Quotes About Ethics

we WEIRD ones typically practise what is known as 'strong reciprocity': we are conditional cooperators (tending to cooperate so long as others do too) but also altruistic punishers (ready to punish defectors and free riders even if it costs us personally). And it is the combination of these two traits that leads to the success of large-scale cooperation in society.

A business that is built on a living purpose may have strong foundations, but without a source of finance that is aligned with its values it is unlikely to survive and thrive.

The pernicious effects of the self-interest theory have been most disturbing,' concludes Frank. 'By encouraging us to expect the worst in others, it brings out the worst in us: dreading the role of the chump, we are often loath to heed our nobler instincts.

I don't mind people going about unobtrusively doing good, but I can't stomach moral indignation.

In every other age and class man is held responsible for his reading, and not reading responsible for man. The books a man or woman reads are less the making of character than the expression of it.

A right includes the freedom to use it in ways others find distressing or even wrong.

But what does it mean to feel pressured or coerced to abort? Abortion opponents cite lurid news stories of women threatened with guns or even murdered for rejecting abortion. That's coercion. But a parent who lays out in detail the hard life of a single mother is not forcing a daughter to terminate her pregnancy, nor is a boyfriend who says he's not up for marriage or ready to be a father, or a sister who says there's no room for another baby in a shared apartment.

An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that "a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain."8

As I've mentioned before, continuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. That means abortion is always potentially lifesaving for a pregnant woman.

We need to see abortion as an urgent practical decision that is just as moral as the decision to have a child—indeed, sometimes more moral.

Pro-choicers often say no one is "pro-abortion," but what is so virtuous about adding another child to the ones you're already overwhelmed by? Why do we make young women feel guilty for wanting to feel ready for motherhood before they have a baby? Isn't it a good thing that women think carefully about what it means to bring a child into this world—what, for example, it means to the children she already has?

Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for conduct during pregnancy, and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014 a law was proposed in the Kansas state legislature that would require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in pregnancy.

You can't really trust any man who is religious. If your interests conflict with the religion the man breaks his word and betrays you and thinks he's right to do so.

To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.

I am an atheist and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

Across media platforms, "Typhoid Mary" is still casually applied to contemporary menaces of public health, ignoring the ethically dubious practice of blaming healthy carriers and Mary Mallon's persecution as a poor immigrant at the turn of the 20th century.

Does the surgeon spare the cancer because he must cut to remove it? We are cruel. Of course we are cruel.

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?

If guilt's a luxury, then I'm a plutocrat.

If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.

The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.