Quotes About Ethics

We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

But secularists are not value free; their values are simply grounded in earthly concerns rather than in anticipation of heavenly rewards or fear of infernal punishments.

The ruling of men was a dirty business—

Doing what's right isn't supposed to hurt someone you care about.

Yet where lies the line between compromise and surrender? Between relinquishing the ideal of perfection on the one hand, and losing one's integrity on the other?

That was half the problem with kids these days. No responsibility.

We're always at war with good and evil in this world. No one escapes it. It's how we see it, how we recognize it that engages us in battle.

You don't have to have special skills to be a hero. You just have to do what's right, despite the cost.

I believe in justice too but I know that sometimes it is not delivered in the way it should be. Sometimes it is not delivered at all and the evil man walks free.

her it is complicated fighting for freedom and justice, but necessary if they were to hold on to what made them human and not beasts.

And I wonder, not for the first time, if the right thing to do is always the best thing.

The 1927 Supreme Court ruling that allowed Carrie Buck to be forcibly sterilized gave every state the green light to continue or begin sterilizing those deemed unfit to produce children, all in the name of "race betterment.

killing disabled people in the name of mercy.

The dangers of sophistry and scholasticism are present in the possibility of philosophy itself.

Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way it should be, while never losing sight of the way it is, is what being a grown-upmcomes to.

If the right to happiness is not an idle piece of wishful thinking but a demand of reason, the consequences can be revolutionary.

Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it.

She was ten years old. "That's about the age when people start deforming their consciences in order to accept something that's not just manifestly wrong but manifestly contrary to the religious beliefs that are front and center in their lives." Like Bettina Stangneth or Jan Philipp Reemtsma or David Person, Diane McWhorter cannot say why her conscience resisted attempts to deform it.

The philosopher Janna Thompson has argued that obligations to right historical wrongs persist indefinitely, if not eternally. She believes that keeping transgenerational commitments, implicit or not, is the central moral and political good that gives nations the basis for trust.

How many knots can the psyche tie itself into to defend itself against moral truth?

Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to.

how can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms?

the cubicles of sin

It was said of Dante that he always had time for lechery.