Quotes About Ethics

If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.

It's a luxury to pursue what makes you happy; it's a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful.

It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.

Here's a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical—even legal—equivalent of Occam's razor, the scientist's conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.

Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date. By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no true virtue (as these too are relative). Thus relativism's closest approximation to "virtue" is "tolerance.

When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person's motives are genuine. People motivated to make things better usually aren't concerned with changing other people—or, if they are, they take responsibility for making the same changes to themselves (and first).

telling people you're virtuous isn't a virtue, it's self-promotion. Virtue signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our commonest vice.)

You may come to ask yourself, "What should I do today?" in a manner that means "How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?

Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It's an attribute that is unique in the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire human enterprise?

The way that you set the world straight is by constraining the malevolence in your own heart. (From "Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege" on YouTube)

If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It's a one-sided, deeply ideological theory.

The philosophical study of morality—of right and wrong—is ethics. Such study can render us more sophisticated in our choices. Even older and deeper than ethics, however, is religion. Religion concerns itself not with (mere) right and wrong but with good and evil themselves—with the archetypes of right and wrong.

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.

there are catastrophes lurking at the extremes of every moral continuum.

The fact of life's tragedy and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time.

we cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls

Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don't waste time questioning how you know that what you're doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.

A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very, very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.

You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse.

human health is a matter of moral action, perhaps more than it is a matter of anything else

And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.

The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.

If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking. It's an embodied sensation, not a thought.

You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat