The Big Questions: Ethics by Julian Baggini

Part of a series of books looking at issues of our time: this one a series of essays looking at various sides of ethical arguments.  In the end it doesn't come out with nice clean answers - more of 'it depends' but then life isn't made of nice clean answers.

this reflects a deeper truth about ethics: values often conflict, not because one is wrong and one is right, but simply because sometimes having more of one good means we cannot have as much of another.Read more at location 83

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movements around the Western world are claiming to stand for the 99 per cent against the 1 per cent, the wealthy minority in our countries who together own between a fifth and a third of each nation’s wealth. But, as Ord points out, this indignation is somewhat selective, since if we look at the world as a whole, many of those protesters are in the top 1 per cent and almost all are in the top 5 per cent. ‘When I was earning £14,000 as a student, I found I was in the richest 4 per cent in the world, even adjusting for how much further money goes in developing countries,’ Ord told the BBC in 2010. ‘Giving away 10 per cent of that, I found that I would still be in the top 5 per cent.’17 ‘It’s not particularly heroic or anything,’ he told another reporter. ‘At least half the people in Britain could probably think much more seriously about how much they could give.’Read more at location 604

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Given that nearly 50 per cent of people worldwide survive on less than $2.50 a day, almost all of us are among the richest people in the world and the majority of us could give away much more than we do and still be relatively wealthy, enjoying a very comfortable quality of life. Still, if we don’t want to do that, why should we?Read more at location 611

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Nonetheless, the argument that most of us do not do nearly as much as we should to help the world’s poor seems strong and compelling. It is no doubt unsettling to conclude this. But why should we expect moral philosophy to provide comfort? It’s role is not to justify everything we do, but to point us to how we might do better. In the case of global inequality, it points the way all too clearly.Read more at location 708

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Equasy is not an obscure drug. ‘It is used by many millions of people in the UK including children and young people,’ wrote Nutt. About ten people a year die of it, serious damage is caused once every 350 exposures and it is associated with over 100 road traffic accidents per year. Nutt concluded that, bearing in mind all its harms, ‘it seems likely that the ACMD would recommend control under the Misuse of Drugs Act, perhaps as a class A drug given it appears more harmful than ecstasy.’ So why does the law allow equasy but ban ecstasy? Because equasy stands for Equine Addiction Syndrome, ‘a condition characterized by gaining pleasure from horses and being prepared to countenance the consequences especially the harms from falling off/under the horse’. No government is going to ban horse-riding, but most do ban drugs that are arguably less harmful.Read more at location 722

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People are often reluctant to accept that rights are not natural because they think that if rights were just cultural artefacts they would be less binding. But perhaps this ‘just’ is misplaced. A non-natural right that is globally endorsed and upheld is surely worth more than a natural right that most people trample over. What matters for upholding rights is that laws and institutions recognize and value them, not whether they are natural or not.Read more at location 876

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Nonetheless, some do argue that life is of such value that it is always worth prolonging, no matter how horrible. But why would one think that? Does anyone seriously believe that it would be better if a person died at midday rather than was tortured for twelve hours from noon onwards and died at midnight? Surely everyone would prefer to die sooner than later in this situation. Although extreme, this example demonstrates the point that simply having more life does not mean having a better life overall. Quality matters as well as quantity.Read more at location 1143

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why is it OK if changes are natural and not if they are human-made? Cause seems irrelevant. What matters is whether changes are good or bad, and there is just no way to make sense of things being good or bad for the planet. The planet just is. For billions of years before humans came along it existed with no life, and will probably exist for billions more years after we’ve died out too. Far from making us humble, the idea that we have the power to hurt the earth is hubristic. From the hypothetical perspective of the earth (since, lacking consciousness, it has no perspective) we are at worst a temporary itch on something bigger and incomprehensibly longer-lived than ourselves. Nature doesn’t care what we do because it doesn’t have any thoughts or feelings, but it would not care even if it did.Read more at location 1681

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In that sense, what we need to protect is not the environment but our environment. What matters is keeping the planet hospitable to human life. It may seem as though respect for nature for nature’s sake is a worthy value which can only do us good. But it can in fact lead us badly astray.Read more at location 1693

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And so murder, infidelity, theft and so on are almost always wrong. But that doesn’t establish rules like ‘murder is wrong’ and it certainly doesn’t mean such actions are wrong because they break a moral rule. In that sense moral rules are more like laws of nature than laws of courts: they describe regularities found in nature, they do not prescribe regularities we ought to follow.Read more at location 2062

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We can identify many things that matter for morality: happiness, respect, equality and so on. But it is impossible to say that one principle is the master principle, from which all other moral rules are derived. In different times, at different places, for different people, moral priorities change. Just as babies, children, adults and the elderly need to be treated differently, so other variations in the human condition require different moral responses. That, I suspect, is the truth that makes some kind of relativism inevitable.Read more at location 2302

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Let’s say, for example, that you are a Christian. In the Book of Leviticus, there are all sorts of bizarre-sounding rules, laid down by God, which Christians no longer feel themselves obliged to follow. These include the death penalty for homosexuals and children who do not respect their parents, bans on eating hares and calamari, prohibitions on men trimming their beards, and approval of slavery. Most Christians believe, however, that the New Testament supersedes the Old and that these rules no longer apply. What this adds up to is the belief that what was wrong for the ancient Israelites is not wrong for modern Christians, on God’s command. That seems to me like a clear combination of relativism and the belief that God’s will underpins ethics.Read more at location 2326

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In many ways this should not be surprising, since many have argued that the trouble with divine command theory – the idea that what is right or wrong is what God commands – is that it leaves open the possibility that God could command what is currently wrong to be right and vice versa. (See the next chapter for more on this.) Christian texts seem to provide evidence that this is precisely what their God has done.Read more at location 2332

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If you put all these things together, you can see quite readily how something like morality emerges. Given brute facts and our desires, feelings and needs, we have good reason to uphold justice, to be fair and honest in our dealings with people, to show compassion, not to kill the innocent, and so on. These four factors together add up to a rationale for morality that is more than just enlightened self-interest, although that too is part of the mix and more often than not doing the right thing is better for us than not doing the right thing, in the long run at least.Read more at location 2426

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Without an effective police force, it’s not that everything is permitted but nothing is enforced.Read more at location 2463

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In morality, as in many other difficult areas of life, we want answers, so much so that we’ll often prefer a clear answer with a weak justification than accept a good justification for why there is no clear answer. Accepting a lack of answers in ethics is particularly difficult, since it seems to most of us that surely there must be some way of knowing what the right thing to do is. But is there?Read more at location 2472

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ethics. If we are looking for clear answers, strict objective rules, then I think we’ll look in vain. If we think that all moral dilemmas can be resolved, we will be disappointed. But if we accept that we can make better moral choices, ones with genuinely better outcomes, by thinking clearly and attending carefully to what we really value, then there is a point to philosophical ethics. The final choice is always your own, and only you can bear responsibility for it. And to take that responsibility requires, I think, giving ethics the serious time and thought it deserves.Read more at location 2587

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

I have always been a fan of Matt Ridley's books and this one is no exception.
It covers damming evidence that both government R&D and international aid produce no overall benefit, in fact they actually cause harm by discouraging individuals from supporting themselves.
How arbitrage (trade) is the engine that drives civilisations to innovate and grow, how their governments eventually stifle them (and how the same thing happens to companies are they grow ever larger).

it is a book about the benefits of change. I find that my disagreement is mostly with reactionaries of all political colours: blue ones who dislike cultural change, red ones who dislike economic change and green ones who dislike technological change.Read more at location 159

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years. Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at fullRead more at location 255

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The spread of IQ scores has been shrinking steadily – because the low scores have been catching up with the high ones. This explains the steady, progressive and ubiquitous improvement in the average IQ scores people achieve at a given age – at a rate of 3 per cent per decade. In two Spanish studies, IQ proved to be 9.7 points higher after thirty years, most of it among the least intelligent half of the group.Read more at location 286

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Put it another way, an hour of work today earns you 300 days’ worth of reading light; an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light.Read more at location 308

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Time: that is the key. Forget dollars, cowrie shells or gold. The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it. If you have to acquire it for yourself, it usually takes longer than if you get it ready-made by other people. And if you can get it made efficiently by others, then you can afford more of it. As light became cheaper so people used more of it. The average Briton today consumes roughly 40,000 times as much artificial light as he did in 1750. He consumes fifty times as much power and 250 times as much transport (measured in passenger-miles travelled), too. This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.Read more at location 331

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Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.Read more at location 412

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That is what, it is now clear, far too many people and businesses did in the 2000s – they borrowed more from posterity than their innovation rate would support. They misallocated the resources to unproductive ends. Most past bursts of human prosperity have come to naught because they allocated too little money to innovation and too much to asset price inflation or to war, corruption, luxury and theft.Read more at location 459

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after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is ‘a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator’. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops. A New Zealand lamb, shipped to England, requires one-quarter as much carbon to get on to a London plate as a Welsh lamb; aRead more at location 621

