"Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents… - Sam Harris

"Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this "terrorism"), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this "collateral damage"). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could not be more distinct... For Chomsky, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all."

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About Sam Harris

Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, public intellectual, and neuroscientist, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason. He is the author of The End of Faith (2004), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005 and appeared on The New York Times best seller list for 33 weeks, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), The Moral Landscape (2010), Lying (2011), Free Will (2012), and most recently Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014).

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Birth Name: Samuel Benjamin Harris
Alternative Names: Samuel Harris
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Additional quotes by Sam Harris

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my
sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a
stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she
would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom
impersonal — and deeper than any personal history could justify.
Indeed, a transactional form of love — I love you because. . . — now
made no sense at all.

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the Vatican is an organization that excommunicates women for attempting to become priests13 but does not excommunicate male priests for raping children.14 It excommunicates doctors who perform abortions to save a mother’s life — even if the mother is a nine-year-old girl raped by her stepfather and pregnant with twins15 — but it did not excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich for committing genocide.

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