Sentence examples for pursuing ends from inspiring English sources

If old age is not to be "an absurd parody of our former life," she wrote, it is essential to "go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning", such as devotion to other people, causes and creative work.

Human conduct, insofar as it is rational, is generally explained with reference to ends or goals pursued or alleged to be pursued, and humans have often understood the behaviour of other things in nature on the basis of that analogy, either as of themselves pursuing ends or goals or as designed to fulfill a purpose devised by a mind that transcends nature.

The second stage examines the concepts of happiness and freedom to discover principles which persons — conceived of as rationally adopting and pursuing ends — must adopt insofar as they are to qualify as rational.

It conceives of human beings not merely as organisms in space, but as "active beings, pursuing ends, shaping their own and others' lives, feeling, reflecting, imagining, creating, in constant interaction and intercommunication with other human beings; in short, engaged in all the forms of experience that we understand because we share in them, and do not view them purely as external observers".

When he turns to ethics, Grice adds that commonsense psychology represents us as exercising rationality in freely adopting and pursuing ends; moreover, this view of ourselves is self-justifying in the sense that we cannot coherently conceive of ourselves in any other way.

I try to tell them that the difference between humans and robots is precisely the ability to think and reflect, in Immanuel Kant's words, to set and pursue ends for themselves.

He would pursue ends that are now outside what most people conceive of as the compass points of the debate, by means that are more aggressive than we are accustomed to.

To the extent that we have confused ideas, we may indeed consciously pursue ends other than perseverance in being.

This is because only human beings use reason to set and pursue ends, using the rest of nature as means to their ends (5:426–427).

The social contract which establishes the civil state is not the result of a voluntary association, in which individuals come together to pursue ends that they share.

Or, again, we might hold that amongst the range of options required for individual autonomy are joint options, options to pursue ends that require co-ordinated activity with other members of one's group; that too may justify group rights, such as the right of a group to control its own affairs (Wall 2007).