Author Archives: Pablo Stafforini

Marc Sagoff

The ways in which creatures in nature die are typically violent: predation, starvation, disease, parasitism, cold. The dying animal in the wild does not understand the vast ocean of misery into which it and billions of other animals are born only to drown. If the wild animal understood the conditions into which it is born, what would it think? It might reasonably prefer to be raised on a farm, where the chances of survival for a year or more would be good, and to escape from the wild, where they are negligible. Either way, the animal will be eaten: few die of old age. The path from birth to slaughter, however, is often longer and less painful in the barnyard than in the woods. Comparisons, sad as they are, must be made to recognize where a great opportunity lies to prevent or mitigate suffering. The misery of animals in nature – which humans can do much to relieve – makes every other form of suffering pale in comparison. Mother Nature is so cruel to her children she makes Frank Perdue look like a saint.

Marc Sagoff, ‘Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce’, Osgoode Law Journal, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer, 1984), p. 303

Robin Hanson

The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in spacetime.

Robin Hanson, ‘The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier’, in Damien Broderick (ed.), Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, New York, 2008, p. 168

Jim Holt

If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe. What grater proof of the reality of the Big Bang–you can watch it on TV.

Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, New York, 2012, p. 26

Cal Newport

The author Timothy Ferris, who coined the term “lifestyle design,” is a fantastic example of the good things this approach to life can generate (Ferris has more than enough career capital to back up his adventurous existence). But if you spend time browsing the blogs of lesser-known lifestyle designers, you’ll begin to notice the same red flags again and again: A distresingly large fraction of these contrarians […] skipped over the part where they build a stable means to support their unconvetional lifestyle. They assume that generating the courage to pursue control is what matters, while everything else is just a detail that is easily worked out.

One such blogger I found, to give another example from among many, quit his job at the age of twenty-five, explaining, “I was fed up with living a ‘normal’ conventional life, working 9-5 for the man [and] having no time and little money to pursue my true passions… so I’ve embarked on a crusade to show you and the rest of the world how an average Joe… can build a business from scratch to support a life devoted to living ‘The Dream.'” The “business” he referenced, as is the case with many lifestyle designers, was his blog about being a lifestyle designer. In other words, his only product was his enthusiasm about no having a “normal” life. It doesn’t take an economist to point out there’s not much real value lurking there.

Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, New York, 2012, pp. 119-120

Fred Hapgood

All species reproduce in excess, way past the carrying capacity of their niche. In her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1,000 kits; a trout, 20,000 fry, a tuna or cod, a million fry or more; an elm tree, several million seeds; and an oyster, perhaps a hundred million spat. If one assumes that the population of each of these species is, from generation to generation, roughly equal, then on the average only one offspring will survive to replace each parent. All the other thousands and millions will die, one way or another.

Fred Hapgood, Why Males Exist: An Inquiry into the Evolution of Sex, New York, 1979, pp. 44-45

Marc Sagoff

The principle of natural selection is not obviously a humanitarian principle; the predator-prey relation does not depend on moral empathy. Nature ruthlessly limits animal populations by doing violence to virtually every individual before it reaches maturity[.]

Marc Sagoff, ‘Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce’, Osgoode Law Journal, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer, 1984), p. 299

Jeff McMahan

There are phonograph records purporting to contain “the wit and wisdom of Ronald Reagan” which, when played, are entirely silent. It might be suggested that a book on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy should similarly consist only of blank pages.

Jeff McMahan, Reagan and the World: Imperial Policy in the New Cold War,  New York, 1985, p. 9

Stuart Rachels

Suffering, by its nature, is awful, and so one needs an excellent reason to cause it. Occasionally, one will have such a reason. Surgery may cause a human being severe postoperatory pain, but the surgeon may be right to operate if that’s the only way to save the patient.

And what if the sufferer is not a human, but an animal? This doesn’t matter. The underlying principle is that suffering is bad because of what it’s like for the sufferer. Whether the sufferer is a person or a pig or a chicken is irrelevant, just as it’s irrelevant whether the sufferer is white or black or brown. The question is merely how awful the suffering is to the individual.

Stuart Rachels, ‘Vegetarianism’, in T. L. Beauchamp & R. G. Frey (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, Oxford, 2012, pp. 883-884

Peter Cheeke

If most urban meat-eaters were to visit an industrial broiler house, to see how the birds are raised, and could see the birds being ‘harvested’ and then being ‘processes’ in a poultry processing plant, some, perhaps many of them, would swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat.

Peter Cheeke, Contemporary Issues in Animal Agriculture, 2nd ed., Danville, Illinois, 1990, p. 50

Nick Bostrom

With machine intelligence and other technologies such as advanced nanotechnology, space colonization should become economical. Such technology would enable us to construct “von Neumann probes” – machines with the capability of traveling to a planet, building a manufacturing base there, and launching multiple new probes to colonize other stars and planets. A space colonization race could ensue. Over time, the resources of the entire accessible universe might be turned into some kind of infrastructure, perhaps an optimal computing substrate (“computronium”). Viewed from the outside, this process might take a very simple and predictable form – a sphere of technological structure, centered on its Earthly origin, expanding uniformly in all directions at some significant fraction of the speed of light. What happens on the “inside” of this structure – what kinds of lives and experiences (if any) it would sustain – would depend on initial conditions and the dynamics shaping its temporal evolution. It is conceivable, therefore, that the choices we make in this century could have extensive consequences.

Nick Bostrom, ‘The future of humanity’, in J. K. B Olsen, S. A. Pedersen & V. F. Hendricks (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, Oxford, 2009, pp. 555-556

Shelly Kagan

[E]ven though there may be components of well-being that go beyond one’s experiences—and thus can plausibly be thought to come in imperceptible amounts—it seems undeniable that one important component of well-being is indeed the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain.

Shelly Kagan, ‘Do I Make a Difference?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2011), p. 115

Henry Salt

[I]t is when we turn to their treatment of the non-human races that we find the surest evidences of barbarism; yet their savagery, even here, is not wholly “naked and unashamed,” for, strange to say, these curious people delight to mask their rudeness in a cloak of fallacies and sophisms, and to represent themselves as “lovers” of those very creatures whom they habitually torture for “sport,” science,” and the “table.” They actually have a law for the prevention of cruelty to animals, under which certain privileged species, classed as “domestic,” are protected from some specified wrongs, though all the time they may, under certain conditions, be subjected with impunity to other and worse injuries at the hands of the slaughterman or the vivisector; while the wild species, though presumably not less sensitive to pain, are regarded as almost entirely outside the pale of protection, and as legitimate subjects for those brutalities of “fashion” and “sport” which are characteristic of the savage mind.

Henry Salt, Seventy Years among Savages, London, 1921, p. 12

Charles Darwin

With respect to immortality, nothing shows me how strong and almost instinctive a belief is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life.–Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.

Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, London, 1958, p. 92

Tony Judt

To understand the mystery of French intellectuality, one must begin with the École Normale. Founded in 1794 to train secondary school teachers, it became the forcing house of the republican elite. Between 1850 and 1970, virtually every Frenchman of intellectual distinction (women were not admitted until recently) graduated from it: from Pasteur to Sartre, from Émile Durkheim to Georges Pompidou, from Charles Péguy to Jacques Derrida (who managed to flunk the exam not once but twice before getting in), from Léon Blum to Henri Bergson, Romain Rolland, Marc Bloch, Louis Althusser, Régis Debray, Michel Foucault, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and all eight French winners of the Fields Medal for mathematics.

When I arrived there in 1970, as a pensionnaire étranger, the École Normale still reigned supreme. […] The young men I met at the École seemed to me far less mature than my Cambridge contemporaries. Gaining admission to Cambridge was no easy matter, but it did not prelude the normal life of a busy youth. However, no one got into the École Normal without sacrificing his teenage years to that goal, and it showed. I was unfailingly astonished by the sheer volume of rote learning on which my French contemporaries could call, suggesting an impacted richness that was at times almost indigestible. Pâté de foi gras indeed.

