Philosophy final quotes

To have a law in the US that prohibits a woman from having an abortion is to have a "Good Samaritan" law, a law that requires you to come to the aid of others, in just the case of abortion and in no other cases. We don't have any other Good Samaritan laws in the US.
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To have a law in the US that prohibits a woman from having an abortion is to have a "Good Samaritan" law, a law that requires you to come to the aid of others, in just the case of abortion and in no other cases. We don't have any other Good Samaritan laws in the US.
Thomson
"Smith stands to gain a large inheritance if anything should happen to his six-year-old cousin. One evening while the child is taking his bath, Smith sneaks into the bathroom and drowns the child, and then arranges things so that it will look like an accident." (865)

"Jones also stands to gain if anything should happen to his six-year-old cousin. Like Smith, Jones sneaks in planning to drown the child in his bath. However, just as he enters the bathroom Jones sees the child slip and hit his head, and fall face down in the water. Jones is delighted; he stands by, ready to push the child's head back under if it is necessary, but it is not necessary. With only a little thrashing about, the child drowns all by himself, "accidentally," as Jones watches and does nothing." (865).
Rachels
Imagine that a doctor were to deliberately let a patient die, by deliberately withholding treatment that would cure an illness.
Isn't the doctor just as much to blame for what he's done as he would be had he needlessly killed the patient? (866)
Rachels
"We are not inclined to think that it would be no worse to murder to get money for some comfort such as a nice winter coat than it is to keep the money back before sending a donation to Oxfam." (868)
Foot
"...We can easily understand the idea that a death comes about through our agency if we send someone poisoned food or cut him up for spare parts, but not (ordinarily) if we fail to save him when he is threatened by accident or disease." (868)
Foot
"Suppose a runaway trolley is heading toward a track on which five people are standing, and that there is someone who can possibly switch the points, thereby diverting the trolley onto a track on which there is only one person. It seems that he should do this...But [he] then puts the one man newly in danger, instead of allowing the five to be killed. Why does not the one man's right to noninterference stand in his way, as one person's right to noninterference impeded the manufacture of poisonous fumes when this was necessary to save five?" (871)
Foot
In this case, "the harm is not in question, which suggests that the 'direct,' i.e., deliberate, intention of evil is what makes it morally objectionable to allow [this person] to die. When this element [i.e. the intention of evil] is present it is impossible to justify an action by indicating that no origination of evil is involved [i.e. no initiating of a harmful sequence.]...It was never suggested that there will always and everywhere be a difference of permissibility between the two." (871)
Foot
"...We can easily understand the idea that a death comes about through our agency if we send someone poisoned food or cut [him] up for spare parts, but not (ordinarily) if we fail to save him when he is threatened by accident or disease." (868)
Foot
"the harm is not in question, which suggests that the 'direct,' i.e., deliberate, intention of evil is what makes it morally objectionable to allow [this person] to die. When this element [i.e. the intention of evil] is present it is impossible to justify an action by indicating that no origination of evil is involved [i.e. no initiating of a harmful sequence.]...It was never suggested that there will always and everywhere be a difference of permissibility between the two." (871)
Evil intentions defeat the appeal to the passivity of an action.
