Quotes About Ethics

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; so to say it is ambiguous is to assert that it's meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure & outrageousness, to save his existence.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.

The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.

What do you believe in ? People's sufferings, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, nothing else seems to me of any importance.

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

When he describes woman, each writer discloses his general ethics and the special idea he has of himself; and in her he often betrays also the gap between his world view and his egotistical dreams.

To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.

It must be added that the men who most respect embryonic life are the same ones who do not hesitate to send adults to death in war.

To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well.

at the end of the last century, the police discovered two little girls of twelve or thirteen in a bordello; a trial was held where they testified; they spoke of their clients, who were important gentlemen; one of them opened her mouth to give a name. The judge abruptly stopped her: Do not sully the name of an honest man!

The Social Security's medical consultants support the interest not of the victims but of the organization.

Une éthique véritablement socialiste, c'est-à-dire qui cherche la justice sans supprimer la liberté, qui impose aux individus des charges mais sans abolir l'individualité, se trouvera fort embarrassée par les problèmes que pose la condition de la femme.

Morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning

It's easy to pay with the blood of others.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.

As razões práticas invocadas contra o aborto legal não têm qualquer peso; quanto às razões morais, reduzem-se ao velho argumento católico: o feto possui uma alma a que se veda o paraíso, suprimindo-o antes do baptismo. É de observar que a igreja autoriza, ocasionalmente, a morte de homens feitos: nas guerras ou quando se trata de condenados à morte; reserva, porém, para o feto, um humanitarismo intransigente.

He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative.

The means, it is said, will be justified by the end; but it is the means which define it, and if it is contradicted at the moment that it is set up, the whole enterprise sinks into absurdity.

On ne peut pas mener une vie correcte dans une société qui ne l'est pas?

But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions.