Quotes

Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

Henry W. Fowler and Francis G. Fowler, The King's English, Ware, 1931, p. 11

[T]he rejection of the aggregative approach which characterizes utilitarianism does not mean that it is completely displaced from the moral arena. It remains in reserve to be resorted to when arguments on the basis of rights are not sufficient to reach a conclusion: when reasons about what is correct do not indicate one course of action, because all of them are equally correct or equally incorrect, we must resort to reasons about the maximization of some social goods.

Carlos Santiago Nino, Liberty, equality and causality, Rechtstheorie, vol. 15, no. 1, 1984, pp. 23–38, p. 31

Most people know their own identities. I know who I am, and I can produce enough facts to establish who I am. Anyone who wonders what these facts would be in his own case has only to imagine himself being questioned by the police.

David Pears, Hume on personal identity, Hume studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 1993, pp. 289–299, p. 43

Consider Mr. C. He believes that, in the presence of uncertainty, the appropriate thing to do is to maximize the expected welfare. (Welfare is used interchangeably with net happiness. For simplicity, consider only choices that do not affect the welfare of others.) Suppose you put C in the privacy of a hotel room with an attractive, young, and willing lady. C can choose to go to bed with her or not to. C knows that the former choice involves a small but not negligible risk of contracting AIDS. He also calculates that the expected welfare of this choice is negative. Nevertheless, he agrees that, provided the lady is beautiful enough, he will choose to go to bed with her. This choice of C, though irrational (at least from the expected welfare point of view), is far from atypical. Rather, I am confident that it applies to at least 70% of adult males (the present writer included).

Yew-kwang Ng, Happiness, life satisfaction, or subjective well-being? A measurement and moral philosophical perspective, 2017

[W]e cannot concentrate only on benefactors to humans. Perhaps Peter Singer, the most influential person in promoting the welfare and rights of animals, will ultimately have contributed more to the development of the universe than benefactors merely of humans. Perhaps Singer’s book Animal Liberation will (over the centuries) have increased the happiness, health, and lives of animals to such an extent that it adds up to a greater amount of goodness than the human development that will be the total consequence of (say) Gandhi’s actions.

Quentin Smith, Ethical and religious thought in analytic philosophy of language, New Haven, 1997, p. 217

Paying more for a fair trade label is no more “anti-market” than paying more for a Gucci label, and it reflects better ethical priorities.

Peter Singer and Jim Mason, Eating: what we eat and why it matters, London, 2006

I myself regard enjoyment and suffering (defined more broadly to include milder pain and discomfort) as not only the most important, but ultimately the only important things. Freedom, knowledge, and so on are all important but only because they ultimately promote net welfare (enjoyment minus suffering). Even if they do not completely agree with this strong view regarding enjoyment and suffering, most people will accept that enjoyment and suffering are the most important considerations. Given their importance, the amount of scientific research devoted to them is dismally inadequate. The neglect is partly due to the methodological blunder, which prevents the publication of important results on things that are difficult to measure precisely.

Yew-Kwang Ng, The Case for and Difficulties in Using, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 13, no. 1, 1990, pp. 30, p. 30

Though […] feelings are subjective to the sentient concerned, they exist objectively. That my toothache is subjective to me does not make it non-existent.

Yew-Kwang Ng, Towards welfare biology: evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering, Biology and philosophy, vol. 10, no. 3, 1995, pp. 255–285, p. 259

I used to tell students that no one ever heard, say, tasted, or touched a mind. So while minds may exist, they fall outside the realm of science. But I have changed my mind.

Gordon Gallup, Do Minds Exist in Species Other than Our Own, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 9, no. 4, 1985, pp. 633, p. 633

Nonconsequentialists argue for the moral importance of many distinctions in how we bring about states of affairs. I try to present and consider the elements of some of these distinctions. A good deal of section I focuses on providing a replacement for a simple harming/not-aiding distinction and revising and even jettisoning the significance for permissibility of conduct of the intention/foresight distinction. A good deal of section III is concerned with examining the possible moral significance of other distinctions (collaboration versus independent action; near versus far). Some moral philosophers (such as Singer and Unger) think that many nonconsequentialist distinctions have no moral importance, and other philosophers (such as Gert) employ distinctions other than harming/nod-aiding and intending/foreseeing. The work of yet others (Kahneman) could be used to argue that the distinctions that some consequentialists emphasize are reducible to distinctions (loss/no-gain) that are suspect. Some of the chapters examine these alternative views. Finally, some philosophers hold foundational theories, like contractualism, that could be used to derive and justify the nonconsequentialist distinctions by an alternative method from the heavily case-based ones I employ.

Frances M. Kamm, Intricate ethics: Rights, responsibilities, and permissible harm, Oxford, 2007, pp. 7-8

[U]pon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of it veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.

David Hume, An enquiry concerning human understanding: A critical edition, Oxford, 2000

I reject the ultrapostmodern position (like that taken by Richard Rorty while shadowboxing with some vague thing he refers to contemptuously as “the academic Left”), which holds, when confronting ethnic cleansing or genocide as was occurring in Iraq under the sanctions-regime or any of the evils of torture, censorship, famine, and ignorance (most of them constructed by humans, but by acts of God), that human rights are cultural or grammatical things, and when they are violated, they do not really have the status accorded them by crude foundationalists, such as myself, for whom they are as real as anything we can encounter.

Edward W. Said, Humanism and democratic criticism, New York, 2004, p. 136

In those early days, I often wondered how some of my personal idols—Albert Einstein, for instance—could have been meat eaters. I found no explanation, although recently, to my great pleasure, a Web search yielded hints that Einstein’s sympathies were, in fact, toward vegetarianism, and not for health reasons but our of compassion towards living beings. But I didn’t know that fact back then, and in any case many other heroes of mine were certainly carnivores who knew exactly what they were doing. Such facts saddened me and confused me.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, New York, 2007, p. 13

[T]he biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It’s not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings–the core of morality.

[…] Th[e] power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-to-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people’s sentience becomes ludicrous. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath nor a Jew–or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a god–a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are ll made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.

Steven Pinker, The mystery of consciousness, Time, vol. 169, no. 5, 2007, pp. 58–62, 65–66, 69–70

Give to any hypothesis which is worth your while to consider just that degree of credence which the evidence warrants.

Bertrand Russell, A history of western philosophy: and its connection with political and social circumstances from the earliest times to the present day, London, 1946, p. 816

Upon the whole, then, it appears, that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature. When, therefore, these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principle here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation; and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.

David Hume, An enquiry concerning human understanding: A critical edition, Oxford, 2000

I always am surprised when people say, ‘Oh that was a nice discussion. That was fun.’ I think, ‘Fun? Fun? This is a serious matter!’ You try and try to get the right account of the moral phenomena in such cases as the Trolley Case, and getting it right is just as important as when you are doing an experiment in natural science, or any other difficult intellectual undertaking. If we worked on a NASA rocket, and it launched well, we wouldn’t say, ‘Well that was fun!’ It was aweinspiring, that’s the right way of putting it!

Imprints, 2006, pp. 93-117

[Moral] intuitions would fit the earlier social situations of people in hunter-gatherer societies, that is, the social conditions in which the evolutionary selection that shaped our current intuitions took place. (Would justifying norms by such intuitions make them relative to the conditions of hunter-gatherer societies?) How much weight should be placed upon such intuitions? Since they were instilled as surrogates for inclusive fitness, being correlated with it, why not now go directly to calculations of inclusive fitness itself? Or why not, instead, calculate what intuitions would be installed by an evolutionary process that operated over a longer period in which current social conditions held sway, and then justify our moral beliefs by their confluence with / those/ (hypothetical) intuitions, ones better suited to our current situation than the intuitions we have inherited? Or why stay with intuitions instilled by evolution rather than ones instilled by cultural processes, or by some other process we currently find attractive? (But what is the basis of our finding it attractive?)

Robert Nozick, Invariances: The structure of the objective world, Cambridge, MA, 2001, pp. 388-339

[Y]ou will often hear so-called experts complaining that taxes on driving or on pollution would be bad for the economy. That sounds worrying. But what is ‘the economy’? If you spend enough time watching Bloomberg television or reading the Wall Street Journal you may come to the mistaken impression that ‘the economy’ is a bunch of rather dull statistics with names like GDP (gross domestic product). GDP measures the total cost of producing everything in the economy in one year—for instance, one extra cappuccino would add £1.85 to GDP, or a little less if some of the ingredients were imported. And if you think this is ‘the economy’, then the experts may be right. A pollution tax might well make a number like GDP smaller. But who cares? Certainly not economists. We know that GDP measures lots of things that are harmful (sales of weapons, shoddy building work with subsequent expensive repairs, expenditures on commuting) and misses lots of things that are important, such as looking after your children or going for a walk in the mountains.

Most economics has very little to do with GDP. Economics is about who gets what and why.

Tim Harford, The undercover economist: exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor—and why you can never buy a decent used car!, Oxford, 2006, p. 109

By the end of this book, if not before, you may come to have a fuller appreciation of some of your central beliefs about yourself, and some of your related attitudes. In particular, you may come to realize more fully that, even as you yourself most deeply believe, after several more decades at most, you will cease to exist, completely and forever. In the light of this awareness, and according to your deepest values, perhaps you will make the most of your quite limited existence.

Peter Unger, Identity, consciousness and value, Oxford, 1990, p. 3