Quotes About Ethics

But in dissecting this shameful medical apartheid, an important cause is usually neglected: the history of ethically flawed medical experimentation with African Americans. Such research has played a pivotal role in forging the fear of medicine that helps perpetuate our nation's racial health gulf. Historically, African Americans have been subjected to exploitative, abusive involuntary experimentation at a rate far higher than other ethnic groups.

Betsey's voice has been silenced by history, but as one reads Sims's biographers and his own memoirs, a haughty, self-absorbed researcher emerges, a man who bought black women slaves and addicted them to morphine in order to perform dozens of exquisitely painful, distressingly intimate vaginal surgeries. Not until he had experimented with his surgeries on Betsey and her fellow slaves for years did Sims essay to cure white women.

Americans] have realized many things for which the rest of the world is still struggling...[yet] the civilization and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles.

Morality, as I understand it, has to do particularly with how we ought to conduct ourselves in our relations with others.

So far as freedom is concerned, it is of course true that freedom is commonly understood to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility.

From the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.

From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.

Harry G. Frankfurt

from a moral point of view, economic equality does not really matter very much, and our moral and political concepts may be better focused on ensuring that people have enough.

The doctrines of egalitarianism and of sufficiency are logically independent: considerations that support the one cannot be presumed to provide support also for the other.

We are Citizens of the Outside. We have rejected the simplistic, boring, regimented, bureaucratic, moral, and ethical scriptures by which they live. In their place we have substituted our own far superior ones. We may physically move among them—but we are not of them. Where they are lazy, we are industrious. Where they are immoral, we are moral. Where they are liars, we are the Truth. We are probably the greatest power for good to the society that we have discarded.

Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action.

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

In dreams begins responsiblities.

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just as we see with Eichmann.

Had I done the right thing by not telling her? Maybe not. Who on earth wanted the right thing anyway? Yet what meaning could there be if nothing was right? If nothing was fair? Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase.

Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. [...] Just like Adolf Eichmann caught up in the twisted dreams of a man named Hitler. - Oshima

But there are times in this world when it's not enough just not to do the wrong thing

In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil. Good and evil are not fixed stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa.

Cops, Hoshino concluded, not for the first time in his life, are just gangsters who get paid by the state.

waste is the highest virtue one can achieve in an advanced capitalist society

I don't think I'd want Mickey Mouse pimping for me anyway.

And besides, thought Yoshida, If it was all right for God to test man, why was it wrong for man to test God?