Quotes About Ethics

I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example.

Indeed, one of the functions of the structures of normality is that by making it unnecessary for almost everybody almost all the time to provide justifications for what they are doing or are about to do, they relieve us of what would otherwise be an intolerable burden.

Central to these was and is the claim that it is only possible to understand the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity adequately from a standpoint external to that culture.

Ronald Dworkin has recently argued that the central doctrine of modern liberalism is the thesis that questions about the good life for man or the ends of human life are to be regarded from the public standpoint as systematically unsettlable. On these individuals are free to agree or to disagree. The rules of morality and law hence are not to be derived from or justified in terms of some more fundamental conception of the good for man.

Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.

There is no practical rationality then without the virtues of character. The vicious argue unsoundly from false premises about the good, while the akratic ignores the sound arguments available to him. Only the virtuous are able to argue soundly to those conclusions which are their actions […]

it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms

We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.

Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack.

To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.

That,' Peregrine said, 'is civilisation. Not all who were rewarded deserved to be; not all who should have been were.

Could kindness – by only ever taking little steps – twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty?

Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?

Sometimes the only workable solution isn't a fair one

I am not cruel," he said. "Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used.

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She would worry, just as you worry. It's the people who don't worry—those who never have any doubts that what they're doing is good and right—they're the ones that cause the problems.

If it took a monster to do that, doesn't that mean we sometimes need monsters?' 'Maybe we do. But that doesn't mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.

No," I said emphatically. "Not in a million years. I might not be human. I might be nothing more than a set of algorithms, running on a spacesuit with a corpse inside it. But I'm not a monster.

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

Character is better than ancestry, and personal conduct is of more importance than the highest.

As CEO of Unilever, my personal mission is to galvanize our company to be an effective force for good.

Personal liberty is not personal license.