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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
Becomes
Glass
Prohibitions
Clear
Glasses
Fatally
Else
Absolutes
Inflexible
Hard
Absolute
Acknowledging
Sometimes
Ethics
Prohibition
Even
Embrace
Contradiction
Like
Importance
Maintain
Broken
Torture

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The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments.
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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.
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We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we're doing is right.
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Even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse).
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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.
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Philosophy has to be enquiring it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.
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No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've made in your life to date.
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Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.
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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.
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The idea that the mind can extend even beyond the body is an intriguing one, and is bound to become more pressing as we increasingly develop technologies that augment our natural abilities.
Julian Baggini
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In my experience, those who make the biggest fuss about not spending much at Christmas are generally the ones who buy what they want and eat where they want 12 months a year.
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Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right.
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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Morality is more than possible without God, it is entirely independent of him.
Julian Baggini
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I don't think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.
Julian Baggini
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Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.
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.
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True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.
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.
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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