Philosophers, in my view, are not qualified to lay down authoritative standards of political action. Whenever they have tried their hand at this, they have either described useless utopias or given dangerous instructions. It might be more attractive to think of them as playing a critical role. But political critique is productive only if it is tempered by common sense and practical experience. Philosophical critics of politics, on the other hand, proceed all too often from supposedly absolute truths, and what they say then proves generally unhelpful and sometimes even destructive. Insofar as philosophy has any task to perform in politics, it is to map out new possibilities. By confronting actual political conditions with alternatives, it can help to undermine the belief that these conditions are inevitable. If the German philosophers of the 1930s had engaged in such reflection, they would not have surrendered so readily to the false certainties of Nazism.

-Hans Sluga

“…if in the following excerpt the word “ethics” is substituted for “politics,” we are left with a sense of shock that may be worth carrying over into bioethics, not because it describes what exists, but because it cautions against a certain danger while appealing to an impressive strength of what philosophy can do…”

-Arthur Kleinman