Paul Bloom Quotes

Even the best things ill used become evils; and, contrarily, the worst things used well prove good.

In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a 'should' involved, and this cannot be worked out from, 'If I do this, what will happen?' alone.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means.

There is nothing wrong with violence in itself. In any particular case, whether violence is good or bad depends on how it is used and the purpose for which it is used.

The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.

D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

I wanted to play around with the format, really tear it to pieces and shake it up. For example, if Mitch saves someone from drowning, and that person then goes out and releases a virus that kills a million people. Imagine the moral implications of that.

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

They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn't specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get differences.

Whether it's trivial or important, every choice has a moral aspect to it to a certain degree.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

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

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.

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue ... Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

I definitely have a preference for writing anti-heroes and bad guys, especially when they have motivations that the average 'good' person can understand and get behind.

The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for cruelty to our own kind.

There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy -- love which creates life?

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?

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.

The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.

You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.