“Pain that is equally intense may be equally bad even in the absence of self-consciousness. It is not necessary to have the thought “I am in pain” in order for pain to be bad. As people who have experienced the more intense forms of pain are aware, pain can blot out self-consciousness altogether. Intense pain can dominate consciousness completely, filling it and crowding out all self-conscious thoughts.”
— Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (2002), p. 229
“[C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain.”
— Harold Laski, The Dangers of Obedience (1929)
“I didn’t know that freedom meant people doing stuff that sucks. I was thinking more of a ‘choose your own cell phone carrier’ thing.”
— Summer, Rick and Morty, Season 2 Episode 3
“Consider the case of a poor young children who, rather than playing and going to school, must work in terrible conditions and for a miserable salary in order not to starve. These children may not be a slaves and may have the option to choose not to work for their survival, but we can’t really claim that they are free in any meaningful sense. They can’t really choose what to do or they will not survive, much like wild animals who must undergo continuous threats and have to suffer extreme situations that they have no choice over. This cannot be considered freedom. Animals who die shortly after being born can’t be said to be living free, because they have such little chance to live at all in the first place, and because they have almost no chance to exercise freedom at all in that short life.”
— Animal Ethics, Can animals in the wild be harmed in the same ways as domesticated animals and humans?
“It is sometimes assumed that animals in the wild live great lives simply because they are free, as if freedom automatically entails a good life. This is not necessarily true. Theorists of liberty commonly point out that freedom does not simply mean that a being is not forced to do something. Beings need to be able to do what they want to do or what will be good for them. Most nonhuman animals do not have this level of freedom.”
— Animal Ethics, Can animals in the wild be harmed in the same ways as domesticated animals and humans?
“It is sometimes argued that animals in the wild live good lives simply because they are free, as if freedom automatically entails a good life. This is not necessarily true. Theorists of liberty commonly point out that freedom does not simply mean that a being is not forced to do something. Beings need to be able to do what they want to do or what will be good for them. Most nonhuman animals do not have this level of freedom.”
— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering
“When we consider human infants who die shortly after birth, we don’t talk about how much they benefited from the freedom to develop their capacities or fulfill their natures.”
— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering
*“For some, being free is good because it means that personal fulfillment can be achieved or that a person won’t be harmed by oppression. But what matters in not being oppressed is ultimately that your preferences are not thwarted and that you don’t suffer because you are oppressed. Being free is good because it can help you to achieve that. However, if there is no way in which you can live a life free from harm, there is no way in which being free can help you at all. If your freedom only allows you to die in pain, as is often the case for wild animals, then it is not going to help you much.”
— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering
*“A steady view of these matters shows us how to refer all moral choice and aversion to bodily health and imperturbability of mind, these being the twin goals of happy living. It is on this account that we do everything we do – to achieve freedom from pain and freedom from fear. When once we come by this, the tumult in the soul is calmed and the human being does not have to go about looking for something that is lacking or to search for something additional with which to supplement the welfare of soul and body. Accordingly, we have need of pleasure only when we feel pain because of the absence of pleasure, but whenever we do not feel pain, we no longer stand in need of pleasure.
And so we speak of pleasure as the starting point and the goal of the happy life, because we realize that it is our primary native good, because every act of choice and aversion originates with it, and because we come back to it when we judge every good by using the pleasure feeling as our criterion.
[T]hus when I say that pleasure is the goal of living, I do not mean the pleasures of libertines or the pleasures inherent in positive enjoyment, as is supposed by certain persons who are ignorant of our doctrine, or who are not in agreement with it or who interpret it perversely. I mean, on the contrary, the pleasure that consists in freedom from bodily pain and mental agitation.”
— Epicurus
“I suffer great disaster because I have a body. When I have no body, what disaster can there be?”
— Lao Tzu
“The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.”
— Aristotle
“As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence. That plan is most deserving of praise which most ably fosters the creation of the objects and conditions best adapted to diminish the pain of living for those most sensitive to its depressing ravages. To expect perfect adjustment and happiness is absurdly unscientific and unphilosophical. We can seek only a more or less trivial mitigation of suffering.”
— H. P. Lovecraft, Nietzscheism and Realism (1921)
“If people are badly off, suffering, or otherwise remediably miserable, it is not appropriate to address their ill-being by bringing more happy people into the world to counterbalance their disadvantage.”
— Clark Wolfe, O Repugnance, Where Is Thy Sting?
“Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in “our” parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure – absolutely sure – that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence.”
— David Pearce, Quantum Ethics? Suffering in the Multiverse (2008)
“I believe that there is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness, or between pain and pleasure. Both the greatest happiness principle of the Utilitarians and Kant’s principle, “Promote other people’s happiness…”, seem to me (at least in their formulations) fundamentally wrong in this point, which is, however, not one for rational argument….In my opinion…human suffering makes a direct moral appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.”
— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1952)
“I tell thee what; there is not an atom of life in this all-peopled world that does not suffer pain.”
— Mary Shelley, Valperga
“[Pain] is a bad thing in itself. It does not matter who experiences it, or where it comes in a life, or where in the course of a painful episode. Pain is bad; it should not happen. There should be as little pain as possible in the world, however it is distributed across people and across time.”
— John Broome, More Pain or Less? (April, 1996)
“Every human being has a right to freedom from pain to the extent that our knowledge permits health professionals to achieve this goal. [P]ain [i]s more than an intriguing puzzle. It is a terrible problem that faces all humanity and urgently demands a solution.”
— Ronald Melzack, Patrick Wall, The Challenge of Pain (1988)
“[O]thers don’t understand what it’s like to be me. Morality is not an abstract, intellectual game, where I pick a viewpoint that seems comely and elegant to my sensibilities. Morality for me is about crying out at the horrors of the universe and pleading for them to stop. Sure, I enjoy intellectual debates, interesting ideas, and harmonious resolutions of conflicting intuitions, and I realize that if you’re serious about reducing suffering, you do need to get into a lot of deep, recondite topics. But fundamentally it has to come back to suffering or else it’s just brain masturbation while others are being tortured.”
— Brian Tomasik, The Horror of Suffering
“Pain is an evil – all our morality implies that. Even if we have a right to forgive the universe our own pain–and I doubt if we have the right to do even this – we have certainly no right to forgive it the pain of others. We must either believe the pain inflicted for some good purpose, or condemn the universe in which it occurs.”
— John McTaggart, The Necessity of Dogma (1895)
“I have experienced pains no more severe than a broken wrist, torn ankle ligaments, or an abscess in a tooth. These were pretty bad, but I have no doubt that a skilled torturer could make me experience pains many times as bad.”
— Alastair Norcross, Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives (1997)
“Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
“We can deserve many things, such as gratitude, praise, and the kind of blame that is merely moral dispraise. But no one could ever deserve to suffer. For similar reasons, I believe, no one could deserve to be less happy.
When people treat us or others wrongly, we can justifiably be indignant. And we can have reasons to want these people to understand the wrongness of their acts, even though that would make them feel very badly about what they have done. But these reasons are like our reasons to want people to grieve when those whom they love have died.
We cannot justifiably have ill will towards these wrong-doers, wishing things to go badly for them. Nor can we justifiably cease to have good will towards them, by ceasing to wish things to go well for them. We could at most be justified in ceasing to like these people, and trying, in morally acceptable ways, to have nothing to do with them.”
— Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume One (2011), p. 272
“Objection might be taken to the claim that there could be a ‘bare sensation’ of pain which was not disliked. What, it might be asked, would such an experience be like? Can we imagine such an experience? I think that I can not only imagine it, but have had it; but I shall return to this question later. Here I shall just make the obvious point that we cannot conclude, from the fact that something surpasses our imagination, that it cannot happen. I cannot myself imagine what the electric torture would be like; but that does not take away the possibility that it might be inflicted on me. It would be more relevant if it could be established that no sense could be given to the expression ‘experience which is like pain except for not being disliked.’ But that is precisely the question at issue, and this whole paper is an attempt to see what sense can be given to such an expression.”
