Quotes About Ethics

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.

After the Reichstag fire, Hannah Arendt wrote that "I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.

We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as "just following orders".

If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.

History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.

Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle.

As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism "has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.

In 2017, the American president averaged six lies a day. The next year it was sixteen, the following year twenty-two. In 2020 he told on average about twenty-seven lies a day.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. "I found so much obedience," Milgram remembered, "that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.

Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public's sense of truth.

the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.

If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. "I

We do not see the minds that we hurt when we publish falsehoods, but that does not mean we do no harm.

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. Both

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.

They handled hundreds of cases at a time, at a pace of sixty per hour or more; the life or death of an individual human was decided in a minute or less. In a single night the Leningrad troika, for example, sentenced to death 658 prisoners of the concentration camp at Solovki.55

lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's most important deputy, did not follow every twist of Hitler's thinking, but he grasped the conclusions: Ethics as such was the error; the only morality was fidelity to race.

But other parents asked their children to make use of their own bodies if they passed away. More than one Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: "Mother says that we should eat her if she dies." This was forethought and love.83

Hitler foresaw a "resolution of the Polish problem" by the murder of those who might be regarded as fully human.

Law had no purpose beyond the codification of a Führer's momentary intuitions about the good of his race.