Captain's Dinner Quotes

“This ethical tension made a notable appearance at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a shortage of ventilators”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“Utilitarianism is rooted in the idea that moral actions are ones that produce the greatest good for the greatest number.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“Regina v. Dudley and Stephens—regina being Latin for “the queen,” who was officially the prosecuting party—”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“The defense’s main argument would have to be a doctrine known as the “necessity defense.” Dudley said it was necessary to kill Parker “to sustain the existence of those remaining.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“Perhaps the earliest recorded instance of cannibalism on a British ship comes from an account written in 1641 about a voyage in the West Indies. The ship left St. Kitts”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“utilitarianism, the philosophical theory that holds that the morally right action is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“Monty Python did a whole skit about it, “Lifeboat (Cannibalism),” in which the castaways in a lifeboat debate which of them would be the best to eat, until Michael Palin calls for a waitress, who appears from nowhere and takes an order for “leg of Hodges.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“Dudley and Stephens’s main holding, about the need to defend individual rights in the face of utilitarian calculations, is an important moral and legal touchstone. Dictators have, throughout history, sought to justify atrocities through hedonic calculus. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin insisted that their concentration camps, planned starvations, and other forms of mass murder were a step on the way toward building a better world. There will always be tyrants who argue that the dead bodies piling up will promote the greatest good for the greatest number. Dudley and Stephens represents a firm rebuke”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“Instead of the moral clarity of a prohibition against murder, it allowed people to make their own decisions about whether and when it might be right to kill someone.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“The roots of the royal prerogative of mercy lay in the reign of Edward the Confessor, the king of England from 1042 to 1066. The royal prerogative was, according to William Blackstone, the great legal commentator, part of the “power of the Sovereign of his pure grace to show mercy to an offender by mitigating or removing the consequences of conviction.” The power was limited to less serious crimes at first, but over time, it evolved so the monarch could, and often did, use it to overturn death sentences. In some cases, the mercy power was considered to be, according to a legal scholar, “an acknowledgement of the fallibility of the judicial process.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History