— R. M. Hare, Pain and Evil (1964)
“The word “acceptance” is widely used to denote an optimistic attitude toward illness that gets past the initial horror of it and enables you to proceed with life. No matter how philosophical you are, however, pain is never really “acceptable.””
— Cheri Register, Living with Chronic Illness (1987), p. 180
“Knowing what it feels to be in pain, is exactly why we try to be kind to others.”
— Jiraiya, Naruto (anime)
“The proper way to prove that pain is bad is proof by induction: specifically, hook an electric wire to the testicles of the person who doesn’t think pain is bad, induce a current, and continue it until the person admits that pain is bad.”
— Scott Alexander, Less Wrong
“Pain [m]ay not be the only evil, but it cannot be denied to be evil.”
— John McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), p. 15
“When I am in pain, it is plain, as plain as anything is, that what I am experiencing is bad.”
— Guy Kahane, The Sovereignty of Suffering: Reflections on Pain’s Badness (2004), p. 2
“Suffering is bad primarily because of its intrinsic nature: it is bad in itself. Suffering of a certain intensity and duration is equally bad, or almost equally bad, wherever it occurs.”
— Jeff McMahan, Animals (A Companion to Applied Ethics, 2003, p. 529)
“[S]uffering cries out for its own abolition[.]”
— Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility (2002), p. 111
“I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.”
— Gautama Buddha (566-480 BC)
“Suffering is an evil in itself for whatever or whoever undergoes it[.]”
— Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (1987), p. 224
“If one goes for a long time without serious pain, one can more or less forget its distinctive nature. But then, when it comes, one is reminded only too well of what it is like, that is, of its reality as a distinctive quality of experience.”
— Timothy Sprigge, Is the esse of Intrinsic Value percipi? (2000)
“I believe that most of us tend to underrate the evilness of suffering. The reason is that it is difficult for us, when not actually suffering, to recollect what suffering really is. We employ numerous psychological mechanisms to conceal from our consciousness the true nature or meaning of suffering, to falsify and deny it. We do this without renouncing the word, however. The word comes to designate, in our minds, only a faint copy or superficial image of the real thing; but having forgotten what the original is, we mistake it in the copy. We ascribe to “suffering” a certain gravity of evil; but it is slight compared to what we would ascribe to suffering itself, if we could only recall its true meaning. [T]he falsification of suffering is everywhere – in movies, in poetry, in novels, on the nightly news. Accounts of disaster routinely veer from a discussion of the agony and plight of the victims (which quickly becomes tiresome) to the description of some moving act of kindness or bravery. Often it is these descriptions that affect us the most and that provoke the greatest outburst of emotion. These are the images we often take away and that become our image of “suffering.” Suffering comes to be closely associated with stirring images of hope in adversity, acts of moral heroism and touching kindness, gestures of human dignity, sentiments of noble sympathy and tremulous concern, the comfort and consolation of tears. It turns into something beautiful. It becomes poetry. People begin to refer to “sublime suffering.” Suffering, in other words, becomes just exactly what it is not.”
— Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility
“Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil. But I cannot, and I too suffer.”
— Bertrand Russell, Prologue: “What I Have Lived For” (written on 25 July 1956)
“Since the notion of quality, as understood by [the Swedish Research Council], is supposed to ignore practical applicability, quality as the sole selection criterion means that we value the production of new knowledge and its own right, rather than just a means towards attaining other goals. I have long been – and still am – highly sympathetic to this romantic view of knowledge and intellectual achievements. To improve our understanding of the world we live in really is one of the most magnificent and worthy the goals of human activity one can think of. And yet, it is not the only worthy goal. A bright future for humanity, where everyone has the best possible prospects of leading a happy and prosperous life, and where such things as poverty, pain and misery are reduced to a minimum, seems like another goal worth striving for, at least as important as the quest for ever-increasing knowledge.”
— Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Chapter “Science for good and science for bad”, p. 8
“I just can’t bring myself to feel so lucky when there is so much suffering. Sure, ability to understand the universe is great, but what good is it when your life is spent in desperate isolation, or extreme pain, or eternal conflict? I say we keep what Richard Dawkins has said in mind, and also combat unnecessary suffering. That is what I am going to do. I cannot live with myself if I do not live both ways.”
— pseudonymous comment response to Richard Dawkins’ “Growing Up in the Universe”
“If I could trade some bafflement in factual matters for certitude about questions of ethics, would I do so? Which is more important: knowing the precise phylogenetic relationships between all the various branches of the evolutionary bush or knowing the meaning of life?”
— Robert Sawyer, Calculating God (2000), p. 197
“Moral choices often involve hard thinking, diligent gathering of information about the situation at hand, careful consideration of immediate and future consequences, and weighing of alternatives.”
— Fred Edwords, The Humanist Philosophy in Perspective
“Ethics is inescapable. Everyday we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.”
— Peter Singer
“At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week’s toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths – and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.”
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics: Third edition (2011)
“Another moral philosopher Stephen Gardiner call [climate change] “a perfect moral storm,” based on the juxtaposition of a number of aspects, each contributed heavily to its difficulty. One is that the harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions does not hit mainly upon the individual emitter, but it is dispersed over the entire population of Earth. This means that an individual looking after his personal well-being has little incentive to contribute to the common good by cutting his emissions. Conditional on what everyone else does, then, no matter what their emission levels are, my own emissons make little difference, so if it is more convenient for me to take the car than to take the bus, that will be the best action from a prudential perspective (i.e., when optimizing what is best for me without regard to what is good for others). In other words, the problem is an instance of the social dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons. To this spatial dispersion of causes (greenhouse gas emissions) and effects (climate change), we must also add the temporal aspect: our emissions today affect not only people living today, but also future generations. This makes the problem even more difficult due to the asymmetry that our actions influence the well-being of future generations whereas theirs do not affect us. A further contribution to the perfect storm is our lack of adequate theoretical and institutional tools to handle issues involving the far future, intergenerational justice, scientific uncertainty and our actions effects’ on nature.”
— Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Chapter “Our planet and its biosphere”, p. 34
“In some parts of the world, what you are doing is already apparent. According to the World Health Organization, the warming of the planet caused an additional 140,000 deaths in 2004, as compared with the number of deaths there would have been had average global temperatures remained as they were during the period 1961 to 1990. This means that climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.”
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics: Third edition (2011)
“The 4°C scenarios are devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; the increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer; wet regions becoming wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems. And most importantly, a 4°C world is so different from the current one that comes with high uncertainty and new risks that threaten our ability to anticipate and plan for future adaptation needs.”
— World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer Planet Must be Avoided
“[D]eveloped states have been more willing to appeal to moral values and to use such appeals in justification of initiatives -such as the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia – that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. But these appeals only heighten the puzzle. If it makes sense to spend billions to endanger thousands of lives in order to rescue a million people from Serb oppression, would it not make more sense to spend similar sums, without endangering any lives, on leading many millions out of life-threatening poverty?”
— Thomas Pogge, Priorities of Global Justice (2001)
“A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.”
— John Stuart Mill
“The proper aim of giving is to put the recipients in a state where they no longer need our gifts.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960)
“[O]veremphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a ‘matter-of-fact’ habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. Without ‘ethical culture’ there is no salvation for humanity.”
— Albert Einstein (1953)
“In the western world, we tend to think of ethical living as a simple matter of being polite, obeying the law and making the odd donation to our favorite charities. But with just a bit more thought, there is so much more good we could do: with our donations, our careers and our lives.”
— The Most Good You Can Do promotion website
“In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means to getting from A to B – all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live.”
— Peter Singer, How Are We to Live?, Chapter “The Escalator of Reason” (1995)
“Unfortunately, giving to charity is often regarded in broader society merely as a generous use of our spare cash, and working for charities is seen as something someone does when they “feel a calling” to help others. Not participating in altruistic efforts is conceived of as a mere omission. But by not giving all we can, we are failing to help individuals whose suffering we could have prevented. Whether we harm them or neglect to help them, we have responsibility in their suffering either way. [U]ltimately, when we think about where to direct our resources, it is crucial that we consider all those whose suffering we have the ability to prevent.”
