{"quotes":[{"text":"A week-old baby is not a rational and self-aware being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-awareness, capacity to feel and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If, for the reasons I have given, the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either.","author":"Peter Singer","tags":["ethics","utilitarianism"],"id":15554,"author_id":"Peter+Singer"},{"text":"The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.","author":"Leon Trotsky","tags":["communism","democracy","freedom","history","liberty","philosophy","politics","revolution","socialism","utilitarianism"],"id":27459,"author_id":"Leon+Trotsky"},{"text":"The capacity for suffering – or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness – is not just another characteristic like the capacity for language or for higher mathematics. Bentham is not saying that those who try to mark ‘the insuperable line’ that determines whether the interests of a being should be considered happen to have selected the wrong characteristic. 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 child. 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 mice will suffer if they are treated in this way.","author":"Peter Singer","tags":["ethics","suffering","utilitarianism"],"id":29154,"author_id":"Peter+Singer"},{"text":"For preference utilitarians, taking the life of a person will normally be worse than taking the life of some other being, because persons are highly future-oriented in their preferences. To kill a person is therefore, normally, to violate not just one but a wide range of the most central and significant preferences a being can have. Very often, it will make nonsense of everything that the victim has been trying to do in the past days, months or even years. In contrast, beings that cannot see themselves as entities with a future do not have any preferences about their own future existence. This is not to deny that such beings might struggle against a situation in which their lives are in danger, as a fish struggles to get free of the barbed hook in its mouth; but this indicates no more than a preference for the cessation of a state of affairs that causes pain or fear. The behaviour of a fish on a hook suggests a reason for not killing fish by that method but does not in itself suggest a preference utilitarian reason against killing fish by a method that brings about death instantly, without first causing pain or distress. Struggles against danger and pain do not suggest that fish are capable of preferring their own future existence to non-existence.","author":"Peter Singer","tags":["death","ethics","preference","utilitarianism"],"id":29351,"author_id":"Peter+Singer"},{"text":"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. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.","author":"Jeremy Bentham","tags":["ethics","happiness","moral-philosophy","morality","nature","pain","philosophy","philosophy-of-ethics","pleasure","reason","utilitarianism","utility"],"id":51189,"author_id":"Jeremy+Bentham"},{"text":"Settle, for sure and universally, what conduct will promote the happiness of a rational being.","author":"Immanuel Kant","tags":["happiness","philosophy","utilitarianism"],"id":58473,"author_id":"Immanuel+Kant"},{"text":"The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.","author":"John Stuart Mill","tags":["ethics","greatest-happiness-principle","moral-philosophy","pain","philosophy","pleasure","utilitarianism","utility"],"id":61304,"author_id":"John+Stuart+Mill"},{"text":"In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.","author":"Neil Postman","tags":["philosophy","technology","utilitarianism"],"id":105879,"author_id":"Neil+Postman"},{"text":"A gentleman is not a pot.","author":"Confucius","tags":["instrumentalism","utilitarianism","values","virtue"],"id":111685,"author_id":"Confucius"},{"text":"We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good—for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It’s called ‘moral vanity’.","author":"Greg Egan","tags":["consequentialism","effe-tive-altruism","ethics","utilitarianism"],"id":137754,"author_id":"Greg+Egan"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":31,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}