Quotes About Morality

We humans have a dual nature - we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves.

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago:

It may sound depressing to think that our righteous minds are basically tribal minds, but consider the alternative. Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.

And you'll find the Sanctity foundation underlying some of the moral passions of the environmental movement. Many environmentalists revile industrialism, capitalism, and automobiles not just for the physical pollution they create but also for a more symbolic kind of pollution—a degradation of nature, and of humanity's original nature, before it was corrupted by industrial capitalism.

Durkheim, who said: "What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to Ã¢â'¬Â¦ regulate his actions by something other than Ã¢â'¬Â¦ his own egoism."65

our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can't justify those feelings by pointing to victims:

Doc, God help me for saying it—if you repeat this I'll totally deny it—but some sperm deserve to be drowned before they get a chance to swim.

There's profit in law enforcement?" "I was thinking spiritually." —

Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of 'moral justice' could occur in the American democracy.

If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you're not a better person.

Please, mein Herr, shoot the children cleanly.

So who is guilty? Everyone, or no one? Why should the worker assigned to the gas chamber be guiltier than the worker assigned to the boilers, the garden, the vehicles? The

both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by so much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who's to blame? What

This path is very rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims, in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil. It

A ty zabija?e? ludzi"?.-"Raz musia?em dobija?. Ale zazwyczaj zajmowa?em si? wywiadem, pisa?em raporty".-"A co czu?e?, jak strzela?e? do tych ludzi?". Odpowiedzia?em bez wachania: "To samo, co czu?em, patrz?c, jak inni strzelaj?. Gdy istnieje taka konieczno??, staje si? niewa?ne, kto to robi. Poza tym uwa?am, ?e patrz??, ponosz? tak? sam? odpowiedzialno?? jak ci, co strzelaj?".

Se stavamo commettendo un'ingiustizia, bisognava pensarci su, e decidere se era necessaria e inevitabile, o se era solo il risultato della faciloneria, della pigrizia, della mancanza di riflessione.

Fin dagli albori della storia umana, la guerra è sempre stata considerata il male più grande. Ma noi avevamo inventato qualcosa al cui confronto la guerra finiva per sembrare pulita e pura.

If we were committing an injustice, we ought to think about it, and decide if it was necessary and inevitable, or if it was only the result of taking the easy way out, of laziness, of a lack of thought. It was a question of rigor. I knew that these decisions were made at a much higher level than our own; still, we weren't automatons, it was important not just to obey orders, but to adhere to them; yet I was having doubts, and that troubled me. Finally

There are men for whom war, or even murder, is a solution, but I am not one of them; for me, as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers.

So, basically if we keep trying to save the country and maybe the world from a bunch of murderous assholes with outer space weapons, then we're the bad guys?" "In a nutshell." "Then, hey ... let's be bad guys.

Benny Imura was appalled to learn that the Apocalypse came with homework. "Why do we have to study this stuff?" he demanded. "We already know what happened. People started turning into zoms, the zoms ate just about everyone, everyone who dies becomes a zom, so the moral of this tale is: Try not to die.

All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure with evil. -SOPHOCLES

He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE