Quotes About Ethics

Some knowledge is inherently corrupting

People." I pause for a moment. "Remind me of Peel's Principles of Policing, again?" Ramona looks blank. Mhari looks skeptical. "Policing by consent," I hint. "Come on, the basic rules we play by? Minimum use of force to achieve compliance, the performance of a police force is judged best by how little crime takes place on their watch rather than by how many heads they kick in, that kind of thing?" "Since

If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)

You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It's really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn't just distant from the client base, he's distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort.

A certain Herr Schurz, a Prussian politician, once said: 'My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

The iron law of bureaucracy dictates that most of the people in any large organization will, after a time, be more preoccupied with preserving their own jobs than with fulfilling the mission statement of the agency.

People." I pause for a moment. "Remind me of Peel's Principles of Policing, again?" Ramona looks blank. Mhari looks skeptical. "Policing by consent," I hint. "Come on, the basic rules we play by? Minimum use of force to achieve compliance, the performance of a police force is judged best by how little crime takes place on their watch rather than by how many heads they kick in, that kind of thing?

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority. —Lord Acton

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN IS THE CODE NAME FOR THE END OF the world. You might have noticed that Mo and I have no children. We don't even have a pet cat, the consolation prize of the overworked urban middle classes. There's a reason for this. Would you want to have children, if you knew for a fact that in a couple of years you might have to cut their throats for their own good?

Justice, he thought, has many faces, but they don't always include mercy.

Here is one of the most important things to remember when doing research that involves regression analysis: Try not to kill anyone. You can even put a little Post-it note on your computer monitor: "Do not kill people with your research.

Statistics is like a high-caliber weapon: helpful when used correctly and potentially disastrous in the wrong hands.

The overall lesson of this chapter is that statistical malfeasance has very little to do with bad math.

I would never dream of killing an excellent tailor, not even to keep a secret that could endanger my life.

it is we who degrade ourselves by allowing our standards to be debased without a struggle.

Then a homeless man with a dog approached us and put his hand out. This happens to be something that I have a real problem with: homeless people with pets who approach you for food when they have a perfectly delicious dog standing right there?

This is no way to run a business," I told Dim Sum, and then looked at Tons of Fun. "And you might want to lay off the carbs, you fucking wildebeest.

Why do people show up—if not out of decency, and tradition?

It's just hard to go from seeing elephants living their lives in the wild and not being bothered by humans, to seeing them put in a bunker every night and then being forced to take assholes like us on rides.

I have become so disgusted with the pharmaceutical industry in this country

What?" Dan looked horrified. "I don't make them sign NDAs or anything. It's not like Trump. It's just more of a parting gift, to lessen the blow. Like a couple guys got fired who worked at resorts where I was a guest—that kind of thing. They weren't supposed to mingle with the guests, so when they get fired, and I'm done with my little fling, I give them money.

We're only human James, bound by flesh and blood to do the wrong thing. ~Lena Jefferson from The Other Sister

Sometimes life is not about what u want to do but what u ought to do