186 Quotes by Michael Shermer

The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty through force or fraud. The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to believe and act as we choose so long as our beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.

So, of course, Gish’s presentation was well received, which it would have been the case had he only gotten up and said “praise the Lord” and sat back down.

The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person. This is based on the philosopher John Rawls’s concepts of the “veil of ignorance” and the “original position” in which moral actors are ignorant of their position in society when determining rules and laws that affect everyone, because of the self-serving bias in human decision making.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. – Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18711.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else.

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”6.

Cities, Barber notes, “collect garbage and collect art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies. They put up buildings and run buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties. They secure the flow of water rather than the flow of arms. They foster education and culture in place of national defense and patriotism. They promote collaboration, not exceptionalism.”24.

This fact provides a rebuttal to the argument “What if a young woman aborts a baby who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer?” A rejoinder is, “What if a young woman who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer dies in childbirth?

In other words, we can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s utilitarianism, or Rawls’s fairness ethics, but in science as well.