Quotes About Ethics

Low prices are what consumers consider fair, even if their affordable goods create injustice elsewhere.

In my book I specifically discussed the structural nature of injustice and offered Nine Touchstones of Goddess ethics as an alternative to the Ten Commandments of Biblical religion.

If people knew who the angels were, they would be very nice when they saw one and would still do their same evil garbage when they thought none were around. Knowing who they are defeats the purpose.

There is justice in an insanely cruel world.

Problem with the big philosophers is they cared about ideas more than people. Hegel would probably have stepped over a guy trying to slit his wrists outside a bar — to get to all the people he could sit and bullshit with inside. Did you know half of philosophy was first put into words by people shot in the ass?

I don't know if anybody thinks of themselves as bad. We all have excuses.

No friend of my parents is a pervert. It's physiologically impossible.

Savages were savages, but what could one expect of civilized men who plotted massacre?

Brutal Bosses McCall goes on to point out that when leaders feel they are inherently better than others, they may start to believe that the needs or feelings of the lesser people can be ignored. None of our fixed-mindset leaders cared much about the little guy, and many were outright contemptuous of those beneath them on the corporate ladder. Where does this lead? In the guise of "keeping people on their toes," these bosses may mistreat workers.

It's not right to profit from another person's suffering.

It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

When you do anything that harms others—get them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or punch them out—a powerful new factor comes into play: the need to justify what you did.

We cannot avoid our psychological blind spots, but if we are unaware of them, we may become unwittingly reckless, crossing ethical lines and making foolish decisions. Introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs that we, personally, cannot be co-opted or corrupted and that our dislikes or hatreds of other groups are not irrational but reasoned and legitimate. Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.

The reason Big Pharma spends so much on small gifts as well as the big ones is well known to marketers, lobbyists, and social psychologists: being given a gift evokes an implicit desire to reciprocate.

Whether those claims are true or false is irrelevant. When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior that we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves. Whether the behavior in question is a small thing like spilling ink on a hotel bedspread or a big thing like embezzlement, the mechanism of self-justification is the same.

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

Centuries of experience show that people will tell their tormenters what they want to hear, whether it's confessing to witchcraft in Salem, admitting to counterrevolutionary tendencies in Soviet Russia or concocting stories about Iraq and Al Qaeda."20 Indeed, the Senate Intelligence report confirmed that no information gained from torturing detainees had proved useful in capturing or killing any terrorist, including Osama bin Laden.

Once torture is justified in rare cases, it is easier to justify it in others: Let's torture not only this bastard we are sure knows where the bomb is, but this other bastard who might know where the bomb is, and also this bastard who might have some general information that could be useful in five years, and also this other guy who might be a bastard only we aren't sure.

Gentlemen, for all their talk of honour, really had the oddest morals.

He realized this character trait, like most, cut both ways, and could be a virtue or a flaw, depending on the circumstances. At the moment, he felt it made him rather callous.

Winning is nothing unless the opponent is worthy

Maybe in ten or twenty years we'll look back on chemotherapy and gasp. Another generation may be appalled that we ever did this, dripped poison through a needle into a person's body to make him well. ?

One in whom goodness is dominant moves through the world as a swan does through water, never drenched or dragged down, but rather buoyant, tranquil, treating all experience equally. That person generates virtue as a spider spins its threads. Such a person knows true happiness.

Strat yearned to imagine her without even the thin white dress, but it would not be honorable, so he prevented himself from having such a fantasy.