Philosophy

The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.

Freedom of expression, the right to explore, the right to have the adventure of intellectual discovery is a deep personal right precisely because it is a deep personal pleasure.

There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.

We assume that the person in front of us is essentially a broken version of us. When you realise that the person opposite you is not a broken version of you, but a very different kind of person, it forces you to take their perspective seriously.

Difference is not something we need to solve. Difference is something we need to love. Difference is something we need to respect — because it is in the clash of difference that the great ideas emerge.

Robert Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize for IVF. By then, millions of children had been born through it. On the very day his Nobel was announced, the Vatican said giving him the prize was 'completely out of order'. Same person, same achievement, same day -- celebrated as a saviour by some, condemned as a murderer by others. That is what a real moral controversy looks like. It doesn't dissolve, even after the technology has changed millions of lives.

We allow firefighters to risk their lives to save others, and we honour them for it. We didn't allow people to test vaccines that way.

The Red Crescent sheik said: 'That would just be giving his life back. We could do that.' A WHO official, told that the same Filipino patient would have died without our exchange, exclaimed, 'He should be dead!'

A repugnant transaction has fans as well as foes. When I call something repugnant, I'm not saying I oppose it, or that you should -- only that it has opponents who raise objections primarily on moral grounds.

We wouldn't like there to be any heroin in society, but there's plenty of heroin. So our discussion can't just concern our moral feelings about drug addiction. It has to involve our consequential feelings about prisons, overdose deaths, and the effect on communities. You can't escape consequences when you talk about the world.

Hope is active — it's a discipline. It would be such a profound disservice to give up: a disservice to young people, to the scientists who have spent decades working. There is no other option but to be hopeful. That is what activates me. There is simply no other option.

Nature is not the backdrop to our lives — it is our lives. We are nature and nature is us. There is no separation. We invented the ideology that we're exempt from nature's rules, that we're masters over nature, and that ideology is incorrect.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Physicist who developed the theory of relativity and E=mc².

Abraham Maslow (a famous psychologist) once commented, 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail'. Investors currently have a hammer, and that hammer is economics.

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex

At some point, if this kind of technological progress continues, it would seem that our descendants will become entirely digital: uploads or artificial intellects implemented on computers. At that point, it is possible that evolutionary selection will again become an important driver of change—but not necessarily of change for the better.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic, and scientific advances that, for better and worse, underpin modern civilization.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford