Quotes About Ethics

Los maestros tienen la obligación de investigar y difundir la verdad sobre los temas más significativos, sobre los temas que importan.

It is probable that the most inhuman monsters, even the Himmlers and the Mengeles, convince themselves that they are engaged in noble and courageous acts.

Es «antiliberal y amoral» el formar a los niños para que trabajen «sin apelar a la libertad ni a la inteligencia, sino en nombre del salario».

that's what faced the soldiers who were massacring each other in the trenches in the First World War. They were fighting for nothing. They were fighting for the right to destroy each other. And in that kind of circumstance no questions of justice arise

August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts

they don't even mention the logical possibility of a third position: namely, that the United States did not have the right, either the legal or the moral right, to intervene by force in the internal affairs of Vietnam. We leave to history the task of judging the debate between the hawks and the respectable doves, but the third position, opposed to the other two, is excluded from discussion.

where there is no question of justice, just the question of who's going to win a struggle to the death, then I think the proper human reaction is: call it off, don't win either way, try to stop it

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.

What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.

The business of voting your conscience is: Do you really care just about how you feel? or, Do you care about what happens to the world? If you care about what you feel you don't have any conscience, you're not a moral agent at all, so stop talking about conscience, you don't have any.

Lesser evil voting should be simply called elementary rationality and elementary morality.

In a democratic society, we, the intelligent minority, have the duty of directing the "ignorant and stupid" masses to what we decide are proper goals, using whatever deception is required. All for their own good.

No podemos evitar abordar cuestiones complejas y controvertidas —especialmente cuando son significativas desde el punto de vista humano— con un punto de vista definido, con intereses personales, si se quiere, y estos intereses tienen que ser evidentes, de manera que aquellos a los que nos dirigimos puedan entender de dónde venimos en nuestras opciones e interpretaciones de los hechos de la historia.

Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn "personal responsibility" by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don't agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it's grotesque at any level.

It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—no feeling, for example, that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort.

From the essay Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

The internet is the superhighway of grammatically incorrect moral outrage. EPHRON:

I would love to be a sellout if only someone would ask.

What good are laws if they're not human?

There is no disgrace in staying behind, not when it's the right thing.

Two of the top rules—Try Not to Hurt Anybody, and Have the Balls to Say What You Think—often clashed, but the results blended with her Be An Asshole When Necessary rule, so it worked for her.

In my world, the self-righteous are often the ones sneaking around getting blow jobs before they go home to the wives and kiddies.

Education's supposed to be more than learning--leastways that's how we were taught. It's supposed to help build your character and help teach you how to get on in the world. If it tells you that you get booted for doing what you had to do, for standing up for yourself, then something's wrong with the system.