Cathy O'Neil Quotes

I think ethics is always there; it's not always a very thoughtful or reflective ethics.

The most profound and serious indication of the moral implications underlying the ecological problem is the lack of respect for life evident in many of the patterns of environmental pollution.

The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuosity into life.

Should I be the one to play God? We're both about the same age, but we grew up in different neighborhoods.

There's less of a connection for a lot of people between the technical decisions we make and the ethical ramifications we are responsible for.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral.

Life was cheap in the Middle Ages. It has become cheaper since. It is only in specific battles for specific lives that our culture is put to the test, and with it our humanity.

For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens, our species - and we're just animals too, we're just mammals - that there is nothing morally special about us. I myself don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision, but it is certainly the received view in many quarters.

The training one receives when one becomes a technician, like a data scientist - we get trained in mathematics or computer science or statistics - is entirely separated from a discussion of ethics.

Vivisection is wrong because it is an abuse of man's power over the helpless, involving pain and suffering. The name for this is cruelty, and cruelty is immoral, no matter what the reason for its introduction.

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

Knowledge is power. Power to do evil...or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?

A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.

This is why moral uneasiness is destined to become even more acute. It is obvious that a fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilization, which does not allow the human family to break free from such radically unjust situations.

To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity.

My country and me, we are part of this region, we're not separated. We cannot discuss it as Syria or as me ; it should be as part, as a whole, as comprehensive. That's how we have to look at it.

What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

Many good Christians are confused about complex social issues of our day, such as doctor-assisted death or medical research which uses stem cells from human embryos. They wonder, 'Why shouldn't science use discarded fetuses for research?' And if someone finds his medical condition intolerable and hopeless, 'why shouldn't he have the legal right to end his life?' Although the Bible does not address these issues in particular, it does provide guiding insights.

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.

Even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse).