Quotes About Ethics

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

One thing that has to cease among Christians is the appeal to an audience to give with the promise of getting something.

At the heart of the Ten Commandments is an Israelite's honesty about one's neighbor (Exod 20:16). At the heart of the Bible's ethic is telling the truth. Honesty mattered then and it matters now.

But the danger is obvious: those who take this approach more often than not end up denying the potency of the Sermon and sometimes simply turn elsewhere—to Galatians and Romans and Ephesians—for their Christian ethical instruction. What many such readings of the Sermon really want is Paul, and since they can't find Paul in the Sermon, they reinterpret the Sermon and give us Paul instead.

It is one thing to be judgmental; it is entirely different to say greed is wrong or that sexual sins are wrong, and saying so is not judgmentalism.

Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

There is nothing complex about this most simple of moral maxims; its difficulty is in the doing, not in the knowing.

we must learn to distinguish moral discernment from personal condemnation.2 This distinction—the ability to know what is good from what is bad and to be able to discern the difference versus the posture of condemning another person—enables us to see what Jesus prohibits in this passage.

As a rule, I don't like to laugh at the misfortune of others. The exception to that rule is if it's really, really funny.

Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.

Hard work is rewarding. Taking credit for other people's hard work is rewarding and faster.

I asked how many guys would have sex with a robot if it was indistinguishable from a hot human woman. About 95 percent of the hetero guys said they would. The other 5 percent expressed a strong preference for lying.

Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. But you still don't want to get any on you.

I]t isn't the considered judgments of hindsight, but actions actually taken that show the true character of a person.

But defeating one's enemies is only half the game; for a war to be truly justifiable one has to materially gain.

The Appeal of Utilitarianism

Although utilitarianism has appeal, especially in a secular society, it also has shortcomings. The most common charge against utilitarianism is that it cannot protect the rights of minorities, and sometimes it can even justify obvious injustices when the greater good is served.

Reducing morality to matters of opinion or feeling is at the heart of Hume's project. The reason his theory is important is that it is widely followed today. Morality is becoming increasingly subjective and is losing its propositional nature as people in our culture insist that judgments of right and wrong are merely individual subjective feelings or opinion.

Emotivism does give us something positive, a reminder that moral language is emotionally charged and can be used improperly to manipulate people under the guise of getting them to do the right thing. Unfortunately, because moral language is so emotionally charged, people often dismiss it today as too divisive or incapable of verification.

Emotivism maintains that the only statements capable of having meaning are those that are empirically verifiable, but this underlying principle is itself not empirically verifiable.

Third, emotivism cannot account for the place of reason in ethics. Emotivism sets up a false dichotomy, as the following demonstrates: (a) Either there are moral facts like there are scientific facts, or (b) values are nothing more than expressions of our subjective feelings. But there is another possibility; namely, moral truths are truths of reason, or a moral judgment is true if it is supported by better reasons than the alternatives.

Good reasons usually resolve moral disagreements, but for the emotivist, giving good reasons and using manipulation would essentially be the same thing.

It should not be surprising that ethical statements are not empirically verifiable, since right and wrong are not empirically observable qualities. But neither are they simply emotive expressions.

A second form of relativism practiced today is moral subjectivism, which says that morality is determined by the individual's own tastes and preferences.