...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?

Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals.

Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.

We certainly would resolve the problems of the charities that are working in areas where they can do the most good. So if you consider that the U.S. foreign aid budget is 30 billion, yes, we could make a major contribution to reducing global poverty, start to deal much better with some of the other big environmental problems that the world faces. So I think we could solve a lot of problems.

I believe that in this new world that we live in, we often have a responsibility, you know, to actually go beyond the thou shalt nots - that is, the not harming others - and say we can help others and we should be helping others.

There are a lot of weapons that we've developed which we've pulled back from - biological weapons, chemical weapons, etc. This may be the case with armed autonomous robotics, where we ultimately pull back from them.

Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the slippery slope: once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.