#conceptual ethics

In what does [philosophy] consist, if not the endeavor to know how to and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? ...It is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it.

Don't think that our concepts are the only possible or reasonable ones: if you imagine quite different facts from those with which we are continually surrounded , then concepts different from ours will appear natural to you. ...one of the most important methods I use is to imagine a historical development for our ideas different from what actually occurred.

One is tempted to justify rules of grammar by sentences like “But there are really four primary colors.” And if we say that the rules of grammar are arbitrary, that is directed against the possibility of this justification. Yet can’t it after all be said that the grammar of color words characterizes the world as it actually is? …Doesn’t grammar put the primary colors together because there is a kind of similarity between them?…Of which in that case I can say: “Yes, that is the way we look at things” or “We just do want to form this sort of picture.” For if I say “there is a particular similarity among the primary colors” - whence do I derive the idea of this similarity? Just as the idea ‘primary color’ is nothing else but 'blue or red or green or yellow" is not the idea of that similarity too given simply by the four colors?

...at any given instant, the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of the society; inversely, at each of their points of choice the social structures encounter a certain number of possible individuals (and others who are not).

Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real, and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking; thus “truth,” at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call “imaginings.” Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity. Semeiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inwardnesses which did not know enough to “understand” themselves. Morality is mere sign language, mere symptomatology: one must know what it is all about to be able to profit from it.