Thomas Browne on sex: “I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination when he shall consider what an unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.” (1642)

Shaw on marriage: “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.” (1913)

Insider trading, like blackmail, is something everyone abhors and no one can say why. Economists have shown that under a variety of plausible circumstances insider trading is actually beneficial for all shareholders and investors, because, for instance, it can be used as a particularly efficient form of incentive compensation for corporate executives. For this reason many shareholders would be perfectly agreeable if their corporation would add a provision into its charter expressly authorizing its executives to engage in insider trading. Yet many people, even after they have grasped the economic case to be made for insider trading, continue to regard it as somehow immoral even if economically desirable. And the law certainly forbids companies to allow their executives to engage in insider trading, even if their shareholders should expressly authorize it. But no one to date has been able to explain why insider trading is immoral and why it continues to be immoral even if the shareholders unanimously authorize the management to engage in it.

— Leo Katz, Ill-Gotten Gains, 1996

You’re driving down the road and, in a moment of inattention, you run a red light. In one universe a cop pulls you over and gives you a ticket. In another universe you hit a little old lady and kill her.

In the first universe you’re just an ordinary motorist. In the second you’re a shameful monster. But you had no control over the presence of the little old lady; the same (small) list of controllable actions were available to you in both universes.

If our moral responsibility extends only to our voluntary actions, then in both universes your only transgression lies in running the red light. Why then do we assign additional blame for hitting the lady, an outcome over which you had no control?

There is a story to the effect that a statistician once found a very high correlation between the number of old maids and the size of the clover crop in different English counties. After puzzling over this relation for some time, he was able to trace what appeared to him to be the causal chain. Old maids, it appeared, kept cats; and cats ate mice. Field mice, however, were natural enemies of bumblebees, and these latter were, in turn, the chief agents in fertilizing the flowers of the clover plants. The implication, of course, is that the British Parliament should never legislate on the subject of marriage bonuses without first evaluating the effect upon the clover crop of reducing the spinster population.

— Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior, 1997

After about a month of studying cases, I put to my first term torts students a couple of hypothetical questions. The first concerns an ‘evil deity.’ ‘Suppose,’ I ask my students, ‘such a deity were to appear to you, as president of this country or as controller of our legal system, and offer a gift, a boon, which would make life more pleasant, more enjoyable than it is today. The gift can be anything you want — be as idealistic, or as obscene, or as greedy as you wish — except that it cannot save lives.’ Later I will drop even that requirement. ‘The evil deity suggests that he can deliver this gift in exchange for one thing … the lives of one thousand young men and women picked by him at random who will each year die horrible deaths.’

When I ask, ‘Would you accept?’ my students almost uniformly answer, ‘No.’ Indeed, they are shocked that one could even ask the question. I then ask, quietly, what the difference is between this gift and the automobile, which takes some fifty-five thousand lives each year.

— Guido Calabresi, Ideals, Beliefs, Attitudes, and the Law, 1985

The situation is reminiscent of the two monks, Theophilus and Gottlieb, who are quarreling over whether one may engage in smoking and praying at the same time. Theophilus, an unbending ascetic, says no. Gottlieb, an easy-going smoker, says why not. They meet again some weeks later. Theophilus triumphantly reports, ‘I took the issue to the pope. I asked him point-blank “Is it permissible to smoke during prayer?” and he said “Absolutely not.”‘ Gottlieb protests: ‘That’s not what he said when I asked him.’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘Of course I did phrase the question a little differently. I asked him “Is it permissible to pray while I smoke?” and he said “Of course.”‘

— Leo Katz, Bad Acts and Guilty Minds, 1987