Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character

by Richard P. Feynman

Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge” and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”