Quotes
Suffering is bad primarily because of its intrinsic nature: it is bad in itself. Suffering of a certain intensity and duration is equally bad, or almost equally bad, wherever it occurs.
Jeff McMahan, Animals, in R. G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.) A Companion to Applied Ethics, Malden, MA, 2003, pp. 525–536, p. 529
The idea that it is wrong to cause suffering, unless there is a sufficient justification, is one of the most basic moral principles, shared by virtually anyone.
James Rachels, Animals and ethics, in Edward Craig (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London, 1998
[T]here is something odd about maintaining that pain and suffering are morally significant when felt by a human but not when felt by an animal. If a child burns a hamster alive, it seems quite incredibile to maintain that what is wrong with this act has nothing essentially to do with the pain and usffering the hamster feels. To maintain that the act was wrong because it might encourage the chid to burn other children or encourage anti-social behaviour, because the act failed to exhibit this or that virtue or violated some duty to be kind to animals—to hold these views seems almost perverse, if they are taken to imply that the hamster’s pain and suffering are no central data bearing upon the morality of what was done to it. For us, pain and suffering are moral-bearing characteristics, so that, whether one burns the child or the child burns the hamster, the moralità of what is done is determined at least in part by the pain and suffering the creature in question undergoes. Singer’s utilitarianism picks this feature up quite nicely, and it seems to me exactly right. Of course, there may be other moral-beraing characteristics that apply in the case, but the fact in no way enables us to ignore, morally, the hamster’s pains.
R. G. Frey, Animals, in Hugh LaFollette (ed.) The Oxford handbook of practical ethics, Oxford, 2003, pp. 161–187, p. 170
Pain […] may not be the only evil, but it cannot be denied to be evil.
J. Ellis McTaggart, Some dogmas of religion, London, 1906, p. 15
Much of the/ moral progress/ of civilization can be understood as the furtherance of concern for “up to usness”, the recognition of its moral importance, and the implementation of arrangements that are based upon this recognition.
Saul Smilansky, Free will and illusion, Oxford, 2000, p. 21
Only the most reckless poet would attempt [to describe the sensation of an orgasm under LSD]. I have to say to you, “What does one say to a little child?” The child asks, “Daddy, what is sex like?” and you try to describe it, and then the little child says, “Well, is it fun like the circus?” and you say, “Well, not exactly like that.” And the child says, “Is it fun like chocolate ice cream?” and you say, “Well, it’s like that but much, more more than that.” And the child says, “It is fun like the roller coaster, then?” and you say, “Well, that’s part of it, but it’s even more than that.” In short, I can’t tell you what it’s like, because it’s not like anything that’s ever happened to you—and there aren’t words adequate to describe it, anyway. You won’t know what it’s like until you try it yourself and then I won’t need to tell you.
Timothy Leary, The politics of ecstasy, Berkeley, 1998, pp. 128-129
Inner experiences are not the only things that matter, but they / do/ matter. We would not plug into an experience machine, but we would not plug into an anesthetizing machine either.
Robert Nozick, The examined life: philosophical meditations, New York, 1989, p. 90
There are many different techniques for collecting, interpreting, and analyzing facts, and different techniques often lead to different conclusions, which is why scientists disagree about the dangers of global warming, the benefits of supply-side economics, and the wisdom of low-carbohydrate diets. Good scientists deal with this complication by choosing the techniques they consider most appropriate and then accepting the conclusions that these techniques produce, regardless of what those conclusions might be. But bad scientists take advantage of this complication by choosing techniques that are especially likely to produce the conclusions they favour, thus allowing them to reach favoured conclusions by way of supportive facts. Decades of research suggests that when it comes to collecting and analyzing facts about ourselves and our experiences, most of us have the equivalent of an advanced degree in Really Bad Science.
Daniel T. Gilbert, Stumbling on happiness, New York, 2006, p. 164
“[N]o-nonsense” materialism, as I understand it, is characterized not so much by what it asserts, namely the identity of conscious states and processes with certain physiological states and processes, but by an accompanying failure to appreciate that there is anything philosophically problematic about such an identification.
Michael Lockwood, Mind, brain and the quantum: the compound "I", Oxford, 1989, p. 2
Sometimes in therapy when a person has difficulty accepting some feeling, I will ask if he or she is willing to accept the fact of refusing to accept the feeling. I asked this once of a client, Victor, a clergyman, who had difficulty in owning or experiencing his anger, but who was a very angry man. My question disoriented him. “Will I accept that I won’t accept my anger?” he asked me. I smiled and said, “That’s right.” He thundered, “I refuse to accept my anger and I refuse to accept my refusal!”
Nathaniel Branden, How to raise your self-esteem, London, 1987, p. 56
Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a ‘machine’ with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.
Greg Egan, Permutation city, New York, 1994, p. 286
[D]o not be oppressed by the frightful sum of human suffering; there is no sum; two lean women are not twice as lean as one, and two fat women are not twice as fat as one. Poverty and pain are not cumulative; you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that it is.
