Quotes About Ethics

Discretion is the polite word for hypocrisy.

If you built a time machine and traveled back four hundred years and, let's say for the sake of argument, found yourself in a romance with one of your sixteenth-grade grandmothers, the good news is that you can feel fine about having children together. However morally bizarre that might be, it would not be genetically problematic.

not put in place, one wonders how insurance and pharmaceutical companies will treat our grandchildren if they have genetic information about them, perhaps even before they are even conceived. Insurance

If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of of your power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having...a value conferring status.

Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.

The principle of a good will, therefore, is to do only those actions whose maxims can be conceived as having the form of a law. If there is such a thing as moral obligation – if, as Kant himself says, "duty is not to be as such an empty delusion and a chimerical concept" (4:402) – then we must establish that our wills are governed by this principle: "I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position

Virtue consists not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it." She

A conscience at ease is a pillow on which we may sleep soundly even in a dungeon.

Sólo los políticos se arrogan el derecho a condonar o perdonar en nombre de todos, cosa inconcebible para un crimen de masas o un genocidio.

Cuál es el régimen político más inhumano? El que decreta el bien del hombre.

To police is not to conquer, to police is to remind people there are rules that if followed benefit all.

but the stupefying realization that the paparazzi who chased her car into Paris's Alma tunnel did nothing to help her. "She was still very much alive in the backseat," Harry later said, "and those same people that caused the accident, instead of helping, were taking photographs of her while she was dying. They just stood there and watched her die. I will never forgive them." William agreed.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Stealing is the worst kind of cheating. It's cheating at life, son. It's for folk that arenae any good at life, so they have to cheat.

In a proper utopia, they would not let any lawyers in.

Oil they would buy from anyone. From Satan.

In our corrupt times, the virtue of a Pontiff is commended when he does not surpass the wickedness of other men. —Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy, 1561

Why should you give up God because of gunpowder? Since the world began, God in his wisdom has given us tools with which to slaughter each other. Jawbones of asses. Slings. Swords. Crossbows. Why shouldn't he give us gunpowder?

The best vantage point for clarifying one's moral responsibility when harm has occurred is in the dirt and blood alongside the wounded party, not at the safe distance of a detached jurist debating the details of the relevant legislation.

When Jesus concludes the parable by asking the lawyer, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the one who fell among robbers?" (v. 36), he is indicating that the question, "Who is my neighbor?" is really a victim's question, which can only be answered from a victim's point of view.

The law has no compassion. And justice is administered without compassion.

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.