Quotes About Ethics

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

Any appeal to reason is hopeless, since "reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions": and the passions are the root of the problem.

Socrates had just smiled and shook his head. To break the law, he told Crito, even a law that he knew was unjust, would be wrong. As he told his disciples many times, "one must not do wrong even when one is wronged."3 By doing wrong, a man did injury to his soul. Doing right, by contrast, makes his soul healthy and strong. A life of virtue is a life without compromise, Socrates believed, in which the goal is perfection according to an eternal standard.

Golden Rule: I won't disturb your self-interest, if you don't disturb mine.

Society acts as a mirror to our inner self, by reflecting back to us the reactions of others, and becomes our guide to what is good and evil in the world.

Aristotle showed (or seemed to show) that by linking one valid syllogism to another regarding a single subject, such as biology or ethics or even the nature of God, one could build a conceptual chain of reasoning that would inevitably lead, link by link, from one set of necessary truths to another, all the way to the highest truths of all.

Strato the Physicist. His appointment sent a clear signal that the natural and physical sciences would be the Lyceum's focus in the future, just as ethics and formal philosophy would be the future focus at the Academy.

Aristotle insisted, the source of that justice is always the same: observation of the underlying order of nature.

The law is a means to an end—and what that end is depends on human desires and needs.

The law is a means to an end—and what that end is depends on human desires and needs. But somewhere, some basic principles have to stick.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it."33 Was it possible that God would devise such a system of natural laws and put man in the middle of them in order to create a nation of slaves? Locke said no.

Aristotle's theory of the mean seems simple-minded; or to quote Bertrand Russell again, common sense pedantically expressed. However, if we change the word mean to proportion, we get closer to what Aristotle must have meant—and large parts of his Ethics as well as his Politics make more sense. The mean represents not so much a literal middle point as striking a balance between conflicting impulses and choices, and seeing our way through to the other side.

How does he learn to take that crucial step? Does he learn it the hard way, that if he is going to get along he has to go along, as Pufendorf suggested? Or is there a simpler, more uplifting way, by which we learn that virtue can be its own reward?

One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle's philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.

Thou shalt not covet, but traditionApproves all forms of competition.

No graven images may beWorshipped, except the currency.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.

One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Honor is decency without vanity.

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one's fingers.

Just the Human Genome Project alone is the Full Employment Act for bioethicists.

The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics.