Quotes About Ethics

The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly: (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.

The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn't happen to them.

Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.

Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. This

Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn't seek them, there would be no people.

Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.

Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?

Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative.

The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator.

Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?

Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal.

Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.

In his book The Expanding Circle, the philosopher Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own.

Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators.

Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable—who could be against human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that does not come naturally to the human mind.

Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality—the interchangeability of perspectives—you get the core of morality.

one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.

After all, other mammals fight to stay alive, appear to experience pleasure, and undergo pain, fear, and stress when their well-being is compromised. The great apes also share our higher pleasures of curiosity and love of kin, and our deeper aches of boredom, loneliness, and grief. Why should those interests be respected for our species but not for others?

To claim that [natural selection at the level of competing groups] is morally superior to natural selection at the level of competing individuals would imply, in its human application, that systematic genodice is morally superior to random murder.

We judge people not just on what they do but on what they are - not just on whether someone has given more than he has taken, but on whether he is the kind of person who would sell you down the river or knife you in the back if it were ever in his interests to do so.

When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering.