The Tango of Ethics Quotes

“One of the most striking consequences for philosophy of the evolutionary origins of many intuitions is that it is very difficult for a brain, designed by spontaneous processes that intrinsically favour existence, to escape its own biases and arrive at counterintuitive conclusions that put its own value into question.”
― Jonathan Leighton, The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering

“Surely we would want to encode a powerful AGI [artificial general intelligence] with the most utopian ethical framework we can, rather than lock in the prevailing ethics of the early twenty-first century.”
― Jonathan Leighton, The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering

“Is existence so beautiful that we can justify torturing animals to prevent our own suffering? Is it still beautiful if we do?”
― Jonathan Leighton, The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering

“Treating a sentient being’s suffering as less important because of its species classification is to devalue the one parameter of overriding ethical importance and to give importance to features that are simply irrelevant.”
― Jonathan Leighton, The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering