Quotes

Among all the several species of psychological entities, the names of which are to be found either in the Table of the Springs of Action, or in the Explanations above subjoined to it, the two which are as it were the roots, the main pillars or foundations of all the rest, the matter of which all the rest are composed—or the receptacles of that matter, which soever may be the physical image, employed to give aid, if not existence to conception, will be, it is believed, if they have not been already, seem to be PLEASURES and PAINS. Of these, the existence is matter of universal and constant experience. Without any of the rest, these are susceptible of,—and as often as they come unlooked for, do actually come into, existence: without these, no one of all those others ever had, or ever could have had, existence.

Jeremy Bentham, Deontology: Together with a table of the springs of action and the article on utilitarianism, Oxford, 1983, p. 98

[A]lthough I defend the permissibility of abortion and thus welcome the introduction of the abortion pill, I do not believe the debate should end until we have the kind of intellectual and moral certainty about abortion that we have about slavery. It is important to notice that the ostensible victims of abortion—fetuses—are not parties to the debate, while of those who are involved in it, the only ones who have a significant personal interest or stake in the outcome are those who would benefit from the practice. There is therefore a danger that abortion could triumph in the political arena simply because it is favored by self-interest and opposed only by ideals. We should therefore be wary of the possibility of abortion becoming an unreflective practice, like meat eating, simply because it serves the interests of those who have the power to determine whether it is practiced.

Jeff McMahan, The ethics of killing: Problems at the margins of life, New York, 2003, p. viii

[W]hen my wife, Jan, and I were on Campus Crusade staff at Northern Illinois University our movement was infiltrated by certain Christians who believed that physical healing was included in the atonement of Christ, and thus no Christian ever needed to be sick. Just pray to God and He will heal you!

Well, the result of this was that some of our students were throwing away their glasses, claiming that they were healed, even though they couldn’t see any better. I remember confronting one of them by asking, “Are you healed?” He said, “Yes, I am.” So I said, “Well, can you see any better?” “No,” he admitted. “So then how are you healed if you can’t see any better?” I asked. “Because my faith isn’t strong enough,” he said. “I am healed, but I just don’t have faith to believe it.” And so these poor, nearsighted students were going around trying to study and attend classes without their glasses, claiming that they were healed but that they lacked the faith to believe that God had answered their prayers. I wonder what those Christians would say about someone who dies from cancer despite prayers for healing: that he really was alive and well but just appeared to be dead because he lacked the faith? What those Christians needed was not more faith, but some common sense!

William Lane Craig, No easy answers, Chicago, 1990, p. 45

What is my good? The good of something, it seems—and, in particular, the well-being of whatever thing I am. But what can the good of things such as we are be? Some things—for example, automobiles and government agencies—appear to have fixed essential functions or goals, and a good deriving from these. But when something is truly said to be ‘for the good of’ such things, this seems to be said differently than it would be about ourselves. Such things are essentially purposive because they are artifacts or institutions, and as such have essentially just whatever functions they are essentially conceived (or constitutively intended) to have. Whatever maintains or furthers the automobile’s or government agency’s capacity to perform its essential function well is for its good. Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Administrator was for its good; and lubrication was for the automobile’s. But such a thing’s good seems not to be a good for the thing itself in the way that ours seems to be. The meaning of life seems to be unlike the essential purpose of a government agency or of a machine. And this is because our capacity for faring well or ill seems to be unlike any capacity we believe artifacts or institutions to have.

Leonard David Katz, Hedonism as metaphysics of mind and value, 1985, pp. 7-8

In recent years much nonsense has been written by post-modern theorists such as Michel Foucault about the “social construction of the body,” as if human bodies were the incarnation of cultural norms rather than ancestral sexual preferences. These theorists should go to the zoo more often. What they consider a “radical reshaping” of the human body through social pressure is trivial compared to evolution’s power. Evolution can transform a dinosaur into an albatross, a four-legged mammal into a sperm whale, and a tiny, bulgy-eyed, tree-hugging, insect-crunching proto-primate into Julia Roberts—or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Selection is vastly more powerful than any cosmetic surgeon or cultural norm. Minds may be sponges for soaking up culture, but bodies are not.

Geoffrey Miller, The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, New York, 2001, p. 255

There is no need to import superstition. We can begin with a mechanistic view of the world, one in which bits of energy and matter interact in various ways perhaps according to certain deterministic or probabilistic laws of causation; and in which people’s lives are determined by the interplay of their own desires, goals, commitments, urges, and impulses with those of other people, steered by different beliefs about the world, of varying degrees of falsehood and veracity, all within the limits imposed by nature; but a world that exhibits no transcendent purpose or meaning or design in any of its parts—no purpose, that is, outside the purely continent (and usually quite powerless) wills of individual people and animals. Nevertheless, surely it would be blindness to fail to see, at the very least, that some things in this purposeless world are objectively bad; that these things ought not to arise; that we are obliged by their very badness to prevent them from arising; and that certainly the experience of suffering in its many forms has this very property of objective badness that I have been describing, even if nothing else has it. It seems to me stranger to deny this than to affirm it.

Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and moral responsibility, Oxford, 1999, p. 113

If I am going to die, there’s no need to ‘make peace’ with myself, no reason to ‘compose myself’ for death. The way I face extinction is just as fleeting, just as irrelevant, as the way I faced every other moment of my life. The one and only thing that could make this time matter would be finding a way to survive.

Greg Egan, Axiomatic, London, 2013, p. 220

[W]hy is there a whole of parts rather than nothing at all? […] The reason why this whole of parts exists, rather than some other possible whole, is that this whole’s existence is logically required by the existence of its parts, and its parts exist. The parts of the merely possible whole do not exist, and therefore the actual existence of this merely possible whole is not logically required.

But why these parts? These parts exist because all of them have been caused to exist by earlier parts. Other possible parts do not exist because nothing causes them to exist.

But why is there something rather than nothing? The whole of parts is something. The reason it exists is that every one of its parts has been caused to exist by earlier parts and the whole’s existence is logically required by the existence of the parts. The reason there is not nothing is that a universe caused itself to begin to exist and the basic laws governing this universe instantiated themselves.

By thy is there such a thing as a universe that causes itself to begin to exist? The reason is that this universe’s existence is logically required by the existence of its parts and its parts exist because each of them is caused to exist by an earlier part.

Michael Martin (ed.), The Cambridge companion to atheism, New York, 2006, pp. 192-193

[M]y entire life is less valuable than the entire state of my being dead (which may be identified with the continued existence of the matter and energy that composed my body at the time of my death, even if this matter and energy no longer constitutes a corpse and breaks down into separated and distant atoms). My life can add up only to a finite number of units of value. But my state of being dead lasts for an infinite amount of future time. Even if my state of being dead at each time has the minimal value, say one (the value of the members of the set of particles that composed my body at the time of my death), my state of being dead will have aleph-zero units of value. My state of being dead is infinitely more valuable than my state of being alive. The same is true for any human and any living being.

Quentin Smith, Moral realism and infinite spacetime imply moral nihilism, in Heather Dyke (ed.) Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, Dordrecht, 2003, pp. 43–54, p. 47

Orgasms are difficult to define, let alone reverse-engineer.

Regina Nuzzo, Science of the Orgasm, Los Angeles Times, 2008

Trying to kiss a girl for the first time is a momentously tricky process. I am never sure that girls properly appreciate this, when all they have to do is sit there looking cute.

Sean Thomas, Millions of women are waiting to meet you: a story of life, love and Internet dating, Cambridge, MA, 2006, p. 41

If aging is just damage, and the body is just a complex machine, it stands to reason that we can apply the same principles to alleviating the damage of aging as we do to alleviating the damage to machines.

Aubrey De Grey and Michael Rae, Ending aging: The rejuvenation breakthroughs that could reverse human aging in our lifetime, New York, 2007, p. 22

If I could trade some bafflement in factual matters for certitude about questions of ethics, would I do so? Which is more important: knowing the precise phylogenetic relationships between al the various branches of the evolutionary bush or knowing the meaning of life?

Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God, New York, 2000, p. 197

Humans—who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals—have had an understandable penchant for pretending that animals do not feel pain. On whether we should grant some modicum of rights to other animals, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham stressed that the question was not how smart they are, but how much torment they can feel. […] From all criteria available to us—the recognizable agony in the cries of wounded animals, for example, including those who usually utter hardly a sound—this question seems moot. The limbic system in the human brain, known to be responsible for much of the richness of our emotional life, is prominent throughout the mammals. The same drugs that alleviate suffering in humans mitigate the cries and other signs of pain in many other animals. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of forgotten ancestors: a search for who we are, New York, 1992, pp. 371-372

In ethics, as in mathematics, the appeal to intuition is an epistemology of desperation.

Philip Kitcher, Biology and ethics, Oxford, 2007, p. 176

The healthy brain theory suggests that our brains are different from those of other apes not because extravagantly large brains helped us to survive or to raise offspring, but because such brains are simply better advertisements of how good our genes are. The more complicated the brain, the easier it is to mess up. The human brain’s great complexity makes it vulnerable to impairment through mutations, and its great size makes it physiologically costly. By producing behaviors such as language and art that only a costly, complex brain could produce, we may be advertising our fitness to potential mates. If sexual selection favored the minds that seemed fit for mating, our creative intelligence could have evolved not because it gives us any survival advantage, but because it makes us especially vulnerable to revealing our mutations in our behaviour.

Geoffrey Miller, The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, New York, 2001, p. 104

Social drinking until 1947 during a long & terrible love affair, my first infidelity to my wife after 5 years of marriage. My mistress drank heavily & I drank w. her. Guilt, murderous & suicidal. Hallucinations one day walking home. Heard voices. 7 years of psychoanalysis & group therapy in N. Y. Walked up & down drunk on a foot-wide parapet 8 stories high. Passes at women drunk, often successful. Wife left me after 11 yrs of marriage bec. of drinking. Despair, heavy drinking alone, jobless, penniless, in N. Y. Lost when blacked-out the most important professional letter I have ever received. Seduced students drunk. Made homosexual advances drunk, 4 or 5 times. Antabuse once for a few days. Agony on floor after a beer. Quarrel w. landlord drunk at midnight over the key to my apartment, he called police, spent the night in jail, news somehow reached press & radio, forced to resign. Two months of intense self-analysis-dream-interpretations etc. Remarried. My chairman told me I had called up a student drunk at midnight & threatened to kill her. Wife left me bec. of drinking. Gave a public lecture drunk. Drunk in Calcutta, wandered streets lost all night, unable to remember my address. Married present wife 8 yrs ago. Many barbiturates & tranquilizers off & on over last 10 yrs. Many hospitalizations. Many alibis for drinking, lying abt. it. Severe memory-loss, memory distortions. DT’s once in Abbott, lasted hours. Quart of whisky a day for months in Dublin working hard on a long poem. Dry 4 months 2 years ago. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Wet bed drunk in London hotel, manager furious, had to pay for new mattress, $100. Lectured too weak to stand, had to sit. Lectured badly prepared. Too ill to give an examination, colleague gave it. Too ill to lecture one day. Literary work stalled for months. Quart of whiskey a day for months. Wife desperate, threatened to leave unless I stopped. Two doctors drove me to Hazelden last November, 1 week intensive care unit, 4 wks treatment. AA 3 times, bored, made no friends. First drink at Newlbars’ party. Two months’ light drinking, hard biographical work. Suddenly began new poems 9 weeks ago, heavier & heavier drinking more & more, up to a quart a day. Defecated uncontrollably in a University corridor, got home unnoticed. Book finished in outburst of five weeks, most intense work in my whole life exc. maybe first two months of 1953. My wife said St. Mary’s or else. Came here.

John Berryman, Step One, in John Haffenden (ed.) The Life of John Berryman, London, 1982, pp. 374-375

T. S. Eliot, Collected poems 1909 - 1962, New York, 1963, p. 219

We think of certain departures from the principles encapsulated in probability theory, logic, decision theory, and Bayesian confirmation theory as irrational. For example, it is irrational to be more confident of the truth of a conjunction than of one of its conjuncts, and this norm corresponds to the fact that a conjunction cannot be more probable than either of its conjuncts. Should we think of departures from consequentialism principles in the same way?

Frank Jackson, Departing from consequentialism versus departing from decision theory, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 17, no. 1, 1994, pp. 21–21, p. 21

Love is felt so intensely, it seems inconceivable that it will not always produce a response. Love is antiphonal. The words ‘I love you’ contain an implicit demand. They are incomplete without the answer: ‘I love you too.’ Implicit faith in romantic idealism makes us confident that if we proclaim our love loud enough, we will get an answer. As when calling across a valley, we assume that an echo will acknowledge our effort. But love does not obey physical laws. Sometimes we proclaim our love and there is no reply. Our words are killed by the dead acoustic of a cold heart and the ensuing silence is terrible.

Frank Tallis, Love sick: love as a mental illness, New York, 2004, p. 244