I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the moral principles that underlie actions like slavery and torture, suggesting if we can't agree on clear wrongs, then morality itself is meaningless.
Christopher Hitchens invokes a moral test articulated by Abraham Lincoln to challenge the justification of waterboarding as a form of torture. By comparing slavery to torture, he urges us to recognize that if we can excuse one form of severe human rights violation, we strip the meaning from all concepts of morality, suggesting that certain ethical lines must not be crossed if we wish to maintain any sense of moral integrity.
In practice
In a debate about human rights practices, this quote could illustrate the foundational principles of morality being ignored.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.
Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
I would by all means have men beware, lest Æsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.
I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.
I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.
Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
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