Quotes About Ethics

Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?

Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.

It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy.

other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.

Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel.

Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.

But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.

can't quite dispel the worthless notion that the very beautiful should live by other codes. For such a face as I've imagined for her there should be special respect.

Instead, she found her argument in the "doctrine of necessity," an idea established in common law that in certain limited circumstances, which no parliament would ever care to define, it was permissible to break the criminal law to prevent a greater evil.

self-interest and kindness were best not separated

forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?

Celor ce nu-È™i pot lua gândul de la o nedreptate li se întâmpl? uneori s? suprapun?, în minte, dorinÈ›a de revan?? cu sentimentul unei obligaÈ›ii morale.

Vous n'avez tué personne aujourd'hui ? Mais combien en avez-vous laissé mourir ?

The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant. Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them.

To kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain.

All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?

Regarding yourself as a highly rational and compassionate being does not make you rational and compassionate in all circumstances.

There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought.

He suspected he had brushed against a fundamental law of the universe: such ecstasy must compromise his freedom. That was its price.

There is a compassion in rational thought that is sometimes missing in religious conviction.

In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy.

As between an ethical professional requirement that a journalist hold nothing back and a patriotic duty not to shoot one's own soldiers in the back, we have found no difficulty in making a choice. Freedom of the press does not carry with it a general license to reveal our secret strengths and weaknesses to the enemy.

Never in my life have I had the thought that I was going out to fight in order to inflict defeat on somebody. Rather, I've always gone out to protect what was rightfully mine.

I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.' David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 19381