Quotes About Ethics

I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

American business needs more conscience, not less, whether from religious motivation like Hobby Lobby or from secular intentions.

The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.

Is hacking ever acceptable? It depends on the motive.

There are people who do everything for a calculative political motive. My only motive is a human motive.

I have become the chief minister not with a selfish motive.

I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.

We should often blush for our very best actions, if the world did but see all the motives upon which they were done.

You can have the most wonderful motives for what you do, but if what you do harms other people, you're fooling yourself.

Some forms of motor neuron disease are genetically linked, but I have no indication that my kind is. No other member of my family has had it. But I would be in favour of abortion if there was a high risk.

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

A computer study of the frequency of the word "duty" in British and American books showed its frequency had shrunk to one-third of its frequency in earlier times.124 Shame is another of the concepts that seems to have faded, as shameless behavior has flourished, and has even been celebrated as "liberation" in some quarters.

If we ever allow morality or law to become just a question of whose ox is gored, then we will have taken a fatal step toward national suicide. We can survive lapses into hypocrisy, but we cannot survive making hypocrisy a ruling principle.

Adam Smith declared "the good temper and moderation of contending factions" to be "the most essential circumstance in the public morals of a free people."51 But what good temper or moderation can be expected when a major segment of the population becomes convinced that "the system is rigged" against them and morality is just a giant fraud?

Adam Smith declared "the good temper and moderation of contending factions" to be "the most essential circumstance in the public morals of a free people." But what good temper or moderation can be expected when a major segment of the population becomes convinced that "the system is rigged" against them and morality is just a giant fraud?

In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.

The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. The latter rejects absolute power, regardless of its aim or use.

The judge punishes lawbreakers as a burning house injures its occupants. A person may be burned to death while robbing a home or saving a friend. Similarly, from a moral point of view, the judge's work is good or evil, depending on whether the laws he enforces are good or evil.

Scientific knowledge does not contain within itself directions for its humanitarian use.

Anyone who seeks to help others—whether by means of religion or by means of medicine—must eschew the use of force.

Men are rewarded and punished not for what they do, but rather for how their acts are defined. This is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.

The fact that physicians commit suicide more frequently than do lay persons ought to unmask their claims about suicide prevention as self-serving propaganda.

In the history of the twentieth century, the principal dramatis personae were National and International Socialisms, better known as Nazism and Communism. Their citizens evaded the duty of self-responsibility by claiming to be following orders. Following orders -attributed to or issued by God, the State, Science, Medicine-is always the easy way out. Refusing to do so requires self-reliance and resisting temptations and threats.

What, then, are psychotherapists and what do they sell to or impose on their clients? Insofar as they use force, psychotherapists are judges and jailers, inquisitors and torturers; insofar as they eschew it, they are secular priests and pseudomedical rhetoricians. Their services consist of coercions and constraints imposed on individuals on behalf of other persons or social groups, or they consist of contracts and conversations entered into by individuals on their own behalf.