The Notion That Human Life Is Sacred

There Are Some Circumstances, For Example, Where The Newborn Baby Is Severely Disabled And Where The Parents Think That It's Better That Child Should Not Live, When Killing The Newborn Baby Is Not At All Wrong ... Not Like Killing The Chimpanzee Would Be.

Sometimes We Know The Best Thing To Do, But Fail To Do It. New Year's Resolutions Are Often Like That. We Make Resolutions Because We Know It Would Be Better For Us To Lose Weight, Or Get Fit, Or Spend More Time With Our Children. The Problem Is That A Resolution Is Generally Easier To Break Than It Is To Keep.

In My World Of The People Who Study War And Defense Issues, We Simply Did Not Talk About Robotics. We Do Not Talk About It Because It's Seen As Mere Science Fiction. It's Cold, Hard, Metallic Reality.

The Capacity To Reason Is A Special Sort Of Capacity Because It Can Lead Us To Places That We Did Not Expect To Go.

If We Compare A Severely Defective Human Infant With A Nonhuman Animal, A Dog Or A Pig, For Example, We Will Often Find The Nonhuman To Have Superior Capacities, Both Actual And Potential, For Rationality, Self-consciousness, Communication And Anything Else That Can Plausibly Be Considered Morally Significant.