Evil has a way of propagating like a plague. Where plague is a disease of the body, evil is a disease of the soul. It spreads through our actions: an act of evil done to someone infests their soul, so that they desire to do evil in return. And evil grows with each turn, the revenge act must be the greater. The best way to deal with evil is to turn it into something good, before it has the chance to spread. Each of us has the ability to have evil stop with us.Anonymous. The Treatise of Wisdom (Kindle Locations 4492-4494). Unknown.
Moral philosophers say things like, ‘What is actually wrong with cannibalism?’ There are two ways of responding to that: one is to shrink back in horror and say, ‘Cannibalism! Cannibalism! We can’t talk about cannibalism!’ The other is to say, ‘Well, actually, what is wrong with cannibalism?’ Then you work it out and you tease it out and you decide yes, actually, cannibalism is wrong, but for the following reasons. So I’d like to think that my moral values at least partly come from reasoning. Trying to suppress the gut reaction as much as possible. ["Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?", The Guardian, 9 June 2015]
A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.