# Quote — Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

> From what can "ought" be derived. The most compelling answer is this: ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature — on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most compelling facts about human nature -n novels, in religious texts, in psychological experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the attempt to unify our world-view so that out ethical principles don't clash irrationally with the way the world is.

- Author: [Daniel Dennett](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett.md)
- Book: [Darwin's Dangerous Idea](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett#Darwin's_Dangerous_Idea_(1995)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea/from-what-can

## More from this book

> If you have ever asked yourself if there are facts about yourself (about your health, your competence, your prospects) you would rather not know, and decided that there were, you should be prepared to consider seriously the suggestion that the best — perhaps the only — way to ensure that such facts are not imposed on people is by prohibiting investigations likely to discover them.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea/if-you-have.md)

> Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it eumemics, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of Social Darwinists, an attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on the bounty of nature. Few today — but there are a few — would brand all genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of eugenics.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea/political-correctness-in-the.md)

> [T]he only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea/t-he-only-meaning.md)