Quotes About Consequences

harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits).

The final problem is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and so on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy.

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page.

Though terrorists hope for the best, their small-scale violence almost never gets them what they want.

An ideology can be dangerous for several reasons. The infinite good it promises prevents its true believers from cutting a deal. It allows any number of eggs to be broken to make the utopian omelet. And it renders opponents of the ideology infinitely evil and hence deserving of infinite punishment

The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.

One [dogma] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.

Many hours of law-school argumentation have been spent on what to do with a man who stabs a corpse thinking it is his sleeping enemy, or whether it makes sense to charge a shooter with attempted murder if the nearest hospital is five minutes away and his victim survives, but to charge him with murder if the nearest hospital is fifteen minutes away and the victim succumbs.

Watch a movie now or pass a course later; buy a bauble now or pay the rent later; enjoy five minutes of fellatio now or an unblemished record in the history books later.

It's not immediately obvious why, out of all the weapons of war, poison gas was singled out as uniquely abominable—as so uncivilized that even the Nazis kept it off the battlefield.

A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos.

The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one.

Human sacrifice and witch-burnings are just two examples of the harm that can result from people pursuing ends that involve figments of their imagination.

Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person's opinion).

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.

Love can make even nice people do awful things.

Love is illogical, love had consequences--I did this to myself, and I should be able to take it.

What love will make you do All the things that we accept Be the things that we regret

What if what you do to survive kills the things you love?

I like to say there's certain things you can't take back: One of them is 'I love you,' and one of them is bullets.

All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

After you, it's all cheap tequila.

Love means never having to say you're sorry. However, it is with sincere regret that I must now kill all of you.