George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, London, 1828
Immediately before taking up woodwork, he’d passionately devoured all the higher mathematics texts in the central library, run all the tutorial software, and then personally contributed several important new results to group theory—untroubled by the fact that none of the Elsyan mathematicians would ever be aware of his work. Before that, he’d written over three hundred comic operas, with librettos in Italian, French and English—and staged most of them, with puppet performers and audience. Before that, he’d patiently studied the structure and biochemistry of the human brain for sixty-seven years; towards the end he had fully grasped, to his own satisfaction, the nature of the process of consciousness. Every one of these pursuits had been utterly engrossing, and satisfying, at the time.
Greg Egan, Permutation city, New York, 1994, p. 277
–¿Qué haría usted si supiera con seguridad que un día determinado acaba el mundo?
–No diría nada, por causa de las criaturas–respondió Ramírez–, pero dejaría anotado en un papelito que en el día de la fecha era el fin del mundo, para que vieran que yo lo sabía.
Adolfo Bioy Casares, Guirnalda con amores, Buenos Aires, 1959, p. 99
That we could not consistently deny our existence without going mad is no evidence for the claim that we do exist—any more than the impossibility of denying consistently that we have free will without going mad is evidence for our actually having it. Why should the truth be believable? For all we know, the true account of what we are might be pathological. That would be a truly absurd situation. It is one thing to accept humbly that our metaphysical nature might remain forever beyond our intellectual grasp. It would be a nasty surprise indeed if we could work out our metaphysical nature all right, but the knowledge of it would inevitably result in madness.
Eric T. Olson, What are we?: a study in personal ontology, Oxford, 2007, p. 210
El frío de la tristeza es como un cosquilleo en el estómago que me recorre la columna, las piernas, y por fin se instala cómodo en el pecho, en la garganta. El sol comienza a bajar y sé que es la señal.
Adrián Cangi (ed.), Favio: sinfonía de un sentimiento, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 30
The unpleasantness of a toothache and the pleasantness of a beautiful view are not likely to coexist—not so much because the two hedonic tones have opposite signs, but rather because the two underlying experiences or attitudes are incompatible. The pain so “absorbs me” that I cannot give myself over to the view enough really to enjoy it, or, on the other hand, the view may absorb me away from the pain. For two attitudes or absorptions thus to detract from each other, it is not at all necessary that the two hedonic tones be opposite. I have made experiments like the following: while listening to the marche funèbre in Beethoven’s Seventh, I ate a piece of delicious candy and observed whether I could maintain the two enjoyments unimpaired alongside each other. It was impossible.
Karl Duncker, On pleasure, emotion, and striving, Philosophy and phenomenological research, vol. 1, no. 4, 1941, pp. 391–430, p. 409
The [current] system [of licensing medicines] was created to deal with traditional medicine which ais to prevent, detect, cure, or mitigate diseases. In this framework, there is no room for enhancing medicine. For example, drug companies could find it difficult to get regulatory approval for a pharmaceutical whose sole use is to improve cognitive functioning in the healthy population. To date, every pharmaceutical on the market that offers some potential cognitive enhancement effect was developed to treat some specific disease condition (such as ADHD, narcolepsy and Alzheimer’s disease). The enhancing effects of these drugs in healthy subjects is a serendipitous unintended effect. As a result, pharmaceutical companies, instead of aiming directly at enhancements for healthy people, must work indirectly by demonstrating that their drugs are effective in treating some recognised disease. One perverse effect of this incentive structure is the medicalization and “pathologization” of conditions that were previously regarded as part of the normal human spectrum. If a significant fraction of the population could obtain certain benefits from drugs that improve concentration, for example, it is currently necessary to categorize this segment of people as having some disease in order for the drug to be approved and prescribed to those who could benefit from it. It is not enough that people would like to be able to concentrate better when they work; they must be stamped as suffering from attention0deficit hyperactivity disorder: a condition now estimated to affect between 3 and 5 percent of school-age children (a higher proportion among boys) in the US. This medicalizatoin of arguably normal human characteristics not only stigmatizes enhancers, it also limits access to enhancing treatments; unless people are diagnosed with a condition whose treatment requires a certain enhancing drug, those who wish to use the drug for its enhancing effects are reliant on dinging a sympathetic physical willing to prescribe it (or finding other means of procurement). This creates inequities in access, since those with high social capital and the relevant information are more likely to gain access to enhancement than others.
Nick Bostrom and Rebecca Roache, Ethical issues in human enhancement, in Jesper Ryberg, Thomas S. Petersen, and Clark Wolf (eds.) New waves in applied ethics, London, 2007, pp. 120–152
[T]he Utilitarian cannot confine himself to a single mind; he has to consider what he calls “the total happiness of a collection of minds”. Now this is an extremely odd notion. It is plain that a collection cannot literally be happy or unhappy. The oddity is clearly illustrated if we […] use the analogy of greyness. Suppose that a number of different areas, which are not adjoined to each other, all go through successive phases of greyness. What could we possibly mean by “the total whiteness of this collection of areas”?
C. D. Broad, Five types of ethical theory, London, 1930, pp. 248-249
Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in favour of it. But why not begin on yourself? From a purely selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than trying to improve others—yes, and a lot less dangerous.
Dale Carnegie, How to win friends and influence people, New York, 1981, p. 1