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I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.

Julian Baggini

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Julian Baggini
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 9
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Broken
Torture
Becomes
Glass
Prohibitions
Clear
Glasses
Fatally
Else
Absolutes
Inflexible
Hard
Absolute
Acknowledging
Sometimes
Ethics
Prohibition
Even
Embrace
Contradiction
Like
Importance
Maintain

More quotes by Julian Baggini

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The reason Buddhism can be so naturalised is because, stripped of its supernatural elements, its core teachings can be giving a sound, secular philosophical interpretation. In other words, it becomes a religion acceptable to the contemporary, naturalistic mind only when it ceases to be a religion.
Julian Baggini
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There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!
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Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.
Julian Baggini
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Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.
Julian Baggini
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Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.
Julian Baggini
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Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls within a limited range of possibilities. Human culture, however, has the nasty habit of never staying the same for very long.
Julian Baggini
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You don't choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe.
Julian Baggini
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Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.
Julian Baggini
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It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim never say never is one of the most important in ethics.
Julian Baggini
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When you try to translate any kind of real-life problem into a neat logical form, you're almost always simplifying it. We need a kind of blend - we need to use not just tools of logic, which are important and valuable - I'm not denying that, but also tools of judgement, and of inductive and abductive reasoning which can also inform.
Julian Baggini
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I am only me for practical purposes.
Julian Baggini
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Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.
Julian Baggini
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The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.
Julian Baggini
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Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.
Julian Baggini
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If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.
Julian Baggini
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People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers.
Julian Baggini
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Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.
Julian Baggini
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I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.
Julian Baggini
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Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.
Julian Baggini
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Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice.
Julian Baggini