powerful quotes I keep contemplating

last updated: 7 January 2023

The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

~ Jeremy Bentham (in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation)

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

~ Noam Chomsky (in The Common Good)

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

~ Richard Dawkins (in River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

~ George Bernard Shaw (in Killing For Sport)

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

~ Edward Osborne Wilson (in a debate at the Harvard Museum of Natural History)

There are no catastrophes that loom before us which cannot be avoided; there is nothing that threatens us with imminent destruction in such a fashion that we are helpless to do something about it. If we behave rationally and humanely; if we concentrate coolly on the problems that face all of humanity, rather than emotionally on such nineteenth century matters as national security and local pride; if we recognize that it is not one’s neighbors who are the enemy, but misery, ignorance, and the cold indifference of natural law—then we can solve all the problems that face us. We can deliberately choose to have no catastrophes at all.

~ Isaac Asimov (in A Choice of Catastrophes: The Disasters that Threaten Our World)

Disaster on an unfathomable scale is always taking place on Earth. Countless instances of extreme suffering are occurring in this moment — *right now*. Yet because this suffering is so normal and ordinary, simply occurring every day, distributed rather evenly over time and space, it seems less evocative and urgent than the more unusual, more localized disasters, such as school shootings and earthquakes. Almost all the suffering that occurs on Earth can be considered baseline horror, which allows us to ignore it. We simply do not *feel* the ever-present emergency that surrounds us.

~ Magnus Vinding (in Suffering-Focus Ethics: Defense and Implications)

It's easy to convince oneself that things can't *really* be that terrible, that the horror I allude to is being overblown, that what is going on elsewhere in space-time is somehow less real than the here-and-now, or that the good in the world somehow offsets the bad. Yet however vividly one thinks one can imagine what agony, torture or suicidal despair must be like, the reality is inconceivably worse. The force of "inconceivably" is itself largely inconceivable here. Blurry images of Orwell's "Room 101" can barely even hint at what I'm talking about.

~ David Pearce (in The Hedonistic Imperative)

We advocate the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects, modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific advance may give rise.

~ Humanity+ (in The Transhumanist Declaration)

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

~ in Constitution of the World Health Organization

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

~ Nick Bostrom (in In Defense of Posthuman Dignity)

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

~ Howard Zinn (in You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train) 

Moorean Metaethics and Evolutionary Metaethics: Moore’s Principia Ethica facing Street’s Darwinian Dilemma (term paper)

During my fourth semester of studying philosophy at the University of Zurich, I attended a seminar titled "G.E. Moore: Some Main Problems of Philosophy", which was run by Peter Schulte, who introduced us to the eponymous book. I was intrigued by Moore's work on the role of intuition and common sense in philosophy, which further fuelled my interest in epistemology, especially moral epistemology. As I had also been meaning to explore evolutionary debunking arguments for quite some time, I decided to write a term paper on Moorean metaethics and evolutionary metaethics during the subsequent semester.

This is the link to my second term paper in philosophy: Moorean Metaethics and Evolutionary Metaethics: Moore’s Principia Ethica facing Street’s Darwinian Dilemma