Julio Cabrera Quotes

Projeto de Ética Negativa (1989), p. 28 ‎<small></small>

If freedom, according to traditional morality itself, is a fundamental ethical value, the very basis of ethics, one must be aware that the creation of a child may be the first huge disrespect of the freedom of the human person. The issue of freedom suffers here from the same problem as the issue of pain: it is a matter of ethical value that the traditional affirmative ethics is unable to radicalize.

Killing someone and giving birth to someone are two violent actions through which, magically, man tries to put himself in God’s place. The victim of a homicide is always helpless, but never as helpless as the victim of a birth. There is as much innocent blood spilled in a childbirth as in a homicide. If procreation is a free choice, then life is fundamentally unnecessary pain.

Students are taught to do philosophy only in one way, in a single style and supported in a single tradition, by studying thoughts from only four or five countries on the planet. Latin American problems and authors (...) seem relevant to the future of young students of philosophy, by posing critical questions to them rather than simply inserting them as workers and consumers of philosophy within a supposedly objective system. Instead of deciding for the student in a paternalistic way, we should find a space for information and discussion where all ways of doing philosophy are presented, discussed and eventually excluded, because even to exclude philosophies they must appear.

The place of birth as an organizing center is part of the circumstances of thought, but does not exhaust them. The "from Brazil" is not only a national reference, but an existential-historical circumstance, linked to the particular configuration of the world that we make when we see it from South America and not from Ethiopia or Canada. Names like "Brazil," "Israel," or "Paris," do not allude to nations, but to organizational prospects of the world. While it makes some sense to state that in a globalized world the narrow idea of nation is diluted, it may be fallacious to say that globalization suppresses perspectives and circumstances from which this globalization is to be lived and thought.

It may be accepted that philosophical thoughts are universal in the sense of being of interest to humans from anywhere on the planet (...) However, if we do not want to formulate this universality in metaphysical or transcendental terms, we will have to conceive it as the result of a historical process, with a provenance, a circumstance and a perspective, which does not damage the universality of the thought (...) but situates it. What is denied is the idea that philosophical thoughts can arise directly from human reason, from a vision of nowhere. The universality of thoughts does not exempt them from having an origin (...)

One of the most curious questions that I hear in discussions about philosophy in Brazil is that my approach is "markedly political," as if I were introducing politics into the aseptic and uncontaminated body of "pure philosophy" (... ) I want to say from the outset that the ideas that European philosophy is a universal philosophy, and that thoughts born in Latin America or Africa are national, are end-to-end policies; they are part of a policy that, having been instituted and enforced in a hegemonic way, hides its own ideological traits by presenting itself as if it were merely the absolute and objective truth.

We do not just live in an English-speaking world. We live in an English-writing and English-reading world, an English thinking-world. If we write philosophy in Spanish or Portuguese (for example), our thoughts simply do not come into existence; they remain in a kind of limbo, not even as bad or trivial (this would show some kind of visibility), but as not existent at all.

A questão da filosofia no Brasil no contexto da reflexão sobre civilização e barbárie no pensamento argentino, 2009

The problem is that they come here and talk about their philosophical problems in their language, and we go there and talk about their philosophical problems in their language.

Introdução a uma abordagem negativa da argumentação, 2017, p. 164

Despite Singer's proud affirmative statement that he has finally discovered the definitive solution to the problem of abortion and can finally settle the issue, his "proof" depends on many possible sub-arguments (which he prefers not to "see"). His pro-abortion argument can only be established if we accept some kind of utilitarian ethics according to which the well-being of concrete human beings is above any abstract or metaphysical idea of the "human person" (something that would make them "intrinsically valuable"). It also depends on the idea that what is ethically relevant is that humans do not suffer unnecessary pain, and on the thesis that a human being can be defined by a set of well-defined relevant properties (the famous "indicators of humanity"). It also depends on a very specific definition of the terms "homicide" and "innocent" in the expression "innocent human being", and on the deactivation of the idea of "potentiality", in the sense that someone can be potentially a thing at time t + 1, which would give him rights at t. It is a large number of assumptions without which the "objective" and "definitive" conclusion would not follow. Any debater who does not accept at least one of these assumptions will not accept Singer's "indisputable results". And contrary to what he says, those who do not accept them are not "simply wrong", but they assume other perfectly plausible, sustainable and rational assumptions and Gestalten within the network of arguments. Singer drastically ignores all the questions and obstacles in his line of argument (e.g., the controversy over "indicators of humanity"), and it is only in this way that he can still feed the illusion of having "solved" the problem of abortion.

What we notice, for example, when we get involved in ethical discussions on procreation, abortion or death penalty or in logical debates on analyticity, non-classic logics or lexical connections, is that the opposite positions are perfectly tenable, although they are not the positions that we ourselves prefer to take. We understand that our position about, for example, abortion, comes from a set of previous assumptions, preferences, dislikes, past experiences, education and so on, all elements and circumstances that oriented our choice of categories, concepts and modes of reasoning that certainly should greatly differ from the set of arguments of our interlocutors in a dialogue about the matter. Anything we can present about controversial topics like these would be normally opposed or refused by the other party through all kinds of objections. Opposition is not an anomaly, but the current form in which philosophy develops. Two human beings engaging in a discussion about philosophical questions are going naturally and per force to differ in substance and method in almost any topic at issue. What is the point in trying to impose one's own perspective?

Parents know perfectly well that they are giving a product of doubtful quality only for their own accomplishment and happiness; in admitting that the person may want to return it, they themselves fully realize the dubious value of the gift.

Young children continue to cry a lot for several years; they cry and cry endlessly; they may bother us often, but they are right and we have to be moved by their crying and accept it as a perfectly fair reaction to what has been done to them; some cry until quite advanced ages, until finding other forms of protest and manifestation of their suffering; even as adults, we continue to cry in a variety of ways.