Quotes About Morality

Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.

There is no practical rationality then without the virtues of character. The vicious argue unsoundly from false premises about the good, while the akratic ignores the sound arguments available to him. Only the virtuous are able to argue soundly to those conclusions which are their actions […]

it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means, and Bakke was an engagement whose antecedents were at Gettysburg and Shiloh.

Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack.

That,' Peregrine said, 'is civilisation. Not all who were rewarded deserved to be; not all who should have been were.

Could kindness – by only ever taking little steps – twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty?

Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?

Sometimes the only workable solution isn't a fair one

This one could turn her back on her own dying father, or watch a blinded man whimper in pain and not give one cold cuss.

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She would worry, just as you worry. It's the people who don't worry—those who never have any doubts that what they're doing is good and right—they're the ones that cause the problems.

If it took a monster to do that, doesn't that mean we sometimes need monsters?' 'Maybe we do. But that doesn't mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.

No," I said emphatically. "Not in a million years. I might not be human. I might be nothing more than a set of algorithms, running on a spacesuit with a corpse inside it. But I'm not a monster.

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

Abortion, to me, is an issue of personal responsibility.

Personally, I have never considered myself corrupt or seen the need to be so. People are judged as what they are perceived to be.

Right and wrong becomes more difficult for each of us as we grow older, because the older we get the more we know personally about our own human frailties.

I haven't personally experienced bullying, but when I was in high school, I had a best friend who became a bully. I took a stand and took it upon myself to separate from her. I couldn't be associated with her because it wasn't the type of person I wanted to be.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix.

The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it.

Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

I love to follow truth; nay, I have made it my duty to persuade others to act on truth and abjure falsehood for the sake of their own good. So, the eradication of iniquities is the object of my life.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.