Quotes About Ethics

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.

first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

my approach starts with Durkheim, who said: "What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to Ã¢â'¬Â¦ regulate his actions by something other than Ã¢â'¬Â¦ his own egoism."65

Morality binds and blinds.

rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.

The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e. moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals). It is broader — including the ethics of community and divinity— in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies.

moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth:

Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.

Morality often involves tension within the group motivated by competition between different groups.

Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that "man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

We're born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "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.

For most of us, it's not every day or even every month that we change our mind about a moral issue without any prompting from anyone else. Far more common than such private mind changing is social influence.

There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.

Passions often corrupt reason, but if we can learn to control those passions, our God-given rationality will shine forth and guide us to do the right thing, not the popular thing.

There's The Utilitarian Grill, serving only sweeteners (welfare), and The Deontological Diner, serving only salts (rights). Those are your options.

moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles

One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and eras it that we are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of other's hypocrisy we only compound our own.

Cuídate de cualquiera que insista en que existe una verdadera moralidad para todas las personas, tiempos y lugares, especialmente si esa moralidad se basa en un solo fundamento moral.

The two leading ethical theories in Western philosophy were founded by men who were as high as could be on systemizing, and were rather low on empathizing.

Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form of the Good. He believed that morality had to be the same for all rational creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities.

Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other

Kant provided an abstract rule from which (he claimed) all other valid moral rules could be derived. He called it the categorical (or unconditional) imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."22

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.