Richard P. Feynman Quotes

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.

Do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, near and distant, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other? If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful.

One way to determine if a view is inadequate is to check its consequences in particular cases, sometimes extreme ones, but if someone always decided what the result should be in any case by applying the given view itself, this would preclude discovering it did not correctly fit the case. Readers who hold they would plug in to the machine should notice whether their first impulse was not to do so, followed later by the thought that since only experiences could matter, the machine would be all right after all.

In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.

At the end of the day, if there are truly ethical considerations, those have to override scientific considerations.

Calculated risks of abuse are taken in order to preserve higher values.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

We should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear… We never know enough to make the chance worth taking.

When a government faces an evil that might be avoided, the usual pattern is to first debate whether or not the evil is real or imagined; then determine how evil it really is; then is it an appropriate function of government to avoid it? Then what are the alternative ways to avoid it? Then what are the costs to avoid it? And finally, is the benefit of avoiding the evil worth the cost? In those cases where it is, it is by this time too late to avoid the evil and discussions shift to ameliorating the evil.

In cases of doubtful morality, it is usual to say is there any harm in doing this? This question may sometimes be best answered by asking ourselves another; is there any harm in letting it alone?

The end never justifies the means because there is no end; there are only means.

If you have difficulties making a decision, choose the lesser of the two evils.

A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot.

We should not be making near-term decisions with long-term consequences without robustly debating these questions and fully considering the substantial and unpredictable risks of these actions.

doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right

The end must justify the means.

If individuals have no sufficient reason to believe that a good situation today will have adverse long-term consequences, it must always be rational for them to aim to maximize their short-term good.

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

The decision to put American lives at risk is a decision that has a very high hurdle to pass.

Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments.

We can't make a decision based on PR value. We have to do what we think is right.

Even if trolley problems were a realistic concern for AVs, it is not clear what, if anything, regulators or companies developing AVs should do about them. The trolley problem is an intensely debated thought experiment precisely because there isn't a consensus on what should be done.

Many people weigh the guilt, they will feel against the pleasure of the forbidden action they want to take.