People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
Interpretation
People often rationalize their own harmful actions while perceiving the harm done to them as unjustified.
This quote by Steven Pinker suggests that individuals have a tendency to justify the negative actions they take against others while viewing the negative actions taken against them as entirely unjust and severe. This duality in perspective highlights a common cognitive bias, where one's own shortcomings are minimized while the grievances faced are amplified, potentially leading to a skewed understanding of morality and fairness in human interactions.
In practice
During a discussion about ethics in a philosophy class.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.
To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere Philosophy.
It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?
But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.
The scales of reckoning with mortality are never evenly weighted, alas, and thus it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must continue to rest.
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.
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