Quotes About Morality

I mean, I think even God would agree with this at this point. God's existence isn't important. It's what we do with what we've got that counts.

t]he Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity. (Ruse 1998, 253; emphasis mine)

Or really, the question is: Is there a difference between when life begins and when life as a human begins?

A miserable Noyce told a friend, "For a few goddamned points on Wall Street, we have to ruin people's lives.

A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.

Fines register moral disapproval, whereas fees are simply prices that imply no moral judgment.

on death pools] This attitude is an unwholesome mix of frivolity and obsession—toying with death even while fixating upon it.

If you're decent to others, then you're decent to yourself.

What kind of a God makes bodies and forbids you to use them?

The moral division of labor between newspapers, then, may parallel the moral division of the human faculties between the more respectable faculties of abstraction and the less respectable feelings. People control themselves to read of politics in fine print; they let themselves go to read of murders or to look at drawings of celebrities. Information is a genre of self-denial, the story one of self-indulgence.

You know what we have to do?" The Italian nodded. "I know." "You don't look too happy about it." "Defacing a beautiful building is a crime." "But killing people is not?" Dee asked. "Well, people can always be replaced.

Don't ever, for any reason, do anything, to anyone, for any reason, ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you've been, ever, for any reason whatsoever.

in every war, both sides believe they are in the right.

This is what I have always loved about you humans. You are essentially good." "Not everyone," Machiavelli said tiredly. "No. Not everyone. But enough.

To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

I don't really understand it. Never have. The more I think on it the more it horrifies me. How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible?

really didn't care [about nuclear plant safety] because there are too many people in the world anyway. . . . I think that playing dirty, if you have a noble end, is fine.

Whatever its psychological origins, vegetarianism appears to stem less from a rational consideration of the evidence than an emotional rejection of killing animals

Killing a chicken is not the same as murdering a human. There's an important difference there.

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It's chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago.

I argue that most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces, and that the most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason, terms that I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let's call this the Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of human nature.

The Realistic Vision recognizes the need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing.