Quotes About Ethics

we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.

anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life.

There he coined the acronym NOMA for the phrase 'non-overlapping magisteria':

The sin of Adam and Eve is thought to be have passed down the male line - transmitted in the semen according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?

If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in this exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.

Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism.

Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people cannot tell the difference).

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. … I care about what's true.

Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad?

Hitler no doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentieth-century technology at his disposal.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.

dinin gerçekten de kötü etkilerinden biri, anlamadan tatmin olman?n bize bir erdem olduÄŸunu öÄŸretmesidir.

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.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

Atheists don't have to fear a great spy camera in the sky. They only – so the argument goes – have to fear real cameras and real policemen. Maybe you've heard the cynical witticism 'Conscience is knowing that someone is watching'.

No society has ever survived or will ever survive without morality, and no morality has ever survived without a transcendent source."19

These days, I no longer believe there ever are truly good guys or bad guys in war, at least in the Middle East. They're generally shades of gray. But that doesn't translate well on television. It was too complicated. Too remote.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

Virtue is virtue, and, like suffering, it is inexplicable, irreducible, unintelligible.

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest—and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura—and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant.

He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying.