Quotes About Ethics

WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.

Whether it is called nobility, virtue, or divinity, and whether or not God exists, people simply do perceive sacredness, holiness, or some ineffable goodness in others, and in nature.

I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.6

I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society."46

Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.

When corporations are given the ring of Gyges, we can expect catastrophic results (for the ecosystem, the banking system, public health, etc.).

Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically.

There's more to morality than harm and fairness.

we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule faithfully.

Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers' rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism.

Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."26

The ability to reason combined with a lack of moral emotions is dangerous.

Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.

This was my first hint that morality often involves tension within the group linked to competition between different groups.

A central function of thought is making sure that one acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others.

If you want to make people behave more ethically, there are two ways you can go. You can change the elephant, which takes a long time and is hard to do. Or, to borrow an idea from the book Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath,54 you can change the path that the elephant and rider find themselves traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in ethical behavior.

morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible.

Cuando nadie responde ante nadie, cuando los vagos y los tramposos quedan impunes, todo se derrumba.

La habilidad para razonar de manera normal combinada con la ausencia de emociones morales es una combinación peligrosa.

origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.

You can learn more about cultivating the intellectual virtues and about how to incorporate them in schools at intellectualvirtues.org and in the writings of Jason Baehr, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and one of the founders of the Intellectual Virtues Academy.32

but they were the only group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said that an action that bothered them was nonetheless morally permissible. And they were the only group in which a majority (73 percent) were able to tolerate the chicken story.