Quotes About Ethics

Darwin's words, "If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

if religion were a source of morality, the number of religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero.

As always, the challenge is to find an exogenous change that precedes the change in sensibilities and behavior so we can avoid the circularity of saying that people stopped doing cruel things because they got less cruel.

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic

For one thing, empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness. Batson found that when people empathized with Sheri, a ten-year-old girl with a serious illness, they also opted for her to jump a queue for medical treatment ahead of other children who had waited longer or needed it more. Empathy would have consigned these children to death and suffering because they were nameless and faceless.

La violencia se considera moral, no inmoral: por todo el mundo y a lo largo de toda la historia, se ha asesinado a más personas para imponer la justicia que para satisfacer la codicia.

They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good.

A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it's an inescapable feature of the human condition that we're all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other.

The law may be an ass, but it is a disinterested ass, and it can weigh harms without the self-serving distortions of the perpetrator or the victim.

I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

Yet it would be mad to suppose that Sally is not better off, and positively depraved to conclude that one may as well not try to improve Seema's life because it might improve her neighbors' lives even more and leave her no happier.

judaísmo, el cristianismo, el hinduismo, el zoroastrismo, el budismo, el confucianismo, el islamismo, el bahaísmo

If God does have good reasons for his commandments, why don't we appeal to those reasons directly and skip the middleman?

And so they opened the door to the idea that in the name of future peace, any and all means might be justified—including even exterminatory war."108 Kant himself despised this turn, noting that such a war "would allow perpetual peace only upon the graveyard of the whole human race." And the American framers, equally aware of the crooked timber of humanity, were positively phobic about the prospect of imperial or messianic leaders.

people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.

En las pequeñas empresas -o, como se las suele llamar, las *empresas familiares* o *empresas de papá y mamá*- el nepotismo es muy habitual, por lo que puede entrar en conflicto con los principios de igualdad de oportunidad y granjearse el rencor de la comunidad en que se encuentra.

When a criminal justice system works properly, it's not because rational actors know that Big Brother is watching them 24/7 and will swoop down and impose a cost that will cancel any ill-gotten gain. No democracy has the resources or the will to turn society into that kind of Skinner box.

When they held constant all the factors that typically push men into marriage, they found that actually getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter.107 The causal pathway has been pithily explained by Johnny Cash: Because you're mine, I walk the line.

The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it.

When we were doing 'The Sopranos', I used to love that about it. There were rules, Mafia codes you had to go by, but the code is ridiculous. It's a code among sociopaths.

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.

Our social and economic systems are so devoid of humanity and love.

If love wasn't the law of life, life would not have persisted in the midst of death.