Quotes About Ethics

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.

As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

I don't care about what is good and what is evil, I care about what is true.

It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? The following offences merit the death penalty, according to Leviticus 20: cursing your parents; committing adultery; making love to your stepmother or your daughter-in-law; homosexuality; marrying a woman and her daughter; bestiality (and, to add injury to insult, the unfortunate beast is to be killed too).

Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.

Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'?

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.

Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good.

I will not utter falsehoods but I have no objection to making meaningless statements.

In any case, you won't get rich doing science, so why do it at all if you undermine the only point of the enterprise by lying?

its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive him-self'.

As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

Do we really need policing — whether by God or by each other — in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner?

There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.

our species is the only one not allowed to go to the vet to be painlessly put out of our misery.

There is no inconsistency in favouring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being;

I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.

Notwithstanding his somewhat dodgy family values, Jesus' ethical teachings were—at least by comparison with the ethical disaster area that is the Old Testament—admirable; but there are other teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of 'atonement' for 'original sin'. This