Quotes About Morality

This is why good-versus-evil clashes are so much more satisfying than fictions where there is good without evil.

The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that "treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.

Or consider child beggars in the developing world. The sight of an emaciated child is shocking to a well-fed Westerner, and it's hard for a good person to resist helping out. And yet the act of doing so ends up supporting criminal organizations that enslave and often maim tens of thousands of children. By giving, you make the world worse. Actions that appear to help individuals in the short term can have terrible consequences for many more.

The willful suffering we see in religion—fasting, sacrifice, even self-mutilation—might well reflect a more general feature of what we see as virtuous. It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain. This is why savvy charities sponsor walkathons and marathons, not group massages and beach parties.

Making children suffer temporarily for their own good is made possible by love, intelligence, and compassion, but yet again, it can be impeded by empathy.

In a similar study, people were asked to write about a past event that made them feel "most guilty," and then were asked to manipulate a shock machine to either increase or decrease a set amount of shock they were receiving. Again the guilty group gave themselves more shock than a control group, and the stronger the shock they gave, the more their guilt went away.

Closer to the Pallotta case, they also found that subjects judged someone more harshly for running a charity for profit than for running a corporation for profit.

It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain.

Once again, none of this is to deny the importance of traits such as compassion and kindness. We want to nurture these traits in our children and work to establish a culture that prizes and rewards them. But they are not enough. To make the world a better place, we would also want to bless people with more smarts and more self-control. These are central to leading a successful and happy life—and a good and moral one.

So if the world were a simple place, where the only dilemmas one had to deal with involved a single person in some sort of immediate distress, and where helping that person had positive effects, the case for empathy would be solid.

But war's appeal is more than belonging, morality, and signaling. As Chris Hedges put it in the title of one of his books, "War is a force that gives us meaning." PERHAPS THE TWO examples so far have left you cold. Maybe you don't want to climb mountains or go to war. But what about having children?

I told a story earlier from Jonathan Glover about a woman who lived close to a concentration camp and felt empathy for those being tortured. Her response was to ask that the torture be done elsewhere, where it wouldn't disturb her. This was one of a series of examples meant to show how empathy need not make us good.

These personal relationships make it more difficult to make generalized statements about who is in "spiritual darkness" and who is not, especially when many of our neighbors are nicer and more moral than some who call themselves Christian. Therefore, many North Americans, even those who call themselves followers of Jesus, conclude that all religions are fundamentally the same.

It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.

Compassion is the highest moral value, the noblest human feeling, the purest creature-love. It is the extreme social expression of the divine soul of man. Because he is able to share his feelings, where both are in reality connected in harmony by the presence of this soul in each one. One consequence of this habit of compassion is that an immense understanding of human nature fills his entire being.

They find man a paradoxical being; one capable of descent into the darkest abysses of evil, and yet equally capable of ascent to the sublimest heights of nobility. They

The author points out that the moral failure of Abigail Adams' brother focused her on disciplining her children, and herself, so that they did not come to the same end.

Good and evil, however, are views taken from a certain given standpoint, and from this standpoint good and evil are features forming a contrast, but as such they are always actualities; neither the one nor the other

Says the wolf in Æsop's fable: "Why is it right for you to eat the lamb, when for me it is supposed to be wrong?" Is not man in the same predicament as the wolf, and does not mankind slaughter more animals than all the wolves in the world ever ate?

aspects of the One and All in which a discrimination between good and evil is entirely lost sight

Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of the sinful.

There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.

There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength.

An identity of being 'on the left' has become a lazy way of feeling morally superior; an identity of being 'on the right' has become a lazy way of feeling 'realistic'.