Quotes About Ethics

Judges ought to remember that their office is to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.

Nupital love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.

Seek not proud riches, but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly.

We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong's sake; but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honour, or the like. There, why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong merely out of ill nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch, because they can do no other.

For this is but to dash the first table against the second; and so to consider men as Christians, as we forget that they are men. Lucretius the poet, when he beheld the act of Agamemnon, that could endure the sacrificing of his own daughter, exclaimed: Tantum Religio potuit suadere malorum.

Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue.

He prayed to goodness that the relationship might be reasonably remote. He remembered, anxiously, that a man may not marry his grandmother...

I was never sloppy with other people's money. Only my own. Because I figure, well, you can be.

We teach our boys to firebomb villages, but we won't let them write fuck on the side of their planes because it's obscene.

The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible.

For Nietzsche, the very essence of man was neither his desire nor his reason, but his thymos: man was above all a valuing creature, the "beast with red cheeks" who found life in his ability to pronounce the words "good" and "evil.

Eski öjeni, uygun olanlar?n yetiÅŸtirilmesi ve uygun görülmeyenlerin yok edilmesi amac?yla sürekli seçme iÅŸlemi gerektirirdi. Yeni öjeni ise uygun olmayanlar?n her birinin olas? en yüksek genetik düzeye ç?kart?lmalar?na ilkece olanak verecektir.

Gerçek özgürlük, politik toplumlar?n kendileri için en deÄŸerli sayd?klar? deÄŸerleri koruma özgürlüÄŸüdür ve günümüzün biyoteknoloji devrimi söz konusu olduÄŸunda kullanmam?z gereken özgürlük iÅŸte budur.

We need, in other words, a better theory of the human soul.

But what if Rousseau was wrong and that inner self was, as traditional moralists believed, the seat of asocial or harmful impulses, indeed of evil?

Whether or not true free will exists, virtually all human beings act as if it does, and evaluate each other on the basis of their ability to make what they believe to be genuine moral choices.

To deceive the state, strangers, or even associates is accepted, and often applauded as evidence of cleverness.

Kant picked up on Rousseau's idea of perfectibility, and turned it into the core of his moral philosophy. At the beginning of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says that the only thing that is unconditionally good is a good will, and that the capacity to make moral choices is what makes us distinctively human. Human beings are ends in themselves and should never be treated as a means to other ends.

In societies where most politicians are corrupt, singling one out for punishment is often not a sign of reform but of a power grab.

an autonomous self that has been detached from all prior loyalties and commitments "is not to conceive of an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth":

To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion.