Quotes About Ethics

Punishment and revenge are two different things.

You have to have enough respect for other human beings to leave their lives alone. If you admire that life, build it for yourself. Don't just try to come in and take somebody else's life.

Algunas veces, ser buena madre está reñido con ser buena persona.

For Spinoza, an ethics and a politics follow directly from and are immanent in metaphysics; the better one understands the universe in its complexity, in the connections that link each thing to every other, the more adequate is one's ethical relation in and to it. An ethics does not spring directly from our understanding of the world. Rather, it comes from our affective bonds to and connections with other things in the world, relations that enable us to enhance or diminish forms of life.

That's always the question. How to defend yourself without being nasty.

Life may not be fair, but that doesn't give you any excuse not to be.

He always -- or always tried -- to do things from larger principles, not out of what he felt about people, or any particular people, but what he thought people ought to feel about -- humanity. He wasn't really interested in people singly or personally.

Right and wrong, I learned that day, could not really be taught after all, only felt.

An act may be wrong, but unless the ruling power recognizes the wrong, it is useless to hope for a correction of it.

Once you've postponed doing what's right, you become a big part of what's wrong.

Something I've learned: once you postpone doing what's right, you become a big part of what's wrong.

What about other doctors at the time? Didn't they become suspicious? Even today, we have an unwritten professional code where doctors don't speak out against other physicians.

The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.

The bird that is shot is a parent," he observed in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "We take advantage of its most sacred instincts to waylay it, and in depriving the parent of life, we doom the helpless offspring to the most miserable of deaths, that by hunger. If this is not cruelty, what is?

Wilson has observed, "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything." Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: "we are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it.. We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children... Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something.

Wouldn't it be better, practically and ethically, to focus on what can be done and is being done to save species, rather than to speculate gloomily about a future in which the biosphere is reduced to little plastic vials?

According to an English seaman named Aaron Thomas, who sailed to Newfoundland on the HMS Boston: If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leisure.

The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place. What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

Such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change but still partake in the benefits of modernity

These included mealworms; a hairless, newborn mouse, known as a "pinky"; and the hindquarters of an adult mouse

Eating Animals" closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer's point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer's credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us.

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book in your lap.

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.

Responding to Brand, Wilson has observed, "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything" Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: "We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it... We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.