Quotes About Ethics

You would never look at yourself as "evil" no matter what the other fellow thought of what you did. It's in our nature. And that's the great secret of evil. It is never viewed as evil by those who perpetrate the evil.

That is Plato's great hope: that love of beauty can, when rightly cultivated and educated, battle immorality.

In fact, it's the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

It's deplorable that academia should prostitute itself, but there it is. Not even Harvard is above it. In fact, Harvard least of all, with that ludicrous delusion of self-importance that makes every Harvard professor feel he's a public intellectual, qualified to comment on issues far beyond his expertise.

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.

When a corporation writes something off, it accepts the cost. When we write off corporations as inherently corrupt, we accept the cost, too.

Opportunistic theft and burglary are, historically, rare in American disasters, rare enough that many disaster scholars consider it one of the "myths" of disaster. Some such opportunism happened in Katrina. The first thing worth saying about such theft is who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children's corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration?

If I am not my brother's keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.

Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked.

pretty is as pretty does

Das Gewissen, das des Außenhalts entbehrt, entartet zum Idol der Selbstgerechtigkeit.

Where would the world be if we took every man to book? There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best- in a way that cost them nothing.

The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.

Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.

WE KNOW THAT to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival. As individuals and nations are becoming increasingly interdependent, we have no other choice than to develop what I call a sense of universal responsibility.

MARCH 23 FOR A BODHISATTVA to be successful in accomplishing the practice of the six perfections — generosity, ethical discipline, tolerance, joyous effort, concentration and wisdom — cooperation with, and kindness towards, fellow beings are extremely important.

The lack of moral character is the number one problem in the black community today

At the center of Zoroastrian theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god, Ahura Mazda ("the Wise Lord"). Like most ancients, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as being the source of both good and evil. He therefore developed an ethical dualism in which two opposing spirits, Spenta Mainyu ("the beneficent spirit") and Angra Mainyu ("the hostile spirit"), were responsible for good and evil, respectively.

there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...]

Islam and Judaism in seventh-century Arabia operated within "the same sphere of religious discourse," in that both shared the same religious characters, stories, and anecdotes, both discussed the same fundamental questions from similar perspectives, and both had nearly identical moral and ethical values.

Quemar dinero inocente es un acto de canibalismo