Jonathan Leighton > Quotes

“There is a great paradox in the duality of wanting to understand the big picture and simultaneously continue to enjoy playing the game.”
― Jonathan Leighton, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe

“Philosophical enquiry is often constricted by an implicit need for arguments that are consistent with life being intrinsically worthwhile—a conclusion that we obviously want to arrive at but, if we are to be honest, is not foregone.”
― Jonathan Leighton, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe

“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

“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

“The use of animals as objects is so entrenched in human cultural practices around the world that to step aside and see things objectively requires almost a Copernican paradigm shift.”
― Jonathan Leighton, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe

“Others’ consciousness is the best kept secret in the universe, masquerading in the form of physical gestures and sounds.”
― Jonathan Leighton, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe

“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