Quotes About Ethics

If you had the power to make people do what you wanted and never exercised it, what was the point of having it?

If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest.

Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn't be in chains. She did, however, have firm ideas about not getting killed for other people's high-minded ideas.

According to Connelly, who heard the story from the nigger trader, Michael's former master was fascinated by the abilities of South American parrots and reasoned that if a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.

Entrepreneur?" Pepper said the last part like manure. "That's just a hustler who pays taxes.

But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.

They strung up the guilty and, in the interest of prevention, a robust percentage of the innocent.

When trafficking in cadavers, it helped to be immune to sentimentality.

She didn't agree with the popular arguments for slavery but saw it as a necessary evil given the obvious intellectual deficiencies of the African tribe. To free them from bondage all at once would be disastrous—how would they manage their affairs without a careful and patient eye to guide them?

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

My motto is: When in doubt, just keep lying. Even if you're terrible at it.

the best sources in the Western tradition have argued that morality is much more than, indeed qualitatively different from, the sum of the values that an essentially autonomous self chooses for itself. Classical, Jewish, and Christian sources, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, or Augustine, John Chrysostom, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin, insist that morality is neither plural nor subjective.

A person has to grow as a moral self in order to transcend this childlike subjectivity and primitive narcissism.

valores certamente não são a resposta para o relativismo moral. Muito pelo contrário, a mera discussão sobre valores já favorece o relativismo moral.

A good moral education addresses both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human nature. Stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education—that is, the education of character. The

religious and philosophical ethicists have not reflected much on children as moral learners or written much on the virtues as taught and communicated in children's stories. Perhaps this is because, like so many others, ethicists too subscribe to the falsehood that childhood is more about socialization than moral formation.

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

No one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them.

T]here are two races of men in this world, but only these two -- the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.

It is not for me to pass judgement on those prisoners who put their own people above everyone else. Who can throw a stone at a man who favors his friends under circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life or death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of "pure race"—and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.

In the concentration camps...we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.