Quotes About Ethics

The alternative to morality is violence. Violence is the attempt to satisfy my desires at the cost of yours.

the truth that there is not one single system that can do justice to the moral life. What we need is a combination of several. Attempt to reduce them to "one very simple principle," in John Stuart Mill's phrase, and you will fail to do justice to morality itself.

What would be seen as charity in other legal systems is, in Judaism, a strict requirement of the law, enforceable by the courts.

Cruelty to animals is wrong, not because animals have rights but because we have duties. The duty not to be cruel is intended to promote virtue, and the primary context of virtue is the relationship between human beings. But virtues are indivisible.

When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.

Judaism is supremely a religion of freedom – not freedom in the modern sense, the ability to do what we like, but in the ethical sense of the ability to choose to do what we should, to become co-architects with God of a just and gracious social order. The former leads to a culture of rights, the latter to a culture of responsibilities: freedom as responsibility.

Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: "It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour in public."[4] This acute sensitivity to humiliation displayed by Tamar permeates much of Rabbinic thought:

The corrupt not only believe they can fool their fellow humans; they believe they can fool God as well. When moral standards begin to break down in business, finance, trade, and politics, a kind of collective madness takes hold of people. The sages said Adam bahul al mamono (Pesa?im 11b), meaning, roughly, "Money makes us do wild things.

A number of recent scholars have suggested that the answer lies in the abandonment of the ethics of identity altogether in favour of cosmopolitanism, a world without community.4 But no cosmopolitan society is as tolerant as it seems. In antiquity, both the Greeks and Romans attempted at one time or another to eliminate the practice of Judaism. Europe of the Enlightenment did not end anti-Semitism: it gave rise to a new and violent strain of it.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal

We often suffer from akrasia, weakness of will. So we become good people the way we become good tennis players or violinists, through practice until the behaviour we aspire to becomes natural and instinctive. Being moral means acquiring the habits of the heart we call virtue.

It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words 'God is dead', whose ethic was the will to power. To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God's name in vain.

No one emerges well in this story, which is there to tell us that in the long run, individual piety is unsustainable without collective moral responsibility.

Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.

We have become lonely selves in search of purely personal fulfilment. But that surely must be wrong. Life alone is only half a life. One spent pursuing the satisfaction of desire is less than satisfying and never all we desire. So it is worth reminding ourselves that there is such a thing as ethics, and it belongs to the life we live together and the goods we share – the goods that only exist in virtue of being shared.

Jewish law is concerned not only with protecting the rights of those who have been wronged, but also helping wrongdoers rebuild their future. Guilt, in Judaism, is about acts, not persons. It is the act, not the person, that is condemned.

We should not tell lies because if everyone else did, no one would trust us and the practice of communication on which lying depends would be undermined. Immorality is a kind of self-contradiction. Reason allows us to think our way through to virtue.

When religious faith goes, five things happen, gradually and imperceptibly. First there is a loss of belief in human dignity and the sanctity of life.

I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.

We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.

We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children.

Maybe one day the world will change, that we'll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it's inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn't matter right now.