Quotes About Ethics

La humanidad está muy cerca del salvajismo y tiene que regirse por normas. De lo contrario, nos hundiríamos en nuestra propia naturaleza animal y pereceríamos.

We feel free to criticize otherwise-honest police officers who protect crooked cops because of their Blue Code. But we have our White Code. It allows some doctors to get away with clinical shoddiness and bad medicine, and I say to hell with it.

Si nunca has estudiado filosofía, ¿cómo puedes rechazarla? La ciencia y la medicina se ocupan del cuerpo, mientras la filosofía trata de la mente y del alma, tan necesarias para un médico como la comida y el aire.

imposible encontrar a doce hombres, honrados

Spiritual revolutionaries must be committed not to what is easiest, but to what is most beneficial to themselves and the world.

In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate - look to his character.

The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.

If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.

Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

I do not feel that we should set up people as "models"; rather actions, thoughts, principles.

Bombing of urban areas was not considered a war crime at Nuremberg; reason is, the West did more of it than the Germans.

if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others -- more stringent ones, in fact -- plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil

The idea that we must choose between the method of winning hearts and minds and the method of shaping behavior presumes that we have the right to choose at all. This is to grant us a right that we would surely accord to no other power. Yet the overwhelming body of American scholarship accords us this right.

Not all evils can be rectified, but ongoing evils surely should stop.

It's not the generals, it's the civilians who authorise and organise the worst war crimes.

We should not forget Adam Smith's perspicuous observation that the "masters of mankind"—in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England—never cease to pursue their "vile maxim": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.

Just war theory has been converted into a form of apologetics for whatever atrocities your favored state is carrying out.

intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

Il existe deux ensembles de principes. Les principes de pouvoir et de privilège et les principes de vérité et de justice. Si vous courez après le pouvoir et les privilèges, ce sera toujours au détriment de la vérité et de la justice.

If people cannot rise to the level of applying to ourselves the same standards we apply to others they have no right to talk about right and wrong.

Reigning doctrines are often called a double standard.The term is misleading.It is more accurate to describe them as a single standard,clear and unmistakable,the standard that Adam Smith called the vile maxim of the masters of mankind: ...All for ourselves,and nothing for other people. Much has changed since his day,but the vile maxim flourishes.

NC: You're right, but I think it tells you something very interesting about Western culture. When they went to the concentration camps and were appalled, they did not say, "Let's save the survivors"; they said, "Let someone else pay for saving the survivors." IP: Exactly.