But what these budding French intellectuals gained in culture, they often lacked in imagination. My first breakfast at the École was instructive in this regard. Seated opposite o group of unshaven, pajama-clad freshmen, I burdied myself in my coffee bowl. Suddenly an earnest young man resembling the young Trotsky leaned across and asked me (in French): “Where did you do khâgne?”—the high-intensity post-lycée preparatory classes. I explained that I had not done khâgne: I came from Cambridge. “Ah, so you did khâgne in England.” “No,” I tried again: “We don’t do khâgne—I came here directly from an English university.”

The young man looked at me with withering scorn. It is not possible, he explained, to enter the École Normale without first undergoing preparation in khâgne. Since you are here, you must have done khâgne. And with that conclusive Cartesian flourish he turned away, directing his conversation to worthier targets. This radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles introduced me to a cardinal axiom of French intellectual life.

Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet, London, 2010, pp. 114-116

Jim Holt

[T]he more interesting x is, the less interesting the philosophy of x tends to be, and conversely. (Art is interesting, but the philosophy of art is mostly boring; law is boring, the philosophy of law is pretty interesting.)

Jim Holt, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, New York, 2008, pp. 67-68

Fernando Iglesias

Los desastrosos resultados obtenidos por un país gobernado durante ocho décadas por dos grupos políticos fuertemente nacionalistas deberían hacer sospechosa la idea primitiva de que, cuanto más nacionalista es un país, más prometedor es su futuro.

Fernando Iglesias, La cuestión Malvinas: crítica del nacionalismo argentino, Buenos Aires, 2012, p. 21

Ian Rowland

As an industry, it may not yet be as big as oil, but it is older, will last longer, and is vastly more profitable. To profit from oil you have to find it, transport it, refine it and sell it. To profit from psychic readings, you just talk to people and they give you money. And whereas the world will one day run out of oil, it will never run out of people wanting a psychic reading.

Ian Rowland, The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, 3rd ed., London, 2002, p. 9

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Aquella noche en Salón Canning, mientras el DJ insistía con Fresedo y no pasaba ni un tema de Pugliese, don Samuel, ochenta años cumplidos, no perdonaba un solo tango. Con su traje marrón y el inamovible, informe sombrero del mismo color, invitaba a cuanta rubia lo superase ampliamente en altura. En otra ocasión yo lo había invitado a una copa y, sin aludir a su escasa estatura, le pregunté por esa predilección; creo que observé algo así como que no les tenía miedo a las escandinavas. Me respondió con la sonrisa generosa de quien transmite su experiencia de la vida a la generación siguiente.

–Pibe, no hay nada como tener la cabeza empotrada entre un par de buenas tetas.

Edgardo Cozarinsky, Milongas, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 16

John McTaggart

The opinion that a belief in immortality is logically indefensible gains strength, paradoxical as it may seem, from the very fact that most of the western world desire that the belief may be true.

John McTaggart, ‘Some Considerations Relating to Human Immortality’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 13, no. 2 (January, 1903), p. 170

Carlos Mastronardi

Mientras otros cumplen con rigor un tanto burocrático las tareas intelectuales en que se hallan empeñados y luego, al término del cotidiano deber, buscan descanso en el cinematógrafo, en la tertulia o en la novela trivial, Borges mantiene activo el espíritu en todas las circunstancias. Prolonga en el plano del diálogo ameno las operaciones mentales que lo llevaron a escribir un poema o a examinar los méritos de un libro. No es dable señalar distingos entre su quehacer literario y el tono general de su vida.

Carlos Mastronardi, Borges, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 41

John McTaggart

Nothing is true merely because it is good. Nothing is good merely because it is true. To argue that a thing must be because it ought to be is the last and worst degree of spiritual rebellion–claiming for our ideals the reality of fact. To argue, on the other hand, that a thing must be good because it is true, is the last and worst degree of spiritual servility, which ignores the right and the duty inherent in our possession of ideas–the right and the duty to judge and, if necessary, to condemn the whole universe by the highest standard we can find in our own nature.

John McTaggart, ‘The Necessity of Dogma’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 5, no. 2 (January, 1895), p. 150

Carlos Mastronardi

Una noche del año 25 sale Borges, con un grupo de amigos, de cierta fiesta a la que fueron invitados por una joven escritora. Mientras celebran la amenidad de la reunión y la belleza de la dueña de casa, ganan lentamente la soledad y la sombra. Uno de los incipientes poetas que acompañan a Borges, mientras orina junto a un árbol, dice que le gustaría describir de modo preciso y realista todos los vaivenes de la reunión, y también la esplendorosa persona de la dama que los había congregado. Borges acepta y completa esa aspiración literaria:

Para no omitir ningún aspecto de la realidad, debemos hacer mención de este momento… Conviene tener en cuenta todo lo que hacemos ahora… También esta prosaica ceremonia depurativa es parte del mundo… También estos orines están en el universo.

Carlos Mastronardi, Borges, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 106

John McTaggart

Pain is an evil–all our morality implies that. Even if we have a right to forgive the universe our own pain–and I doubt if we have the right to do even this–we have certainly no right to forgive it the pain of others. We must either believe the pain inflicted for some good purpose, or condemn the universe in which it occurs.

John McTaggart, ‘The Necessity of Dogma’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 5, no. 2 (January, 1895), p. 156

Benjamin Franklin

[I]n my first Voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our People set about catching Cod and hawl’d up a grat many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food; and on this Occasion I consider’d with my Master Tryon, the taking every Fish a kind of unprovok’d Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter.– All this seem’d very reasonable.–But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, and when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.–

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, London, 1973, pt. 1

Stanley Smith Stevens

Since, in order to survive, we must be able to move about effectively, perception must to a certain degree achieve stable and veridical representations. It must tell us how matters stand out there. But the universe is in constant flux. We move about and other things also move. Day turns into night. Sound sources approach and recede. How can perceptual stability be achieved in the face of the ongoing flux?

We can perhaps formulate a better question by asking what aspect of the universe most needs stability. For example, is it the differences or the proportions and ratios that need to remain constant in perception? Apparently it is the proportions—the ratios. When we walk toward a house, the relative proportions of the house appear to remain constant: the triangular gable looks triangular from almost any distance. A photograph portrays the same picture whether we view it under a bright or a dim light: the ration between the light and the shaded parts of the photograph seems approximately the same even though the illumination varies. The perceived relations among the sounds of speech remain the same whether the speech is soft or highly amplified. In other words, the perceptual domain operates as though it had its own ratio requirement—not a mathematically rigid requirement, as in physics, but a practical and approximate requirement.

The usefulness of perceptual proportions and relations that remain approximately constant despite wide changes in stimulus levels is immense. Think how life as we know it would be transformed if speech could be understood at only a single level of intensity, or if objects changed their apparent proportions as they receded, or if pictures became unrecognizable when a cloud dimmed the light of the sun.

By making the perceived aspects o stimuli depend on power functions of the stimulus dimensions, nature has contrived an operating mechanism that is compatible with the need for reasonable stability among perceptual relations.

Stanley Smith Stevens, Psychophysics: Introduction to its Perceptual, Neural, and Social Prospects, New Brunswick, 1986, pp. 18-19

Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert

The more quickly people reach an understanding of negative events, the sooner they recover from them. […] Virtually all tests […], however, have examined people’s understanding of negative events. The AREA [attend, react, explain, and adapt] model is unique in predicting that explanation also leads to the diminution of affective reactions to positive events. We predict that anything that impedes explanation—such as uncertainty—should prolong affective reactions to positive events. […] These studies highlight a pleasure paradox, which refers to the fact that people have two fundamental motives—to understand the world and to maintain positive emotion—that are sometimes at odds.

Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert, ‘Explaining away: A model of affective adaptation’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 3, No. 5 (September, 2008), pp. 377-378

Derek Parfit

Schopenhauer makes two curiously inconsistent claims about the wretchedness of human existence. We can object, he claims, both that our lives are filled with suffering which makes them worse than nothing, and that time passes so swiftly that we shall soon be dead. These are like Woody Allen’s two complaints about his hotel: ‘The food is terrible, and they serve such small portions!’

Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Oxford, 2011, vol. 2, p. 615

Thomas Nagel

There is a great deal of misery in the world, and many of us could easily spend our lives trying to eradicate it. […] [O]ne advantage of living in a world as bad as this one is that it offers the opportunity for many activities whose importance can’t be questioned. But how could the main point of human life be the elimination of evil? Misery, deprivation, and injustice prevent people from pursuing the positive goods which life is assumed to make possible. If all such goods were pointless and the only thing that really mattered was the elimination of misery, that really would be absurd.

Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford, 1986, p. 217

Philip Dormer Stanhope

The art of pleasing is a very necessary one to possess; but a very difficult one to acquire. It can hardly be reduced to rules; and your own good sense and observation will teach you more of it than I can. Do as you would be done by, is the surest method that I know of pleasing. Observe carefully what pleases you in others, and probably the same thing in you will please others. If you are pleased with the complaisance and attention of others to your humors, your tastes, or your weaknesses, depend upon it the same complaisance and attention, on your part to theirs, will equally please them. Take the tone of the company that you are in, and do not pretend to give it; be serious, gay, or even trifling, as you find the present humor of the company; this is an attention due from every individual to the majority. Do not tell stories in company; there is nothing more tedious and disagreeable; if by chance you know a very short story, and exceedingly applicable to the present subject of conversation, tell it in as few words as possible; and even then, throw out that you do not love to tell stories; but that the shortness of it tempted you. Of all things, banish the egotism out of your conversation, and never think of entertaining people with your own personal concerns, or private, affairs; though they are interesting to you, they are tedious and impertinent to everybody else; besides that, one cannot keep one’s own private affairs too secret. Whatever you think your own excellencies may be, do not affectedly display them in company; nor labor, as many people do, to give that turn to the conversation, which may supply you with an opportunity of exhibiting them. If they are real, they will infallibly be discovered, without your pointing them out yourself, and with much more advantage. Never maintain an argument with heat and clamor, though you think or know yourself to be in the right: but give your opinion modestly and coolly, which is the only way to convince; and, if that does not do, try to change the conversation, by saying, with good humor, “We shall hardly convince one another, nor is it necessary that we should, so let us talk of something else.”

Philip Dormer Stanhope, letter to his son, October 16, 1747

James MacKaye

Quantities of pain or pleasure may be regarded as magnitudes having the same definiteness as tons of pig iron, barrels of sugar, bushels of wheat, yards of cotton, or pounds of wool; and as political economy seeks to ascertain the conditions under which these commodities may be produced with the greatest efficiency–so the economy of happiness seeks to ascertain the conditions under which happiness, regarded as a commodity, may be produced with the greatest efficiency.

James MacKaye, The Economy of Happiness, Boston, 1906, p. 183-184

John Gray

‘Humanity’ does not exist. There are only humans, driven by conflicting needs and illusions, and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgement.

John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, London, 2002, p. 12

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Women […] rarely develop sexual fetishes for objects. They do, however, develop emotional fetishes, a condition known as objectum sexualis.

Women who suffer from objectum sexualis usually claim that they are in love with an inanimate object, such as fences, a roller coaster, or a Ferris wheel. Though they sometimes have sex with the objects, their interest usually expresses itself as a powerful emotional connection and a desire for intimacy. Sometimes these feelings culminate in a romantic ceremony. One objectum sufferer name Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer marries the Berlin Wall. Another objectum sufferer, Erika Naisho, marries the Eiffel Tower. After the ceremony, she changed her name to Erika Eiffel. “There is a huge problem with being in love with a public object,” she reported sadly, “the issue of intimacy—or rather lack of it—is forever present.”

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, New York, 2011