Foot
"What has value for the utilitarian is the satisfaction of an individual's interests, not the individual whose interests they are. A universe in which you satisfy your desire for water, food, and warmth is, other things being equal, better than a universe in which these desires are frustrated...But neither you nor the animal have any value in your own right. Only your feelings do." (897)
Regan
"My Aunt Bea is old, inactive, a cranky, sour person, though not physically ill. [Nobody likes her.] She prefers to go on living. She is also rather rich. I could make a fortune if I could get my hands on her money, money which she intends to give me in any event, after she dies, but which she refuses to give me now. In order to avoid a huge tax bite, I plan to donate a handsome sum of my profits to a local children's hospital. Many, many children will benefit from my generosity, and much joy will be brought to their parents, relatives and friends. ..Why, then, not kill my Aunt Bea? Oh, of course I might get caught. But I'm no fool...The deed can be done...professionally, shall we say... Would I have done anything wrong? Anything immoral? One would have thought I had. Not according to the Utilitarian." (p.897).Regan"This objection fails; it mistakenly treats an essential feature of humanity as though it were a screen for sorting humans. The capacity for moral judgment that distinguishes humans from animals is not a test to be administered to human beings one by one. Persons who are unable, because of some disability to perform the full moral functions natural to human beings are certainly not for that reason ejected from the moral community. The issue is one of kind. Humans are of such a kind that they may be the subject of experiments only with their voluntary consent. The choices they make freely must be respected. Animals are of such a kind that it is impossible for them in principle, to give or withhold voluntary consent or to make a moral choice. What humans retain when disabled, animals have never had."Cohen"There are some actions, like giving people names, that are part of the way we come to understand and indicate our recognition of what kind it is with which we are concerned...Doing [a human being] out of a name is not like doing her out of an inheritance to which she has a right and in which she has an interest...It is not 'morally wrong' to eat our pets; people who ate their pets would not have pets in the same sense of that term."Diamond"The ways in which we mark what human life is belonging to the source of moral life, and no appeal to the prevention of suffering which is blind to this can in the end be anything but self-destructive,"Diamond"At the end of Part II I said that the ways in which we mark what human life is belong to the source of moral life, and no appeal to the prevention of suffering, which is blind to this can in the end be anything but self-destructive. Did I mean that? Bennett asked, and he said that he could see no reason why it should be thought to be so. I meant that if we appeal to people to prevent suffering and we, in our appeal, try to obliterate the distinction between human beings and animals and just get people to speak or think of "different species of animals, there is no footing left from which to tell us what we ought to do, because it is not members of one among species of animals that have moral obligations to anything. The moral expectations of other human beings demand something of me as other than animal; and we do something like imaginatively read into animals something like such expectations when we think of vegetarianism as enabling us to meet a cow's eyes. There is nothing wrong with that; there is something wrong with trying to keep that response and destroy its foundation."Diamond"It is not members of one among species of animals that have moral obligations to anything. The moral expectations of other human beings demand something of me as other than animal."Diamond"Let us assume that human beings are intrinsically valuable... The reason we think this is so is that they have interests, preferences, purposes, i.e. a good that can be frustrated or furthered. ..Plants, nonsentient creatures, may not have interests in a true sense, but they do have a good (unlike a rock [or a machine]). "Once we come to understand the life cycle of a butterfly," Taylor says, "and know the environmental conditions it needs to survive in a healthy state, we have no difficulty speaking about what is beneficial to it and what might be harmful to it." The same can be said about bacteria and plants."Thomson"...There are certain things in nature that we, as rational and morally sensitive people, ought to regard as having a value independent of our needs and interests...there are other states of affairs (like defoliated jungles or exotic pine plantations) that we ought to regard as having disvalue. We simply have to come to recognize that these values or disvalues are there, and the job of the proponent of environmental ethics is to...[persuade] us to appreciate certain aspects of nature and [try] to show us that an ethic which does not acknowledge these values cannot satisfy our intuitive understanding of what is bad or good, right and wrong."Thomson"...Our question reduces to this: could, or should, the acceptance of the determinist thesis lead us always to look on everyone exclusively in this [objective] way? For this is the only condition worth considering under which the acceptance of determinism could lead to the decay or repudiation of participant reactive attitudes."Strawson"If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives...For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception... "Hume"The mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only that constitute the mind..."Hume"The operations of reason, whether in action or in speculation, are made up of successive parts. The antecedent are the foundation of the consequent, and, without the conviction that the antecedent have been seen or done by me, I could have no reason to proceed to the consequent, in any speculation, or in any active project whatever."Reid"...My remembrance that I did such a thing is the evidence I have that I am the identical person who did it...But to say that my remembrance that I did such a thing, or my consciousness, makes met he person who did it, is, in my apprehension, and absurdity too gross to be entertained...Memory is the testimony of [a] faculty; and to say that the testimony is the cause of the thing testified, this surely is absurd..."Reid"But as, notwithstanding this distinction and separability, we suppose the whole train of perceptions to be united by identity, a question naturally arises concerning this relation of identity, whether it be something that really binds our several perceptions together, or only associates their ideas in the imagination; that is in other words, whether, in pronouncing concerning the identity of a person, we observe some real bond among his perceptions, or only feel one among the ideas we form of them. This question we might easily decide, if we would recollect what has been already proved at large, that the understanding never observes any real connexion among objects, and that even the union of cause and effect, when strictly examined, resolves itself into a customary association of ideas. For from thence it evidently follows that identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions...but is merely a quality which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination..."Hume...Identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions...but is merely a quality which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination when we reflect upon them...(169)Hume"...All my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness. I cannot discover any theory, which gives me satisfaction on this head... In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent...that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences." (175)Hume