more impoverished, anti-intellectual and downright wretched.