Quotes About Ethics

Like the Bible, Aristotle didn't define happiness as temporary joy. He saw happiness in a life well-lived.

For the media, all arguments are character arguments. If you disagree with the members of the media about something, you are a fundamentally bad human being.

Since the legally and morally despicable decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973, American women have aborted some 56 million children. The vast majority of these children have been aborted for reasons that have nothing to do with rape, incest or the health of the mother. We have destroyed an entire generation of children purely for self-worship. Children are difficult; therefore, they can be done away with. Children are burdensome; therefore, they don't exist in the womb.

Authoritarians rarely recognize their own authoritarianism. To them, authoritarianism looks like simple virtue.

The first contribution of the ancient Greeks was the philosophy of natural law.

if social is supposed to be opposed to individual, then social justice is by definition unjust.

On abortion, the left says it is for choice, but ignores that the baby has no choice.

If you force a leftist to answer why we should all give up our nice cars while the Chinese and Russians continue to dump toxic waste into the atmosphere, they will avoid.

The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the "greater" good.

So what is the moral case for capitalism? It lies in recognition that socialism isn't a great idea gone wrong — it's an evil philosophy in action. It isn't driven by altruism; it's driven by greed and jealousy.

A woman's right to choose takes precedence over all—even if that means crushing the skull of a living child and sucking its brains into a sink.

For professors, however, human life is not divine, and therefore man should be able to take it when he sees fit. Without a higher authority to answer to, life belongs only to the one who possesses it, and he or she can decide to end it.

If public opinion were as solidly pro-euthanasia as the universities, America would be full of suicide clinics already.

It was left to Hume, once again, to completely circumscribe reason. "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions," Hume famously wrote, taking to its logical extreme the thought of his predecessors. "[Reason] cannot be the source of moral good or evil, which are found to have that influence."24

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."25 The

And what gives Professor Commoner the right to take someone's property and hand it over to someone else? Only if there were no property rights would such a thing be acceptable.

When Professor Orlando Patterson of Harvard University was interviewed on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer regarding President Bill Clinton's perjury, he said, "I think it's important to emphasize the fact that there are no absolutes in our moral precepts. Kant may have believed that, and some fascists do. . . . [P]erjury is not an absolute.

When asked which statement about ethics their professors most often voiced, 73 percent picked: "what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity." Only 25 percent of the students selected the option reading: "there are clear and uniform standards of right and wrong by which everyone should be judged.

Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University advocates the killing of disabled newborns. Reports the New York Times, "To Singer, a newborn has no greater right to life than any other being of comparable rationality and capacity for emotion, including pigs, cows and dogs."6 This is evil. Equating newborn humans with animals is absolutely sickening. But that is what Singer is teaching in his course at Princeton.

Moral Relativism is a widespread disease.

The modern mind rebels at this notion—the notion of something's virtue tied to its inherent purpose. Nature, we believe, is blind and valueless—we don't blame a snake for biting or a baby for crying. But that's not what the ancients meant by virtue. They didn't mean our modern moral sense of "virtue"—being a nice person, or something similarly vague. They meant fulfilling the telos for which you were created.

Whereas modern systems of morality focus far more on whether given actions are good or evil, ancient ethical systems worried less about rules for action, and more about making men and women virtuous people—people capable of fulfilling their telos as human beings, and utilizing reason and character to carry out complex moral equations.

Because the polis is the context in which virtue is cultivated—and because cultivating virtue is the ultimate goal of man—the polis must be governed rigorously so that human beings are inculcated with virtue, according to Plato.

professors are ... intellectual terrorists. May they reap what they sow.