Quotes About Morality

I asked how many guys would have sex with a robot if it was indistinguishable from a hot human woman. About 95 percent of the hetero guys said they would. The other 5 percent expressed a strong preference for lying.

I can't bring myself to believe in a God with a personality like my own. I base that on the paucity of lightning attacks on people who deserve it.

The Appeal of Utilitarianism

Reducing morality to matters of opinion or feeling is at the heart of Hume's project. The reason his theory is important is that it is widely followed today. Morality is becoming increasingly subjective and is losing its propositional nature as people in our culture insist that judgments of right and wrong are merely individual subjective feelings or opinion.

Emotivism does give us something positive, a reminder that moral language is emotionally charged and can be used improperly to manipulate people under the guise of getting them to do the right thing. Unfortunately, because moral language is so emotionally charged, people often dismiss it today as too divisive or incapable of verification.

It should not be surprising that ethical statements are not empirically verifiable, since right and wrong are not empirically observable qualities. But neither are they simply emotive expressions.

The Old Testament (OT) statement of the demand for individuals and communities to be moral comes in two primary ways—the commands to obey God's law (Ex. 19:5–6) and the mandate to follow the way of wisdom (Prov. 8:1, 22–31).

A second form of relativism practiced today is moral subjectivism, which says that morality is determined by the individual's own tastes and preferences.

A third form of relativism smuggled into the popular culture is called situation ethics. Popularized by Joseph Fletcher in the 1960s and 1970s, situation ethics holds that all morality is relative to the situation in which one finds oneself, and one's moral obligation is to do the loving thing in that situation.

Despite its philosophical shortcomings, ethical relativism does have appeal, particularly to the popular culture. The first appeal of relativism is based on the important idea that morality does not develop in a sociological vacuum.

First, in terms of the observations of the cultural anthropologists who developed relativism, the degree of moral diversity is overstated and the high degree of moral consensus is understated.

Just because different cultures have different moral standards, even if the degree of moral diversity is not overstated, it does not follow that there is no such thing as absolute values that transcend culture.

A fourth weakness of relativism is that it provides no way to arbitrate among competing cultural value claims.

The fifth and most serious charge against relativism is an extension of the fourth weakness. The relativist cannot morally evaluate any clearly oppressive culture or, more specifically, any obvious tyrant.

A final objection to relativism is the charge that its central premise, namely that moral absolutes do not exist, is a self-defeating statement, since the premise itself is an absolute.

Virtue theory, which is also called aretaic ethics (from the Greek term arete, "virtue"), holds that morality is more than simply doing the right thing. The foundational moral claims made by the virtue theorist concern the moral agent (the person doing the action), not the act that the agent performs.

Socrates would probably say the only way to ensure you're not an asshole is to assume you are one.

evil that looks like evil couldn't be as evil as evil that looks like your friend. We can see the bad guy in most films from miles away. Real evil doesn't come at us with a scar over its eye or with a hook for an arm. We don't hear a sinister orchestra play when it walks into the room. In real life, we are on our own to sort out what is evil and what is good and to decide if those terms are cleanly divisible from each other.

Not being able to look folks in the eye in tough situations feels wrong. Would you propose marriage to someone online? Or tell a child her mother was dead in a text message? I worried that what made me good at work wouldn't transfer to a completely online environment.

The Wiccan ideal of morality is simple: do what you want, as long as you harm none.

Wiccans don't perform destructive, manipulative, or exploitive magic.

I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them." —THE SHOOTIST

We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.

It must be nice to be righteous; from where I stand it looks like fucking lunacy.