Quotes About Ethics

I'll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right—the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.

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

our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can't justify those feelings by pointing to victims:

It's distasteful, I know... this business of running a nation. I pray that we never get used to it. That we never grow cold from it. That we never learn to love it.

Others declare good intentions

Doc, God help me for saying it—if you repeat this I'll totally deny it—but some sperm deserve to be drowned before they get a chance to swim.

The casual destruction of privacy is one of the most momentous and least visible social revolutions of our time, and the safeguards to anonymity that remain are largely a function of numbers—what I call the Big World Problem.

Social norms are the cement that holds societies together.

There's profit in law enforcement?" "I was thinking spiritually." —

In the book I define conservatism, as I believe it is fit upon four categories of principle: respect for The Constitution, respect for life, less government, and personal responsibility.

Please, mein Herr, shoot the children cleanly.

There were always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don't know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that's what's terrible. You

So who is guilty? Everyone, or no one? Why should the worker assigned to the gas chamber be guiltier than the worker assigned to the boilers, the garden, the vehicles? The

both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by so much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who's to blame? What

This path is very rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims, in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil. It

A ty zabija?e? ludzi"?.-"Raz musia?em dobija?. Ale zazwyczaj zajmowa?em si? wywiadem, pisa?em raporty".-"A co czu?e?, jak strzela?e? do tych ludzi?". Odpowiedzia?em bez wachania: "To samo, co czu?em, patrz?c, jak inni strzelaj?. Gdy istnieje taka konieczno??, staje si? niewa?ne, kto to robi. Poza tym uwa?am, ?e patrz??, ponosz? tak? sam? odpowiedzialno?? jak ci, co strzelaj?".

Nechci, aby naši muži trp?li pocitem osobní zodpov?dnosti.

Se stavamo commettendo un'ingiustizia, bisognava pensarci su, e decidere se era necessaria e inevitabile, o se era solo il risultato della faciloneria, della pigrizia, della mancanza di riflessione.

Fin dagli albori della storia umana, la guerra è sempre stata considerata il male più grande. Ma noi avevamo inventato qualcosa al cui confronto la guerra finiva per sembrare pulita e pura.

If we were committing an injustice, we ought to think about it, and decide if it was necessary and inevitable, or if it was only the result of taking the easy way out, of laziness, of a lack of thought. It was a question of rigor. I knew that these decisions were made at a much higher level than our own; still, we weren't automatons, it was important not just to obey orders, but to adhere to them; yet I was having doubts, and that troubled me. Finally

There are men for whom war, or even murder, is a solution, but I am not one of them; for me, as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers.

So, basically if we keep trying to save the country and maybe the world from a bunch of murderous assholes with outer space weapons, then we're the bad guys?" "In a nutshell." "Then, hey ... let's be bad guys.

Reporters trade in pain. It sells papers. Everyone knows that.

All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure with evil. -SOPHOCLES