Frankenstein: Key Quotes

Frankenstein Quotes (Mary Shelley)

• The quote,"I expected this reception,” showcases the creature's anticipation of societal rejection and highlights the central themes of creation, responsibility, and moral obligations in Frankenstein.
• Victor is morally obligated to provide the creature with the means for a happy existence after bringing him to life.
• The creature displays conditional morality, threatening harm if his demands are unmet.
• Technological advancements can lead to destructive outcomes if not guided by empathy and vision, reflecting Shelley's skepticism of the Enlightenment era.
• Frankenstein conveys that creation entails responsibility and the creature's actions reflect Victor's failure to consider the outcomes of his creation and his lack of responsibility.
• The creature is an autonomous being who controls his own actions, and it is his choice if he causes harm or not.
• The passage shows the dangers of ambitious and unchecked creation, suggesting that Victor is mostly at fault for the creature's threat to society due to his inability to behave morally.
• The creature claims that he was benevolent and good, but misery made him a fiend, highlighting conditional morality.
• Victor's failure to take adequate responsibility resulted in the creature's immorality, suggesting that the creature's monstrosity is not natural but imposed by external conditions.
• Shelley compares Frankenstein to Prometheus to illustrate the dangers of altering conditions without considering the consequences for the created being.
• Morality is shaped by external conditions, even against the natural desire to be morally correct, and those who advance technology are responsible for its negative impacts.
• The creature's choices raise the question of whether morality must always be adhered to or if it's conditional and based on outcomes/happiness.
• Victor has an obligation to the creature because he gave him sentience and created the conditions for his misery
• It would be absurd to expect the monster to be entirely virtuous without any reciprocity.

Utilitarianism Quotes (John Stuart Mill)

• The passage showcases Mill's alteration to Bentham's utilitarianism by highlighting the quality not just quantity of pleasure and justifying the existence of higher pleasures.
• Higher pleasures, such as intellectual and moral ones, provide more utility/happiness than bodily pleasures, supporting the 'competent judge' who ascribes higher value to intellectual/moral pleasures.
• Mill defends utilitarianism as a hedonist doctrine by invoking qualitative distinctions of pleasure and suggesting it may guide moral reasoning towards higher happiness.
• Mill's commitment to truth is centered around emotion, where the assessment of pleasure's superiority is accurately determined by experienced individuals.
• Mill believes that the quality of pleasure matters, and that a competent judge can assess qualitatively superior pleasures, suggesting that emotions are central to politics and morality.
• These higher pleasures are towards man's progressive being and liberty ought to permit it.
• Moral judgments are grounded in experience and commitment, allowing for informed consensus about the highest pleasures, making utilitarianism less hedonistic/mechanical and placing it in emotion and truth.
• There are intellectuals who choose hedonism over intellectual pleasures, this deviates from Mill's claim that those who have experienced both types of pleasure will value the higher ones.
• The category of a 'competent judge' determining correctness seems contrary to Mill's commitment to liberty, weakening utilitarianism's objectivity.
• Mill's ethics go beyond hedonism, with the qualification of pleasures leading towards the progressivity and further moral development of man.
• Empiricism is valuable as it aims at truth, reflecting a tension between radical individualism and human progressivity in the direction of conformity.

On Liberty Quotes (John Stuart Mill)

• The passage states liberty has no application until mankind can be improved by free and equal discussion and that obedience is necessary until then
• Mill restricts ideal liberty to societies capable of using it for human betterment, aligning with his ‘harm principle', to clarify that liberty only becomes central when people can use it for self-improvement through reasoned debate and persuasion.
• Mill's tension lies in protecting individual freedom while recognizing social development as a process
• Tyranny is needed to establish social order so liberty can aim at human progress.
• Mill is racist and exclusionary due to his claim stating that he approves of despotism for certain states that he views as uncivilized.
• This goes against individualism and human flourishing, if he sees himself as an authority to claim that liberty is conditional.
• There is a problematic standard for determining what societies qualify for liberty and when a society is sufficiently rational for liberty to only be restricted for preventing harm.
• Mill's commitment to freedom of consciousness and expression fosters truth, collective reason and individual development
• Dissenting opinions should be heard because they may be true, reinforce the correct view, contain truth components, and reassert reasons for believing a truth.
• Silencing dissenting opinions robs society of benefits, his argument resonates with fear of social tyranny and a commitment to progress via truth.
• Truth is not necessarily the belief of the masses, and his aims to prevent social tyranny.
• Hearing dissenting opinions will reveal or confirm truth for Mill per his 4 reasons.
• This seems contradictory to assertions of a majority since Mill trusts in the majority asserting the highest pleasure.
• Mill says that freedom permits people to reach a synthesis of truths.
• Even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute in their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act, showing how liberty ought to be preserved
• According to utilitarianism any actions resulting from a speech that will cause harm ought to be suppressed.
• Mill balances individual freedom and preventing harm to others, recognizing limits to speech so harm does not result.
• Preventing harm to others outweighs individual liberty, so a balance has to be struck for more utility
• Specific examples such as violence or harm may determine the dangers of expression in a given context. -This heavily context-dependent line is difficult to assert, and the term "mischievous act" is broad.
• There is also the problem of indirect incitement and accountability; how an expression results in harm must be addressed.
• There important context to be taken into account when figuring out whether freedom of expression is entirely permitted versus if it needs to be restricted

Elements of the Philosophy of Right Quotes (Georg Whilhelm Friedrich Hegel)

• Hegel states the state has little to do with the relationship of contract, and that contractual relationships are to be avoided
• Views assuming the state is a contractual relationship and Hegel believes misunderstanding how the state functions must be avoided
• Hegel states an individuals’s ‘contract' cannot explain the totality of the state as the relationships belong only in the sphere of property and is arbitrary.
• The state is a necessary condition for individual survival thus does not have contractual relationship with that state
• L labelling the state must be correct, and labeling a social contract is misunderstanding and conflates it with the economy
• Hegel claims critics of rationalism and liberalism fail to provide a full picture of political life and create confusion about the actuality of state
• The state is actually the Idea of freedom and should not be reduced to voluntary agreement
• Hegal suggests individuals need not consent to be governed
• Hegel states that civil society can not exist without the universal, and a country in which no taxes were paid could never strengthen its particular interest
• Each individual is dependent for it's definition as being a certain condition and he notes how the existence of civil society is dependent on the frameworks that is permitted by the outside state (the universality)
• By way of taxes individuals may realize how public works helps make for the ethical idea, for example paying taxes is not from obligation but but because one recognizes how this permits their freedom

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Quotes (Karl Marx)

• Communism as completed naturalism is humanism, as well as the reunion between man and nature and man and man.
• Marx is explaining communism here as a solution to alienation results from property not belonging to man
• Man is alienated from nature (the more he creates, the more he loses his value), himself (no control over work or time) and from the others (working becomes individual pursuit)
• Marx’s goal ultimately would be a unification in which there would no longer be separation of self from man,human from nature, rather their would be a reconciliation in the world
• Marx believes any philosophy and religions lead to inadequacies for reality and prohibit freedom
• A solution could be for man that progress would occur in his time/planet
• Marx conditions lead to a humanist ideology and desires to make a perfect world and sees communism as not economics but as the self conscious resolution of alienation
• Material conditions has created human flourishing

The Communist Manifesto Quotes (Karl Marx)

• Political power is merely organized power of one class for another stating the state is a tool for the upper class
• The point of the state is to enact the reform so that everyone will have ownership
• People must work together collectivly to destroy the other

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Karl Marx)

• Society shapes all other aspects of like consciousness. Thus consciousness is not human, it is a reflection of a social existence.
• This shows that ideas come out from materialism
• Marx has an over dependence on materialism

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ch.6 (Frederick Douglass)

• Slavery dehumanized the people involved
• Frederic's goal was based on ethics. Freedom came with not owning things, but expressing an unalienated part
• Slaves turned evil was not always visible, but it slowly began at point of contact, with power divorced with morality
• Slavery requires you to be thoughtless so its easier to make you a thoughtless one
• Darkening individual’s vision leads critical thinking to be eliminated and causes those individuals to not know corruption

On the Genealogy of Morality (Friedrich Nietzsche)

• Nietzsche questions mans ability to value their own judgments and their worth.
• Human flurishing is that of good
• Good/evil can be both bad
• Nietzsche aims to not only talk about good or evil, but talk about whether it is benefitting humanity
• The value judgment should be gauged for human flurishing if Nietzsche has an accurate concept