D. Hume (1740)
Here then is the only expedient, from which we can hope for success in our philosophical researches, to leave the tedious lingering method, which we have hitherto followed, and instead of taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier, to march up directly to the capital or center of these sciences, to human nature itself; which being once masters of, we may every where else hope for an easy victory.
Chapter 1
Winston Churchill (1940).
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer with one word; It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.
Chapter 4
Anne-Marie Pieper (1991).
A series of critical arguments and criticisms on ethics posed by practitioners and moral philosophers today, that is, objections and criticisms that ethics is ineffective, not helpful, and brings up no results in reality, and consequently useless, are all from a misunderstanding of the concept of [moralistic] freedom and the task of ethics.
Chapter 9
Bertrand Russell (1950)
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
Chapter 10
Pierre Simon Laplace (1902)
We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.
Chapter 10
Jeremy Bentham (1781)
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.
Chapter 12
Bernard Shaw (1903).
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generations.
Chapter 12
David Hume (1740)
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.
Chapter 12
Seneca
I think of houses too, where one treads on precious stones, and where valuables lie about in every corner, where the very roof is brilliantly painted, and a whole nation attends and accompanies an inheritance on the road to ruin. What shall I say of waters, transparent to the very bottom, which flow round the guests, and banquets worthy of the theatre in which they take place? Coming as I do from a long course of dull thrift, I find myself surrounded by the most brilliant luxury, which echoes around me on every side: my sight becomes a little dazzled by it: I can lift up my heart against it more easily than my eyes. When I return from seeing it I am a sadder, though not a worse man, I cannot walk amid my own paltry possessions with so lofty a step as before, and silently there steals over me a feeling of vexation, and a doubt whether that way of life may not be better than mine. None of these things alter my principles, yet all of them disturb me.
Chapter 13
Edward O. Wilson (1978)
Age-grading, antennal rites, body licking, calendar, cannibalism, caste determination, caste laws, colony-foundation rules, colony organization, cleanliness training, communal nurseries, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, division of labor, drone control, education, eschatology, ethics, etiquette, euthanasia, fire making, food taboos, gift giving, government, greetings, grooming rituals, hospitality, housing, hygiene, metamorphosis rites, mutual regurgitation, nursing castes, nuptial flights, nutrient eggs, population policy, queen obeisance, residence rules, sex determination, soldier castes, sisterhoods, status differentiation, sterile workers, surgery, symbiont care, tool making, trade, visiting, weather control, …
Chapter 13
Edward O. Wilson (1978)
Much of what passes for theory in sociology today is really labeling of phenomena and concepts, in the expected manner of natural history. Process is difficult to analyze because the fundamental units are elusive, perhaps nonexistent. Syntheses commonly consist of the tedious cross-referencing of differing sets of definitions and metaphors erected by the more imaginative thinkers.
Chapter 13
Edward O. Wilson (1978)
Innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow.
Chapter 13
Phillip Kitcher (1993)
- Sociobiology has the task of explaining how people have come to acquire ethical concepts, to make ethical judgments about themselves and others, and to formulate systems of ethical principles.
- Sociobiology can teach us facts about human beings that, in conjunction with moral principles that we already accept, can be used to derive normative principles that we had not yet appreciated.
- Sociobiology can explain what ethics is all about and can settle traditional questions about the objectivity of ethics. In short, sociobiology is the key to metaethics.
- Sociobiology can lead us to revise our system of ethical principles, not simply by leading us to accept new derivative statements—as in number 2 above—but by teaching us new fundamental normative principles. In short, sociobiology is not just a source of facts but a source of norms.
Chapter 13
Nature Genetics (2001)
Scholars of theory and philosophy at the heart of traditional ethics have helped us to understand the motivations behind actions that we intuitively feel to be right and moral; through their work we come to better understand the distinction between rights and duties. But all too often this approach does not yield an understanding or direction that enables us to make pragmatic decisions concerning the future development and emphasis of genomics and other technologies.
Chapter 13
M. D. Hauser (2006)
A train is moving at the speed of 100 miles per hour due to brake failure. The operator of the train sees five hikers ahead of him. He will surely kill the five people on the track. However, the driver notices that there is a fork between the hikers and the train, and he can direct the train the other way. However, unfortunately, he finds another hiker on that track, too. Should the driver redirect the train?
Chapter 13
M. D. Hauser (2006)
A train is moving at the speed of 100 miles per hour due to brake failure. The driver of the train sees five hikers ahead of him. He will surely kill the five people on the track. You are watching this horrible situation on a bridge crossing the railroad, which is located between the train and hikers. You are not alone. There is another person whose weight is over 200 pounds leaning over the fence watching the train. If you push him to fall and block the railroad, the train will be stopped, and five hikers will be saved. Should you push him to block the train and save five lives?
Chapter 13
W. Styron (1976)
Sophie and her two children are kept captive in a Nazi concentration camp. One day, a guard approaches Sophie and offers her a choice: If she kills one of her two children, the other will live; if she refuses to choose, both children will die. The guard forces her to make a choice between her children within 24 hours. What should Sophie do?
Chapter 15
Edward O. Wilson (1978)
[Philosophers] examine the precepts of ethical systems with reference to their consequences and not their origins. Thus John Rawls opens his influential A Theory of Justice (1971) with a proposition he regards as beyond dispute: “In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” Robert Nozick begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with an equally firm proposition: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do.
Chapter 15
Edward O. Wilson (1978)
The challenge to science is to measure the tightness of the constraints caused by the programming, to find their source in the brain, and to decode their significance through the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the mind.
Chapter 16
Hyungak (1999)
The society to which I belong was built on the sacrifice of numerous people from poor countries. For instance, the bananas and oranges that I purchased in America were abundant, and good-quality jeans were very cheap. That was possible because the farmers of South American countries were forced to work at low wages by the autocratic rulers who were supported by the American government. My life was constructed totally by their misery. The sugarcane providing the main ingredient, sugar, in the Coca Cola that I drank like water turned out to be the product of low-salary labor of the farmers of Jamaica or the Dominican Republic. I realized that all my behavior and the economic actions occurring around me were only possible due to the pains of other people and that their lives are getting worse and worse. I felt as if I slapped their faces whenever I drank a cheap Coke to quench my thirst.
Chapter 16
John Maynard Keynes (1963)
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.