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.
So I think ethics is the broader thing that’s less focused on prohibitions and is more perhaps looking at principles and questions and ideas about how to live your life.
Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.
If extreme poverty is allowed to increase, it will give rise to new problems, including new diseases that will spread from countries that cannot provide adequate healthcare to those that can. Poverty will lead to more migrants seeking to move, whether legally or not, to rich nations.
In an ideal world, the amount of money we spend on medical research to prevent or cure a disease would be proportional to its seriousness and the number of people who suffer from it.
Most of the robots being developed for home use are functional in design – Gecko’s homecare robot looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2-D2. Honda and Sony are designing robots that look more like the same movie’s ‘android’ C-3PO.
If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.
Almost everybody accepts that some people can be killed. ‘The concept of ‘brain death’ – the belief that people on respirators can legitimately be killed – shows that.
I’m a Utilitarian, so I don’t see the rule against lying as absolute; it’s always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise.
Interest in business ethics courses has surged, and student activities at leading business schools are more focused than ever before on making business serve long-term social values.
I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it’s clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.
Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.
Knowing that we can control our own behaviour makes it more likely that we will.
The idea that we can actually have an impact on places more or less instantly, too, by responding in some way or not responding, I think, also makes it true.
To make sustainable progress in reducing extreme poverty will require improvements in both the quantity and quality of aid.
Can we really believe that we are living a good life, an ethically decent life if we don’t do anything serious to help reduce poverty around the world and help save the lives of children or adults who are likely to die if we don’t increase the amount of aid we are giving.
Well the real concept of basic needs if you cut it right down are simply the physical needs that are unavoidable for all of us. So to have enough calories to keep our bodies going. Have shelter from extreme elements. To have water that is safe to drink, So I think that’s the core of it.
If we use goods made from raw materials that are obtained from a poor country without the proceeds being used to benefit the people of that country, we become complicit in a particularly iniquitous form of grand larceny.
Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are children under five. They die from diseases such as measles, diarrhoea, and malaria that are easy and inexpensive to treat or prevent.
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