Quotes About Ethics

Get what you get honestly. Use what you get frugally. That's the way to live comfortably And die honorably.

Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping the past's meaning.

My grandma Ruth used to say there's a little felon in the best of us.

If only one man is left standing, a bribe cannot bite.

The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.

By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality.

This book is about the problem of evil, but not quite in the traditional sense, since I see it as our problem, not God's. It

Facing the Extreme: Moral life in the concentration camps by Tzvetan Todorov.5 This is a careful study of the moral situation of both prisoners and guards in the German and Russian camps. It shows how much more complex and many-sided that situation was than might have been expected

Our hands, or minds, our feet hold more intelligence. With this I have no quarrel. But, what about virtue?

When men sell their souls, where do the souls go?

P9 Remember the three rules of the wand said Kathleen. Sure, said Annie. You can only use it for the good of others. You can only use it after you've tried your hardest. And you can only use it with a command of five words.

We are irrational in our species-?specific devotions. I know a man who won't eat octopus because of its intelligence. Yet he eats pork and buys glue traps for rats, though rats and pigs are highly intelligent, likely more intelligent—?I'm guessing, for I have not seen the SAT scores—?than octopuses. Why, for that matter, is intelligence the scale by which we decide whom to spare? Or size? Have the simple and the small less right to live?

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy?

Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects" – a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased –

We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.

The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off. The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant than it sounds.

What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology.

One French clergyman recommended thrusting a red-hot poker up what Bondeson genteelly refers to as "the rear passage." A French physician invented a set of nipple pincers specifically for the purpose of reanimation. Another invented a bagpipelike contraption for administering tobacco enemas, which he demonstrated enthusiastically on cadavers in the morgues of Paris.

In "Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America," historian Alexa Green explains the men's relationship as clearly one of master and servant." If the man wants to push a piece of mutton through your side, you let him.

I've had kids object to their dad's wishes (to donate), says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. I tell them, 'Do what's best for you. You're the one who has to live with it.

Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection

Because people like me want to have their hamburgers. Only once or twice a year, I want to say. But I know that's a lame defense. It's not the quantity that matters, it's the statement you make or don't make. When you tell people you don't eat beef — or would never use a glue trap — you make the alternative a little less comfortable for them. You keep it from being a thing they give no thought to.

As one former anatomy instructor said to me, "No one's taking heads home in buckets anymore.

Qureshi adds that the other problem with government-controlled culling—referring here to the shooting of wild boar and nilgais—is that while it is permissible to kill them, the law forbids eating the meat. "And here"—he means India—"you don't kill a species for the sake of killing. Only a psychopath does that.