Quotes About Ethics

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. Here

Corruption isn't about giving in to the seduction of bribery; it is about giving in to the seduction of human nature, the angry drumbeats of our primitive brains and the inner whispers of our feelings.

Doctors make no such exceptions to the Hippocratic Oath—save, of course, when it comes to abortion—and only then when another dogmatic obsession trumps their oath. Alas

The journey through this one case will ultimately bring viewers from wondering, in cop-show expectation, whether the bad guys will get caught, to wondering instead who the bad guys are and whether catching them means anything at all,

As one Democratic insider familiar with Mook's thinking put it, "When you're done with a condom, you throw it out.

The problem in our relationship with animals is that our treatment of them hasn't evolved to keep up with our knowledge.

The doctrine of the mean (the epithet 'golden' is un-Aristotelian) regularly occurs in later writers as a piece of moral advice -- a recipe or rule reminding us to 'observe the mean', to be moderate in all things and to avoid excess and deciciency. (If the doctrine urges us not to drink too much wine, it equally urges us not to drink too little -- but that is something which the moralizers usually find it prudent to ignore.)

Apparently the Time Lords have a long and honourable tradition of genocide when they think the stakes are high enough

Moral life, it can be said, is just too messy, and the situations we encounter differ from each other in subtle ways that no panoply of principles could ever manage to capture. Principles deal in samenesses, and there just aren't enough samenesses to go around. (page 2)

of a corrupt spirit, that breaks over all bounds, and loves inordinate vastnesse; that is it we ought to be carefull of.

What we call a vice is actually an inability to recognize what has the greatest value.

The ultimate good is to treat something according to it's true value.

7. Resolved, Never to do any thing, which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.

A moral Agent is a being that is capable of those actions that have a moral quality, and which can properly be denominated good or evil in a moral sense, virtuous or vicious, commendable or faulty.

most of the duties incumbent on us, if well considered, will be found to partake of the nature of justice.

For the very notion of hardness of heart implies moral inability.

They called it "a disgusting exhibition of calculated cruelty," as if boxing were supposed to be anything else

A woman who was a schoolgirl at Hiroshima asked, "Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb, what did they think would happen if they dropped it?

Above all, the sense of personal responsibility was reduced by the way agency was fragmented. Among the airmen who obeyed the order to drop the bomb, the many scientists who helped to make it, the President, the many political and military advisers involved in the decision, who killed the people of Hiroshima? No one seems to have felt that the responsibility was fully his.

If torture is permitted, it's hard to imagine what isn't.

No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.')

The hardest - the part that's hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one." -Varnado Simpson, Charlie Company of My Lai

Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than the people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correlated with degrees of responsibility. In people further back up the chain, this casual distance reduces the psychological resistance they have to overcome.

A phased decision can avoid there being a key moment when the moral issue about killing civilians has to be confronted.