Quotes About Ethics

Even if the market offers a good price, certain things just aren't done. Parents mustn't sell their children into slavery; a devout Christian must not commit a mortal sin; a loyal knight must never betray his lord; and ancestral tribal lands shall never be sold to foreigners.

Even universities and laboratories need religious backing. Religion provides the ethical justification for scientific research, and in exchange gets to influence the scientific agenda and the uses of scientific discoveries. Hence you cannot understand the history of science without taking religious beliefs into account. Scientists seldom dwell on this fact, but the Scientific Revolution itself began in one of the most dogmatic, intolerant and religious societies in history.

Liberal ethics advises us that if it feels good, we should go ahead and do it. Liberal education teaches us to think for ourselves, because we will find all the answers within.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes.

Si los nuevos tratamientos para alargar la vida y mejorar las condiciones físicas y cognitivas acaban siendo caros, la humanidad podría dividirse en castas biológicas.

Liberalism has a particularly confused notion of 'free will'. Humans obviously have a will, they have desires, and they are sometimes free to fulfil their desires. If by 'free will' you mean the freedom to do what you desire - then yes, humans have free will. But if by 'free will' you mean the freedom to choose what to desire - then no, humans have no free will.

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.

To ensure that the pigs can't run away, farmers in northern New Guinea slice off a chunk of each pig's nose. This causes severe pain whenever the pig tries to sniff. Since the pigs cannot find food or even find their way around without sniffing, this mutilation makes them completely dependent on their human owners. In another area of New Guinea, it has been customary to gouge out pigs' eyes, so that they cannot even see where they're going.7

Male chicks and imperfect female chicks are picked off the conveyor belt and are then asphyxiated in gas chambers, dropped into automatic shredders, or simply thrown into the rubbish, where they are crushed to death. Hundreds of millions of chicks die each year in such hatcheries.

believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

we need to take full responsibility for the crimes and failings of modernity, from genocides to ecological degradation.

The revolutions in biotech and infotech are currently being started by engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists who are hardly aware of the political implications of their decisions, and who certainly don't represent anyone.

secular world judges people on the basis of their behavior rather than their favorite clothes and ceremonies.

What will happen to this view of life as we increasingly rely on AI to make decisions for us?

Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account; they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that's not even half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.

Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable') and Leviticus 20:13 ('If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads').

A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality. Each of us is ensnared within numerous all-encompassing spider webs, which on the one hand restrict our movements, but at the same time transmit our tiniest jiggle to faraway destinations.

How can I find a firm ethical ground in a world that extends far beyond my horizons, that spins completely out of human control, and that holds all gods and ideologies suspect?

el hecho de que algo pueda hacerse no significa que tenga que hacerse.

Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don't tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.

The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence, but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their human masters.

But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

The Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita relates how in the midst of a murderous civil war, the great warrior prince Arjuna is consumed with doubt. Seeing his friends and relatives in the opposing army, he hesitates over whether to fight and kill them. He begins to wonder what good and evil are, who decided it, and what the purpose of human life is.

Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done. Government regulation can successfully block new technologies even if they are commercially viable and economically lucrative.