— Sentience Politics, Altruism, Numbers, and Factory Farms
“[T]here is only one best charity: the one that helps the most people the greatest amount per dollar. This is vague, and it is up to you to decide whether a charity that raises forty children’s marks by one letter grade for $100 helps people more or less than one that prevents one fatal case of tuberculosis per $100 or one that saves twenty acres of rainforest per $100. But you cannot abdicate the decision, or you risk ending up like the 11,000 people who accidentally decided that a pretty picture was worth more than a thousand people’s lives.”
— Scott Alexander, Efficient charity: do unto others…
“Most donors say they want to “help people”. If that’s true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don’t. In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. [T]hese people didn’t have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.”
— Scott Alexander, Efficient charity: do unto others…
“Imagine a military doctor who comes across a battlefield laden with hundreds of injured soldiers in severe pain. The doctor calls for assistance, but the additional medical units will not arrive for thirty minutes. However, the doctor happens to have with him a bag of pain medicine that he can use to palliate the suffering around him. Would it be acceptable for him to treat five of the soldiers and then stop to read a comic book, arguing that he has produced some positive change in aggregated welfare and he needn’t spend all of his effort helping others? Similarly, would we countenance his decision to spend most of his limited supply of pain killer on the mildly injured patients nearest to him, even though many of those a bit farther away are in absolute agony? I believe that the answers ought to be ‘no’. Rather, triage – giving greatest medical attention to those who can be helped most in the least amount of time – represents the ethical imperative under these circumstances.”
— Brian Tomasik, On triage (Essays on Reducing Suffering / 80,000 Hours)
“The problem with death is not just that it can be painful, but that it also irreversibly prevents any more experience, any more action. Our social bonds are broken. Pain can be dealt with, but these other factors point at what makes life worth living. We should seek to live longer because we love life.”
— Anders Sandberg, Desperately seeking eternity (2016)
“Every time someone dies, a library burns. The experiences, skills, and relationships painstakingly built across a lifetime disappear forever. We cannot prevent any particular library from eventually having a fire, but we can make sure the fires are rare. Humans are precious, and that is why we should not wish them to age.”
— Anders Sandberg, Desperately seeking eternity (2016)
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
“And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.”
— Isabella, Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 1
“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
“Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, – will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, – or to diminish something of their pains.”
— Jeremy Bentham
“Forgive me friend, your death only adds to my failure.”
— Vaelastrasz
“Sorry. I don’t feel like dying yet. If I die, everything on my back will be destroyed.”
— Ichigo Kurosaki
Rukia Kuchiki: “Wait, hold on!”
Ichigo Kurosaki: “What is it?”
Rukia Kuchiki: “Just where are you going? That boy is a complete stranger, isn’t he?”
Ichigo Kurosaki: “So what? I can’t just stand by and let this happen. You expect me to watch him die?”
Rukia Kuchiki: “Don’t be such a fool! In the eyes of a soul reaper all the spirits of this world are equal. Getting involved simply because spirits are nearby or they need help isn’t how it works. Leave him be. If you intend to help this child, then commit yourself to saving every spirit. You must be willing to go to any length, even to sacrifice your own life.”
— Bleach
Oskar Schindler: “I could have got more out. I could have got more. I don’t know. If I’d just… I could have got more.”
Itzhak Stern: “Oskar, there are eleven hundred people who are alive because of you. Look at them.”
Oskar Schindler: “If I’d made more money… I threw away so much money. You have no idea. If I’d just…”
Itzhak Stern: “There will be generations because of what you did.”
Oskar Schindler: “I didn’t do enough!”
Itzhak Stern: “You did so much.”
[Schindler looks at his car]
Oskar Schindler: “This car. Goeth would have bought this car. Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. Ten people. Ten more people.”
[removing Nazi pin from lapel]
Oskar Schindler: “This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would have given me two for it, at least one. One more person. A person, Stern. For this.”
[sobbing]
Oskar Schindler: “I could have gotten one more person… and I didn’t! And I… I didn’t!”
“The single most important lesson I’ve learned in the past 20 years is that the irreducible heart of what matters is suffering. Back then, although I was sure I knew everything, I really didn’t know anything about suffering. Since then, though, I’ve developed a chronic disease, and experienced times when I thought I was going to die, times when I wished I would die. Back then, I worried about abstractions and words and principles; I argued about exploitation, oppression, liberation, etc. I didn’t take suffering seriously. Now, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem, well, to put it kindly, ridiculous.”
