As human beings, we ought to be vulnerable. We shouldn't try to say that we can be self-sufficient or do everything that's necessary for a good life on our own, because we need other people.

Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.

Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don't like going back to ordinary language and first principles.

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.

Today, I think, the state of philosophizing about democracy is very healthy. It bridges political science and philosophy, as it should.

There was a time, before I was in graduate school, when political philosophy pretty much ceased to exist. The positivists thought there were only two things you could do: conceptual analysis or empirical investigation. Any kind of political theory or even ethical theory was nonsense.

People don't just want to feel satisfied. They actually want to act.