Quotes About Morality

I mean if those moral principles are out there and God is just telling us what it is, then why do we need the middleman? Just tell us the reasons why it's wrong and okay. And if it's just because God said it what if he didn't say murder was wrong, would that make it right? No, it would still be wrong.

The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty through force or fraud. The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to believe and act as we choose so long as our beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.

the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."3 It was one of the greatest speeches of Dr. King's career

It makes people believe if we just get back to those principles, like police brutalising and jailing homosexuals, we can be good once again.

Once moral progress in a particular area is under way, most religions eventually get on board—as in the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, women's rights in the twentieth century, and gay rights in the twenty-first century—but this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time.

It is indeed probable that more harm and misery has been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. —Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960

And who could forget the sixteenth-century popular Parisian pastime of cat burning, in which a terrified feline was gradually lowered into a fire while "spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.

As Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations , "Society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another.… If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least Ã¢â'¬Â¦ abstain from robbing and murdering one another.

Morality involves how we think and act toward other sentient beings and whether our thoughts and actions are right (good) or wrong (bad) with regard to their survival and flourishing.

Morality involves how we think and act toward other moral agents in terms of whether our thoughts and actions are right or wrong with regard to their survival and flourishing.

As noted previously, a principle of moral good is this: if other persons are involved in an action, then always act with their good in mind, and never act in a way that it leads to their loss or suffering (through force or fraud).

7. The principle of reciprocal altruism—I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine"—is universal; people do not by nature give generously unless they receive something in return, even if what they receive is social status. 8. The principle of moralistic punishment—I'll punish you if you do not scratch my back after I have scratched yours—is universal; people do not long tolerate free riders who continually take but almost never give.

By contrast, in a reason-based worldview like that of Enlightenment humanism in which the principle of interchangeable perspectives means that no one can reasonably argue for special privilege over others, morality shifts from the vantage point of the group to that of the individual, and instead of working toward some unfounded and unattainable utopian ideology in the distant future, the political system is designed to solve specific problems that are obtainable in the here and now.

Perspective-taking is the psychological foundation underlying the capacity for empathy. To judge the rightness or wrongness of an action against another, one must first take the perspective of that other sentient being.

In an aptly titled article 'Two Rights Don't Make Up for a Wrong', the authors found that 'the overall goodness of a person is determined mostly by his worst bad deed.'35 Decades of devoted work for public causes can be obliterated in an instant with an extramarital affair, financial scandal or criminal act.

The public couldn't get enough; writers such as Braddon reaped a new financial harvest with every book. She admitted that she cranked out some volumes as bill-paying hack work. Once she complained to Bulwer Lytton that "the amount of crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning & general infamy required by the halfpenny reader is something terrible,

The truth is only irrelevent when its beneficial

But there was only so much temptation a man could resist without losing all respect for himself.

The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted. —SIR ALEXANDER FLEMING, MD

We are lucidly aware that achieving through mere physical force establishes the rules of a game from which there is no escape. When one grants oneself the moral justification to use force, one cannot logically deny it in one's enemies, for all moralities are relative. The dissimilarity between different human cultures alone suggests that one cannot establish universal goods and evils.

Why is it okay to put someone to death, but it's not okay for those people to do it themselves?

He had never been a religious person. Even as a child he had found the notion of an omnipotent creator who punished his crations inconsistently for minor infractions of a vaguely defined moral code to be unthinkable to anyone with an ounce of sense.

Where's the skill in throwing a hook loaded with tempting bait into the general vicinity of lots of perpetually hungry creatures with brains the size of mustard seeds? You might as well go to a playground, scatter Reese's peanut butter cups around, and club to death the first four year old foolish enough to approach, believing innocently that such treats are readily available in nature.

I'm not sure what a good person is, exactly. On the one hand, it could be someone who always play by the rules. But can someone follow the rules and still be a real jerk? In fact, some of the biggest idiots I know are people who follow the rules, usually because they make you feel like crap when you don't.