— Matt Ball
“It’s easy for us, in our comfortable houses and with full stomachs, to muse about various moral abstractions that catch our interest. I say no. When you let other things displace the importance of suffering, that’s not an improvement but a failure of goal preservation. That future self would be failing to live up to what I care about now, and I don’t want that to happen. It’s the feeling other altruists would have if they started using all their money to buy expensive cars and mansions.”
— Brian Tomasik, The Horror of Suffering
“[S]omeone who does not see that the remediable suffering of others creates obligations is simply not a moral agent.”
— John Harris, Organ Procurement: Dead Interests, Living Needs (2003)
“Imagine that there is a button that, if pushed, will cause all sentient life to painlessly cease to suffer forever. [W]ould there be no obligation to press the button?”
— John Harris, Organ Procurement: Dead Interests, Living Needs (2003)
“There is no need to import superstition. We can begin with a mechanistic view of the world, one in which bits of energy and matter interact in various ways perhaps according to certain deterministic or probabilistic laws of causation; and in which people’s lives are determined by the interplay of their own desires, goals, commitments, urges, and impulses with those of other people, steered by different beliefs about the world, of varying degrees of falsehood and veracity, all within the limits imposed by nature; but a world that exhibits no transcendent purpose or meaning or design in any of its parts – no purpose, that is, outside the purely continent (and usually quite powerless) wills of individual people and animals. Nevertheless, surely it would be blindness to fail to see, at the very least, that some things in this purposeless world are objectively bad; that these things ought not to arise; that we are obliged by their very badness to prevent them from arising; and that certainly the experience of suffering in its many forms has this very property of objective badness that I have been describing, even if nothing else has it. It seems to me stranger to deny this than to affirm it.”
— Jeremy Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility (1999), p. 113
“Consider how strange is the question posed by someone who wants a justification for altruism about such a basic matter as this. Suppose he and some other people have been admitted to a hospital with severe burns after being rescued from a fire. “I understand how my pain provides me with a reason to take an analgesic,” he says, “and I understand how my groaning neighbor’s pain gives him a reason to take an analgesic; but how does his pain give me any reason to want him to be given an analgesic? How can his pain give me or anyone else looking at it from outside a reason?
This question is crazy. As an expression of puzzlement, it has that characteristic philosophical craziness which indicates that something very fundamental has gone wrong. This shows up in the fact that the answer to the question is obvious, so obvious that to ask the question is obviously a philosophical act. The answer is that pain is awful. The pain of the man groaning in the next bed is just as awful as yours. That’s your reason to want him to have an analgesic.”
— Thomas Nagel, The Limits of Objectivity (1980)
“[I]t seems to me that certain things, such as pain and suffering to take the clearest example, are bad. I don’t think I’m just making that up, and I don’t think that is just an arbitrary personal preference of mine. If I put my finger in a flame, I have a certain experience, and I can directly see something about it (about the experience) that is bad. Furthermore, if it is bad when I experience pain, it seems that it must also be bad when someone else experiences pain.”
— Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism
“[R]eason shows me that the suffering of another being is very similar to my own suffering and matters just as much to that other being as my own suffering matters to me, then my reason is showing me something that is undeniably true. [T]he perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found.”
— Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)
“With our decisions, here in our heads, we decide about how much horrible suffering there will or won’t be in the world.”
— Michael Moor, Impact through rationality (TEDxZurich, 2013)
“Saving a life is better than making a wish come true, and saving three lives is better than saving one.”
— Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do (2015)
“To give away money is in easy matter in any man’s power. But to decide to whom to give it, and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter.”
— Aristotle, Ethics (360 BC)
“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”
— Friedrich Hayek
“If you think about it, what we should want from our charity work is not that different from what we want when we reach for a can of soda. We should want as much value as we can get – that is, we should want to make the world as much of a better place as possible.”
— Nick Cooney, How To Be Great At Doing Good
“Perform whatever thought experiments and meditations you have to to be able to imagine a situation where you would do everything in your power to achieve some outcome, without regard for the consequences (beyond their effect on the outcome). Figure out the circumstances under which you’d pull out all the stops and unbar all the holds and put everything you have into the struggle.”
— Nate Soares, Desperation (2015)
“[Desperation is] about having a goal so important that the social concerns drop away, except exactly insofar as they’re relevant to the achievement of your goal. It’s about being willing to let yourself care more about the task at hand than about what everyone thinks about you, no matter how much they would deride you for fully committing.”
— Nate Soares, Desperation (2015)
“In the hypothetical worlds where there are no third alternatives and all the actions before you, it doesn’t matter that all the actions lead to bad outcomes. The best choice is still quite clear: take the action that leads to the best outcome, and take it without remorse. [S]o in the real world, do the same. [L]ook at your actions available options again, and stop measuring them against an objective ideal, and start measuring them against each other. [T]hen, when you’re done and you’ve considered all available options, simply take the best action available. Take it, without suffering, no matter how bad it is. That is all there is to do.”
— Nate Soares, Choose without suffering (2015)
“Let’s say you think utilitarianism is true with some probability, and Kantian deontology is also true with some probability. Can you aggregate the recommendations of these two theories “across the probabilities”? Not easily. The Kantian theory offers an absolute recommendation, but should that carry the day if deontology is true with only 7%? More generally, even less absolute theories do not offer comparable frameworks for cross-theoretical aggregation. How does 6% truth for maximin, 13% truth for prioritarianism, and 27% truth for cosmopolitan utilitarianism all add up? It’s not like calculating true shooting percentage in the NBA, because there is no common and commensurable understanding of “points” across the different frameworks. This aggregation problem is actually tougher than Arrow’s, at least once we recognize there is justifiably uncertainty about the true moral theory.”
— Tyler Cowen, The difficulty of cross-theoretical aggregation
“Endorsing a particular view involves carefully weighing up different strengths and weaknesses; there’s no obviously correct position. (This becomes a theme when you start working on normative uncertainty. To an extent, this should be expected: we’re dealing with messy nonideal agents, who don’t have perfect access to their own values or to the normative truth).”
— William MacAskill, Will MacAskill on normative uncertainty (Machine Intelligence Research Institute blog)
“[M]oment utility is measured by collecting introspective reports, but this [i]s not necessary. Appropriately validated physiological measures of moment utility could be used instead, and may have important advantages. The most promising physiological indicator of momentary affect is the prefrontal cortical asymmetry in the electroencephalogram (EEG), which has been extensively validated by Davidson and his team as a measure of the balance of positive and negative feelings, and of the relative strength of tendencies toward approach or avoidance. A portable measuring instrument is not yet available, but is technically feasible. When success is achieved, Davidson’s technique will be a candidate for a continuous and non-intrusive indicator of moment utility.”
— Daniel Kahneman, Jason Riis, Living, and Thinking about it: Two Perspectives on Life (The Science of Well-Being, 2005, p. 292)
“Constructing a single “happiness” or “preference” evaluation from this complex system is not obvious. It would be akin to asking “How happy is General Motors?” or “What does General Motors prefer?” There are many pieces of the system you could look at when answering that question.”
— Brian Tomasik, This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral (Dylan Matthews, Vox, April 23, 2014)
“The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a ‘spirit world’ than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.”
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), p. 254
“[W]hile the problem of interpersonal comparability of utility is a tricky one, it is not insoluble in principle. It is conceivable that, perhaps several hundred (or a thousand) years from now, neurology may have advanced to the stage where the level of happiness can be accurately correlated to some cerebral reaction that can be measured by a ‘eudaimonometer’. Hence the definition of social welfare [in terms of the sum total of individual happiness] is an objective definition, although the objects are the subjective feelings of individuals.”
— Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfare Economics: Towards a More Complete Analysis (2004), p. 4
“[I]t is an objective fact whether a certain experience is pleasurable or unpleasurable, and relatedly whether a particular conscious individual is presently experiencing something pleasurable or painful. It is an objective fact, so we may put it, about a subjective state.”
— Timothy Sprigge, Is the esse of Intrinsic Value percipi?: Pleasure, Pain and Value (Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, 2000, p. 123)
“Though [f]eelings are subjective to the sentient concerned, they exist objectively. That my toothache is subjective to me does not make it non-existent.”
— Yew-Kwang Ng, Towards Welfare Biology
“While one’s phenomenology is often called one’s “subjective experience”, this does not mean that facts about it lack objectivity. “Subjective” in “subjective experience” means “internal to the mind”, not “dependent on attitudes towards it.””
— Neil Sinhababu, The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism
“Suppose that we all come to believe C [(Consequentialism)]. (This will seem less implausible when we remember that C can be a pluralist theory, appealing to different moral principles.) We then decide that C is wholly self-effacing. We decide that it would make the outcome best if we caused ourselves to believe some improved version of Common-Sense Morality. We might succeed in bringing about this change in our beliefs. Given changes in the world, and in our technology, it might later come to be true that the outcome would be better if we revised our moral beliefs. But if we no longer believed C, because we now believed some version of Common-Sense Morality, we would not be led to make these needed revision in our morality.
But, in order to believe this morality, we must have forgotten that this is what we did. We would simply believe this morality. We might therefore not be led to revise our morality even if it came to be true that our belief in this morality would increase the chances of nuclear war.
These claims should affect our answer to the question whether it would make the outcome better if we all ceased to believe C. We might believe correctly that there is some other moral theory belief in which would, in the short run, make the outcome better. But once Consequentialism has effaced itself, and the cord is cut, the long-term consequences might be much worse.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), pp. 41-42
“It would be natural to want the best theory about rationality not to be self-effacing. If the best theory was self-effacing, telling us to believe some other theory, the truth about rationality would be depressingly convoluted. It is natural to hope that the truth is simpler: that the best theory would tell us to believe itself. But can this be more than hope? Can we assume that the truth must be simpler? We cannot.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 24
“[Suppose that] the technology of lie-detection made us all wholly transparent. If we could never deceive each other, there might be an argument that showed that, according to S [(the Self-Interest theory)], it would be rational for everyone to cause himself not to believe S.
[S] would then be self-effacing. If we believed S, but could also change our beliefs, S would remove itself from the scene. It would become a theory that no one believed. But to be self-effacing is not to be self-defeating. It is not the aim of a theory to be believed. If we personify theories, and pretend that they have aims, the aim of a theory is not to be believed, but to be true, or to be the best theory. That a theory is self-effacing does not show that it is not the best theory.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 24
“[I]t remains true that there will always be a very small chance of some totally unforeseen disaster resulting from your act. But it seems equally true that there will be a corresponding very small chance of your act resulting in something fantastically wonderful, although totally unforeseen. If there is indeed no reason to expect either, then the two possibilities will cancel each other out as we try to decide how to act.”
— Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (1998), p. 65
“If we develop a better system for determining relevant causal relations so that we are able to choose actions that better produce our intended ends, it does not follow that we then must change our ethics. The moral impulse of utilitarianism is constant, but our decisions under it are contingent on our knowledge and scientific understanding.”
— Russell Hardin, Morality within the Limits of Reason (1990)
“No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
— attributed to Edmund Burke
“Since we cannot save everyone, the best we can do is to save the greatest number.” / “Alors, comme on ne peut pas sauver tout le monde, le mieux qu’on puisse faire est de sauver le plus grand nombre.”
— Adriano Mannino interview quote in French translation (La Peniche, Altruisme efficace: Comment sauver 10 000 personnes en une vie? March 31st, 2016)
“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”
— Mother Theresa
“In a lifetime, you can save 10,000 people or do nothing.” / “En une vie, vous pouvez sauver 10 000 personnes. Ou ne rien faire.”
— Adriano Mannino interview quote in French translation (La Peniche, Altruisme efficace: Comment sauver 10 000 personnes en une vie? March 31st, 2016)
“[T]he status quo is the outcome of a system of national selfishness and political expediency, [n]ot the result of a considered attempt to work out the moral obligations of the developed nations[.]”
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (1993), p. 262