Voltaire

Voltaire — born François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778 — was a French Enlightenment writer whose reputation rests less on any single system of thought than on the sustained application of satire to religious intolerance, judicial cruelty, and the arbitrary exercise of power.

The line I keep coming back to is this one:

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

It is quoted often enough to have gone slightly limp, but the mechanism it identifies is exact: the same act changes moral category as it changes scale and acquires ceremony. That observation has aged considerably better than most of the eighteenth century, and it generalises well past its subject — a great deal of what institutions permit at scale would be unthinkable performed once, by one person, in silence.

Worth reading with the caveat that Voltaire’s tolerance had edges. His advocacy for civil liberties coexisted with prejudices he never examined, and the Enlightenment case for universal reason was largely made by people who did not extend it universally. Reading him as a moralist rather than a satirist goes wrong quickly.

The habit worth stealing is the one he shares with good statistical reasoning: refusing to let a category do the work that an argument should. Amrhein and colleagues make a structurally similar complaint about “significant” and “non-significant” in their call to retire statistical significance — a label absorbs a judgment and then travels without it.

See also: reading and thinkers.