Quotes About Ethics

Si uno ensalza la razón, entonces lo que importa es la integridad de los pensamientos, no las personalidades de los pensadores.

to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.

between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, "War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on. But this strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines, and the statement gave no indication that we might have good reasons to prefer understanding and know-how to ignorance and superstition

legítimas, rápidas, justas, moderados y humanas diferencian sus consejos de la retórica de la mano dura contra la delincuencia preferida por los políticos de derechas.

raped, or killed, and it's hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning

in support of the idea that moral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. 3

Who will live and who will die are not inscribed in a Book of Life. They are affected by human knowledge and agency, as the world becomes more intelligible and life becomes more precious.

by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.

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.

If my starting offer is "I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don't get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind," I can't expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there's no good reason that I should get privileges just because I'm me and you're not.

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.

The alternative, then, to the religious theory of the source of values is that evolution endowed us with a moral sense, and we have expanded its circle of application over the course of history through reason (grasping the logical interchangeability of our interests and others'), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel other people's pain).

In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago, who approved, carried out, and even savored the infliction of unspeakable agony on other living beings. What were these people feeling? And why don't we feel it today?

Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws....

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.

Human life is a cardinal value that trumps social norms, social stability, or obedience to the law.

Steven Pinker

And with an average trial length at the time of eight and a half minutes, it is certain that many of the people sent to the gallows were innocent.67 Rummel estimates that between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

Moore noted that it is sensible to ask, "This conduct is more evolutionarily successful, but is it good?" The mere fact that the question makes sense shows that evolutionary success and goodness are not the same thing.

progress" unguided by humanism is not progress.

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.