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There is no such thing as unproductive employment, so long as people are prepared to buy the service you are offering. Today, 1 per cent works in agriculture and 24 per cent in industry, leaving 75 per cent to offer movies, restaurant meals, insurance broking and aromatherapy.Read more at location 640

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allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity. Innovation changes the world but only because it aids the elaboration of the division of labour and encourages the division of time.Read more at location 690

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once cooked, starch gelatinises and protein denatures, releasing far more calories for less input of energy. As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size.Read more at location 765

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A single, routine, minuscule Wal-Mart decision in the 1990s – not to sell deodorant in cardboard boxes – saved America $50 million a year, half of which was passed on to customers.Read more at location 1673

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In effect, Borlaug and his allies had unleashed the power of fertiliser, made with fossil fuels. Since 1900 the world has increased its population by 400 per cent; its cropland area by 30 per cent; its average yields by 400 per cent and its total crop harvest by 600 per cent. So per capita food production has risen by 50 per cent. Great news – thanks to fossil fuels.Read more at location 2093

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(chickens and fish convert grain into meat three times as efficiently as cattle; pigs are in between)Read more at location 2169

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The dirigiste mentality that dominated the second half of the twentieth century was always asking who is in charge, looking for who decided on a policy of trade. That is not how the world works. Trade emerged from the interactions of individuals. It evolved. Nobody was in charge.Read more at location 2412

Note: echoes of the intrnet, social networking, wikipedia Edit

It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.Read more at location 2477

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governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is a lesson for today. Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members.Read more at location 2670

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Rural self-sufficiency is a romantic mirage. Urban opportunity is what people want. In 2008 for the first time more than half the people in the world lived in cities. That is not a bad thing. It is a measure of economic progress that more than half the population can leave subsistence and seek the possibilities of a life based on the collective brain instead. Two-thirds of economic growth happens in cities.Read more at location 2783

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The economist Pietra Rivoli writes, ‘As generations of mill girls and seamstresses from Europe, America and Asia are bound together by this common sweatshop experience – controlled, exploited, overworked, and underpaid – they are bound together too by one absolute certainty, shared across both oceans and centuries: this beats the hell out of life on the farm.’Read more at location 3219

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Two billion people alive today have never turned on a light switch.Read more at location 3420

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Though they may start out full of entrepreneurial zeal, once firms or bureaucracies grow large, they become risk-averse to the point of Luddism.Read more at location 3818

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A large study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that government spending on R&D has no observable effect on economic growth, despite what governments fondly believe. Indeed it ‘crowds out resources that could be alternatively used by the private sector, including private R&D’. This rather astonishing conclusion has been almost completely ignored by governments.Read more at location 3940

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As Bruce Ames famously demonstrated in the late 1990s, cabbage has forty-nine natural pesticides in it, more than half of which are carcinogens. In drinking a single cup of coffee you encounter far more carcinogenic chemicals than in a year’s exposure to pesticide residues in food.Read more at location 4357

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The history of the world is replete with examples of the extinction or near-exhaustion of resources: mammoths, whales, herrings, passenger pigeons, white pine forests, Lebanon cedars, guano. They are all, note, ‘renewable’. By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone.Read more at location 4410

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The aid that Zambia has received since 1960, if invested instead in assets giving a reasonable rate of return, would by now have given Zambians the income per head of the Portuguese – $20,000 instead of $500.Read more at location 4611

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They could find no evidence that aid resulted in growth in any countries. Ever.Read more at location 4615

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Botswana turns out to have secure, enforceable property rights that are fairly widely distributed and fairly well respected. When Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues compared property rights with economic growth throughout the world, they found that the first explained an astonishing three quarters of the variation in the second and that Botswana was no outlier: the reason it had flourished was because its people owned property without fear of confiscation by chiefs or thieves to a much greater extent than in the rest of Africa. This is much the same explanation for why England had a good eighteenth century while China did not.Read more at location 4667

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Whether considering fish off Iceland, kudu in Namibia, jaguars in Mexico, trees in Niger, bees in Bolivia or water in Colorado, the same lesson applies. Give local people the power to own, exploit and profit from natural resources in a sustainable way and they will usually preserve and cherish those resources. Give them no share in a wildlife resource that is controlled – nay ‘protected’ – by a distant government and they will generally neglect, ruin and waste it. That is the real lesson of the tragedy of the commons.)Read more at location 4719

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The twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive. Dare to be an optimist.Read more at location 5226

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