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p.2 Throughout, the book is concerned to support an accommodation between the real and the ideal by maintaining the usefulness of ideals and idealizations as instruments for charting our way amid the difficult realities of this world.
p.3 Ideals are important both because of their critical guiding role at the level of personal decision making and because of their utility in rendering the behavior of rational agents amenable to exploratory understanding.
Many virtues and aspirations are best regarded in the light of ideals... Whether our interest is in understanding or in guiding human behavior, there is work that can be accomplished properly only by an ethic of ideals.
p.3 A central theme of these deliberations is that ideals can serve as useful instruments for practice and that the valuation of ideals lies in their utility - in their capacity to facilitate the realization of the paradoxical ends to which our values bind us.
p.20-21 the adoption of a goal will have two sorts of costs and benefits: the immediate ones associated with its pursuit as such, and the ultimate ones associated with the eventual outcome. The former, pursuit-connected (immediate) costs and benefits are effectively certain; the latter, outcome-connected (ultimate) costs and benefits are, in general, contingent through their dependence on how matters finally eventuate.
p.22 The pursuit of goals is a course of action.
[JLJ - Yes it is, but just because it is a 'course of action' does not make it strategic in nature, and it does not imply that the action itself is wise. The pursuit of a certain goal at a certain moment does not imply that it is worth pursuing at the next.]
p.24 a cogent rationale for adopting and pursuing an unattainable goal can be developed along... the following two lines:
- As a component element of a holistically unified, wider goal structure, which also incorporates other appropriate desiderata that indeed are achievable...
- As a way to maximize actual achievement in circumstances where the adoption of other cognate goals that are less ambitious and more "realistic" would actually be less productive.
[JLJ - This agrees with my thinking that it is simply a trick or way to 'go on' that 'works,' but more so: as a way to go on it was one of many possible ways, that all were considered, debated, considered from all angles, and was deemed the 'winner' in a cognitive competition of plans. We decide as we do, in part, because the future 'me,' looking back from the distant future, would agree in part with our present decision and concur.]
p.27 The present [chapter] ...Its object is to argue that an obligation is not necessarily abrogated by the impossibility of its accomplishment.
p.38 Moral dilemmas are misfortunes: they admit of no morally perfect solution, only resolutions that are (at best) morally acceptable as lesser evils.
p.43 what you must do has to be something that you can do.
p.46-47 ought ought to imply can... In the ideal (Kantianly noumenal) realm, then, ought indeed does imply can.
p.50 The most that moral rules can effectively succeed in doing is to specify the factors we should take into account in our moral deliberations.
p.52 Rules can only specify the generalities of action. But particular acts must be performed in concrete circumstances whose ramifications can never be encompassed in toto by any set of rules... Accordingly, all that a family of moral rules can do is to provide general guidelines. Rule morality in this view can indeed orient and guide but cannot determine and specify action. The rules cannot give us detailed instructions for what to do under endlessly complex and varying conditions and circumstances.
p.66 Where there is no quantitative measure, the idea of maximizing based on the comparison of more or less has no application.
p.74 The intelligent pursuit of one's ends is not simply a question of efficiency.
p.76 to optimize - to produce the best overall result - is not necessarily a matter of maximizing anything... There just is no identifiable factor or complex of factors such that "better" can be identified with "more of that." ...Practical rationality is thus no more a matter of maximization than is cognitive rationality. In matters of agency we can "measure the value" of alternatives no more than in matters of belief we can "measure the weight of evidence." In each case, preferability is a matter of standards rather than yardsticks - of analysis rather than measurement. We are well advised to resist replacing deliberation by calculation in an ill-fated indulgence of the "yearning for convenience."
p.77 In a rational choice among (mutually exclusive) alternatives, we begin by determining for each the particular mixture of costs and benefits involved. Comparing these mixtures with one another, we use "judgment" to (try to) find one that is preferable. overall, to all the rest - a process that may well involve procedures over and above calculation.
[JLJ - Or we can come up with a scheme that involves diagnostic tests as a preliminary first step. Consumer Reports, for example, rates cars based on a series of performance tests. Such performance tests can be combined in some sort of way that weights each test to come up with an overall satisfaction score. But in a complex strategic game we might resort to a trial by ordeal, where we construct diagnostic tests of coercion capacity by trial-and-error testing of "maybe" moves that catch or deserve or sustain our attention, based on some experience-constructed ideal.]
p.79 No doubt, rationality is a matter of opting for the best available alternative. But there is simply no way of transmuting this "best" into "the most of something."
p.79 Not everything quantitative is a measure.
p.83 The useful work of an ideal is to serve as a goad to effort by preventing us from resting complacently satisfied with the unhappy compromises demanded by the harsh realities of a difficult world.
Ideals originate in the use of imagination to contemplate value possibilities that transcend the restrictive confines of the real.
p.113 Ideals serve as guideposts to orient our deliberations about the appropriateness of actions - they both guide and energize our practical endeavors.
p.119 Ideals... are "navigational aids" as it were - thought constructions that we superimpose on the messy realities of this world to help us find our way about. The utility of an ideal lies in its capacity to guide evaluation and to direct action in productive ways. Ideals' crucial role is as a tool for intelligent planning of the conduct of life.
p.125 Ideals can be pursued only within the limits of the possible in a complex and no doubt imperfect world... Commitment to an ideal is inappropriate if it occasions the pursuit of values to be unbalanced.
p.127 The fact that our ideals and values limit one another in actual operation has important consequences. It means that while ideals can - nay should - be cultivated, they never deserve total dedication and absolute priority, because this would mean an unacceptable sacrifice of other ideals. Their pursuit must be conditioned by recognizing the existence of a point of no advantage, where going further would produce unacceptable sacrifices elsewhere, and thus prove counterproductive in the larger scheme of things.
p.127 In the pursuit of ideals, unrealism is thus the constant danger... unrealism is implicit in the pejorative connotation that an "idealistic" person is also naive in having an exaggerated and unrealistic view of the extent to which an ideal can actually be brought to realization without producing untoward "side effects." ...Ideals are crucially important, but without an adequate realization of the realities and complexities of life, they are of little avail. By themselves, ideals are very incomplete guides to action.
p.128 One must have both the "sensitive judgment" and the "practical know-how" needed to effect an appropriate working compromise among one's ideals. Ideals serve to point the way. But this does not resolve the practical choices that confront us in concrete situations.
p.133 To be sure, an ideal is not a goal we can expect to attain. But it serves to set a direction in which we can strive.
p.137 an ideal... its feasibility or infeasibility is simply beside the point, because what counts with an ideal is not the question of its attainment but the question of the benefits that accrue from its pursuit.
p.138 To attain the limits of the possibilities inherent in our powers and potentialities, we must aim beyond them.
p.139 ideals... their worth and validity ultimately reside not in their intrinsic desirability... but in their eminent utility - in their capacity to guide and to facilitate the cultivation of the values that they embody.
p.140 ideals are of value... because of the the good effects to be achieved by using them as a compass for orienting our thought and action amid the shoals and narrows of a difficult world, providing guidelines for acting so as to make one's corner of the world a more satisfying habitat for man.
p.142-143 ideals... They are not things as such but thought instrumentalities that orient and direct our praxis in the direction of realizing a greater good... there is nothing false or fictional about ideals as such - only about the idea of their embodiment in concrete reality. Their pursuit is something that can be perfectly real - and eminently productive. (And it must be at this pragmatic level that the legitimation of an ideal must ultimately be sought.)
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