Quotes About Morality

The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation—our sense of "higher" and "lower." It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality.

Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it's difficult-perhaps impossible-to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix.

Passions often corrupt reason, but if we can learn to control those passions, our God-given rationality will shine forth and guide us to do the right thing, not the popular thing.

There's The Utilitarian Grill, serving only sweeteners (welfare), and The Deontological Diner, serving only salts (rights). Those are your options.

moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles

Cuídate de cualquiera que insista en que existe una verdadera moralidad para todas las personas, tiempos y lugares, especialmente si esa moralidad se basa en un solo fundamento moral.

The two leading ethical theories in Western philosophy were founded by men who were as high as could be on systemizing, and were rather low on empathizing.

foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.

moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society

Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form of the Good. He believed that morality had to be the same for all rational creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities.

Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other

Kant provided an abstract rule from which (he claimed) all other valid moral rules could be derived. He called it the categorical (or unconditional) imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."22

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

principle of utility, which he defined as "the principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question."16 Each law should aim to maximize the utility of the community, which is defined as the simple arithmetic sum of the expected utilities of each member. Bentham then systematized

the most likely candidates. In the rest of this book I'll try to explain how morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture). We're born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

El asesinato a menudo les parece virtuoso a los revolucionarios.

I'll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality.

When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive.

Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.18

The second truth in this part of the story is that we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule faithfully.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment. We reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

he still shouldn't do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe.

Morality binds and blinds. Many scientists misunderstand religion because they ignore this principle and examine only what is most visible. They focus on individuals and their supernatural beliefs, rather than on groups and their binding practices.

If Mill's harm principle prevents us from outlawing their actions, then Mill's harm principle seems inadequate as the basis for a moral community. Whether or not God exists, people feel that some things, actions, and people are noble, pure, and elevated; others are base, polluted, and degraded.