“[T]he good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing the more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other. And it is evident to me that as a rational being I am bound to aim at good generally, – so far as it is attainable by my efforts, – not at a particular part of it.”
— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
“A winner has to speak not of the world as it is, but of the world as it should be!”
— Sosuke Aizen, Bleach (anime)
“[T]he good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.”
— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
“Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.”
— Slavoj Zizek
“DEDICATED TO
Siang, Aline, Eve and the welfare of all sentients”
— Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfare Economics: Introduction and Development of Basic Concepts (1979)
“*If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”*
— *Desmond Tutu
“Love for all sentient beings instead of hate for everyone that looks different than you.”
— Johannes Ackva
“If we are going to live an ethical life, it is not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots. If we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little.”
— Peter Singer, The why and how of effective altruism (TED Conference, 2013)
“The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering – in so far as rough comparisons can be made – of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account.”
— Peter Singer
“[A]n interest is an interest, whoever’s interest it may be.”
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (1993), p. 21
“[W]hen we make ethical judgments, we must go beyond a personal or sectional point of view and take into account the interests of all those affected. [T]his means that we weigh interests, considered simply as interests and not as my interests, or the interests of people of European descent, or of people with IQs higher than 100. This provides us with a basic principle of equality: the principle of equal consideration of interests.
The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions. This means that if only X and Y would be affected by a possible act, and if X stands to lose more than Y stands to gain, it is better not to do the act. We cannot, if we accept the principle of equal consideration of interests, say that doing the act is better, despite the facts described, because we are more concerned about Y than we are about X. What the principle really amounts to is: an interest is an interest, whoever’s interest it may be.”
— Peter Singer
“How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day.”
— Anne Frank
“A Reasonable Person cannot have self-esteem while ignoring the interests of others whose well-being she recognizes as equally significant.”
— Richard Keshen, Reasonable self-esteem
“[A]s moral philosophers through the ages have pointed out, a philosophy of living based on “Not everyone, just me!” falls apart as soon as one sees oneself from an objective standpoint as a person just like others. It is like insisting that “here,” the point in space one happens to be occupying at the moment, is a special place in the universe.”
— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Chapter 11: The Fear of Nihilism, p. 186
“The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.”
— Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)
“We have next to consider who the “all” are, whose happiness is to be taken into account. Are we to extend our concern to all the beings capable of pleasure and pain whose feelings are affected by our conduct? Or are we to confine our view to human happiness? The former view is the one adopted by Bentham and Mill, and (I believe) by the Utilitarian school generally: and is obviously most in accordance with the universality that is characteristic of their principle… it seems arbitrary and unreasonable to exclude from the end, as so conceived, any pleasure of any sentient being.”
— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
“[T]he good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other.”
— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics: 7th edition (1907), p. 382
“It was a random accident of fate that I was born into my own lucky circumstances. But people born in other circumstances are just as real as I am, no matter where they live, or how similar they are to me. Before I decide what to do with my money, I will try to see through the eyes of all the people my decision affects. I will imagine the future of the world after each decision I could make. Only then will I decide.”
— Aaron Gertler, Utilitarian Thought Experiments
“Morality can demand a lot. Let’s say you’ve been falsely accused of murder, you’ve been sentenced to death, and you realize that you can escape if you kill one of your guards. Morality says you can’t kill him, even though it means you’re going to lose your life. That’s just how it is. Well, it turns out that we can save 1,000 people’s lives. If you don’t do that, then you have to say that it’s permissible to value yourself more than 1,000 times as much as you value strangers. Does that sound plausible? I don’t think that sounds very plausible.”
— Toby Ord
“Lest I offend anyone else by doubting their worth, let me begin by doubting my own. I am not depressed; I think I have an adequate sense of self by standard psychological criteria; I think I am not deficient in ordinary self-esteem; I am certainly not deficient in everyday self-centredness and selfishness. And yet, if I ask myself in a cool hour whether I have some deep intrinsic ‘worth’ that grounds the importance of what happens to me, or that justifies anyone, myself or another, in caring about things for my own sake, I do not find it. Much that goes on in my life is important (in a small way); much of it has intrinsic value, both positive and negative. And those facts matter to how I should be treated. But the idea that they either depend on or manifest my personal ‘worth’ is what escapes me.”
— Donald Regan, Why Am I My Brother’s Keeper? (Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, 2004, p. 228)
“[T]he demands of morality pervade every aspect and moment of our lives – and we all fail to meet its standards. [F]ew of us believe the claim, and [n]one of us live in accordance with it. It strikes us as outrageously extreme in its demands[.] The claim is deeply counterintuitive. But it is true.”
— Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality, (1989), p. 2
“A morality is not incoherent simply because, in its own terms, it would be better not propagated.”
— Jonathan Glover, “It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It” (1975)
“We tell someone that such and such a thing is what morality requires, and he replies that he agrees with us but does not see why he should do what morality requires. What could we say in reply? The individual could have reasons of prudence to do the same thing that morality requires, but, if he asks that question, it is probable that he does not have those reasons or that they are not enough for him. But, if they are not reasons of prudence, what other kinds of reasons is he looking for? What is the meaning of ‘should’ in the question ‘why should I be moral?’ The only possible answer is that the reasons in question must be moral ones and that the duty alluded to by the expression ‘should’ must be amoral duty, since our practical reasoning does not admit reasons and duties of a higher order. But the person who asks these questions will not, of course, be satisfied with an answer which presupposes what he is doubting. What is he in fact asking? The very question seems to involve a contradiction, since once adequately articulated it reads: What moral reason do I have to do what morality prescribes, which is not a reason which is derived from morality itself? This is like asking who is the lucky woman who is the wife of the richest bachelor on earth, and being distressed that we do not get an answer.”
— Carlos Santiago Nino, The Ethics of Human Rights (1991), pp. 81-82
“Mattering as a means is a way of mattering. Your desires would be pointless only if acting rationally did not matter. S claims that, when you are deciding what to do, compared with acting rationally, nothing matters more. This claim is justified even when what it would be rational for you to do is to make yourself disposed to act irrationally. What matters most, even here, is that you do what it would be rational for you to do.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 46
“Professional philosophers [h]ave been more interested in using the issue of famine relief as a club with which to beat utilitarianism over the head for its allegedly extreme demandingness than they have been in upholding the moral necessity of doing far more than most of us do now to aid those in distress – or in exploring why our culture is resistant to that message.”
— William Shaw, Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism (1999), p. 287
“[T]he problem with [the claim that importance to oneself of one’s own projects and attachments limits the extent to which morality can demand that one provide assistance to others] is that, to the extent that it is plausible, it ought also to apply to other equally or more onerous demands that morality might be supposed to make. If my being me and having my own life can exempt me from the moral reason I might otherwise have to save someone unrelated to me (even though she is she, with her own life), it seems that these same facts should also exempt me from the moral reason I have not to kill this person if killing her were as important to me or my projects as avoiding having to save her is.”
— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism
“[I]t is a mistake to suppose that the moral views of effective altruists can be rejected on the ground that they are more demanding than people now and in the past have thought that morality could be. It may well turn out that future people will view the failure of affluent people to take individual action to save the lives of people in impoverished areas in much the way we now look back on the drivers of slaves, who were also acting in conformity with ‘the view of most people’ at the time.”
— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism
“Since, according to maximizing utilitarianism, any act that fails to maximize is wrong, there appears to be no place for actions that are morally admirable but not required, and agents will often be required to perform acts of great self-sacrifice. This gives rise to the common charge that maximizing utilitarianism is too demanding. [H]ow should a utilitarian respond to this line of criticism? One perfectly respectable response is simply to deny the claims at the heart of it. We might insist that morality really is very demanding, in precisely the way utilitarianism says it is. But doesn’t this fly in the face of common sense? Well, perhaps it does, but so what? Until relatively recently, moral “common sense” viewed women as having an inferior moral status to men, and some races as having an inferior status to others. These judgments were not restricted to the philosophically unsophisticated. Such illustrious philosophers as Aristotle and Hume accepted positions of this nature. Many utilitarians (myself included) believe that the interests of sentient non-human animals should be given equal consideration in moral decisions with the interests of humans. This claims certainly conflicts with the “common sense” of many (probably most) humans, and many (perhaps most) philosophers. It should not, on that account alone, be rejected.”
— Alastair Norcross, The Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism (The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism, 2006, p. 218)
“Suppose that I steal whenever I believe that I will not be caught. I may be often caught, and pushed. Even in self-interested terms, honesty may therefore be the best policy for me. [Cases like these on whether the self-interest theory of rationality is self-defeating] are not worthy discussing. If this is the way in which [the self-interest theory] is self-defeating, this is no objection to [it]. [It] is self-defeating here only because of my incompetence in attempting to follow [it]. This is a fault, not in [the self-interest theory], but in me. We might object to some theory that it is too difficult to follow. But this is not true of [the self-interest theory].”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 5
“I could either save a 100,000 years of healthy life, or I could garnish my own already happy life with some extra bells and whistles.”
— Toby Ord
“Forget about measuring yourself against a standard of perfection, and just realize that by dint of sheer good luck you get to do tremendous good in this world whenever you want. Today you could rescue a child from a burning building. You really can. This isn’t merely a metaphor. You can save a life today or over the course of the next year. A life that would otherwise not be saved, but for your action.
So forget about the lives that you’re not saving or didn’t save yesterday when you were just playing with your kids at the beach. You want to live in a world where you get to play with your kids at the beach, but you also get to rescue someone else’s kid from a burning building, from malaria or cholera, or a civil war. You get to do that.”
— Sam Harris, Being Good and Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Waking Up with Sam Harris, August 29, 2016)
“[I]f it’s ever okay to take some time off from morality, it’s only so that you can do more good after the R&R.”
— Nakul Krishna, Add Your Own Egg (The Point Mag, 2016)
“Unspeakably more depends on what things are called, than on what they are.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“[T]he Golden Rule is theoretically inferior to the Impartial Observer Formula and Kant’s Consent Principle. But this rule may be, for practical purposes, the best of these three principles. By requiring us to imagine ourselves in other people’s position, the Golden Rule may provide what is psychologically the most effective way of making us more impartial, and morally motivating us. That may be why this rule has been the world’s most widely accepted fundamental moral idea.”
— Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume One (2011)
“If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?”
— attributed to Buckminster Fuller
*“Ethics is thinking about what the perfect world looks like, and then trying to make ours look more like it.”
— Lukas Gloor
“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”
— Hal 9000
“Now, having obtained a precious human body, [I] do not have the luxury of remaining on a distracted path.”
— Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Root Verses of the Six Bardos
“Why do you move so slowly? Do you think this is some kind of game? You must move faster, your mind cannot conceive of the stakes we are dealing with. It is only through luck and my continued forbearance that you’re even alive. Now move.”
— Dr. Janice Polito (System Shock)
“By the end of this book, if not before, you may come to have a fuller appreciation of some of your central beliefs about yourself, and some of your related attitudes. In particular, you may come to realize more fully that, even as you yourself most deeply believe, after several more decades at most, you will cease to exist, completely and forever. In the light of this awareness, and according to your deepest values, perhaps you will make the most of your quite limited existence.”
— Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness, and Value (1990), p. 3
“You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and this created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
“The bells which toll for mankind are – most of them, anyway – like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.”
— Peter Medawar, The Future of Man (1959)
“[I]magine that aliens that want to toy with you in particular have put a black hole on a collision course with Earth. Imagine that the only way to redirect it is using alien tech on an alien space ship that has been left on Earth and which can be piloted only by you and you alone – and that, to destroy the black hole, you must cross the event horizon, never to return. Would you save the world then? And if so, would you do it only grudgingly? [W]ould you go all out to save the world, or would you put in a token “best effort”, a token “at least I tried”, and then go back to enjoying your remaining time? And if you can’t go all out even in incredible imaginary scenarios where everything depends on you, what are you holding out for?”
— Nate Soares, Desperation (2015)
“Is it not enough to have a strong will in order to fight for peace and justice? In that case, I want strength. I want the strength to help me create peace. If it is not enough to believe in justice, then I will become justice. I will seek out the evils in this world and wipe them out like the clouds in the sky. I swear I will… for justice.”
— Kaname Tosen, Bleach (anime)
“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.”
(“If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the Infernal regions.”)
— Virgil, Aeneid (between 29 and 19 BC)
“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”
— Karen Lamb
“20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.”
— Mark Twain
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
— Martin Luther King
“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”
— William Wilberforce
“It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.”
— Sir Peter Ustinov
“It’s only because the misery and death of people far away from me hasn’t been made sufficiently vivid, so that I can no longer ignore it.”
— Sam Harris, Being Good and Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Waking Up with Sam Harris, August 29, 2016)
“What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”
— William Godwin
“I simply don’t want to look away anymore. I don’t want to ignore the facts when the fate of innumerable creatures depends on what I do.”
— Michael Moor, Impact through rationality (TEDxZurich, 2013)
“After dissolving personal identity and survival, it seems, the central question of “How should one live?” becomes “How should the world be?””
“Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”
— anonymous
“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
“Without a struggle, there can be no progress.”
— Frederick Douglass
“How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.”
— Paulo Coelho
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
— Henry David Thoreau, variation of his journal entry (1845)
“Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements but in virtuous activities.”
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.”
— Alice Walker
“Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.” / “Every time you spend [joules and Planck units], you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”
— Anna Lappé
“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”
— Michel de Montaigne
“No one must shut his eyes and regard as non-existent the sufferings of which he spares himself the sight.”
— Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics (1923)
“[F]ar too often the real world consequences of changing a person’s mind aren’t obvious. But from time to time one finds a topic where a good argument can lead directly to action. In fact, in certain cases accepting the argument or realizing that you don’t have a counterargument demands action.”
— Sam Harris, Being Good and Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Waking Up with Sam Harris, August 29, 2016)
“If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.”
— Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III. Of the Foundation of our Judgments concerning our own Sentiments and Conduct, and of the Sense of Duty, Chapter I: Of the Principle of Self-approbation and of Self-disapprobation
“Moral philosophy provides a bargain in terms of gaining new information: doing just a bit of philosophical study or research can radically alter the value of one’s options. So individuals, philanthropists, and governments should all spend a lot more resources on researching and studying ethics than they currently do.”
— William MacAskill, Will MacAskill on normative uncertainty (Machine Intelligence Research Institute blog)*
“Every day each of us spends time and money on our less than necessary aims in a world where millions of people through no fault of their own are suffering the worst forms of deprivation — deprivation, which, if it were ever to appear directly on your doorstep, so that you couldn’t ignore it, would demand a response.”
— Sam Harris, Being Good and Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Waking Up with Sam Harris, August 29, 2016)
“Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?”
— Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
“You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”
— Nikola Tesla
“If the reader wishes to form an impartial judgment as to what the fundamental problems of Ethics really are, and what is the true answer to them, it is of the first importance that he should not confine himself to reading works of any one single type, but should realize what extremely different sorts of things have seemed to different writers, of acknowledged reputation, to be the most important things to be said about the subject.”
— G. E. Moore, Ethics (1912), p. 253
“Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”
— Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1884)
“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“Saving the world is not something that you do with minimum effort or maximum elegance or any of the other things that make plans clever and intrinsically awesome. The plan to save the world has instrumental value based only on cost-effectiveness.”