Quotes About Ethics

It's an odd thing is a professional gone bad. They talk about bent coppers, but what about bent lawyers, bent accountants, bent doctors? If push came to shove, would you expect one crooked businessman to stick up for another?

When confronted with inner conflicts, we are tempted to obscure them by externalizing the antagonisms—something that is done through the hatred of others and/or the hatred of the self (a method in which the scapegoat mechanism is turned inward). The more difficult, courageous, and ethical path involves attempting to face and tarry with the antagonisms.

The materialistic consciousness of our culture … is the root cause of the global crisis; it is not our business ethics, our politics or even our personal lifestyles. These are symptoms of a deeper underlying problem. Our whole civilization is unsustainable. And the reason that it is unsustainable is that our value system, the consciousness with which we approach the world, is an unsustainable mode of consciousness.

Even if nothing illegal occurred, one has to wonder about the political judgment involved. Surely the mere appearance of selling American power and influence to foreign interests should be enough to cause a former US president—and a possible future one—to steer well clear of such potentially

It is important to note that this deal was with the Chinese government—not with a Chinese company, which means that the Chinese government and the son of the vice president were now business partners.

Eliminating politicians' ability to raise money while in session would force them to devote their time exclusively to their job: lawmaking.

embarrassing entanglements. "Bribery interferes with trade, investment, and development," Hillary Clinton said at the OECD's fiftieth-anniversary forum in 2011. "It undermines good governance and encourages greater corruption. And of course, it is morally wrong—and far too common." On that we can all agree.

The law dictates how much politicians can collect in campaign contributions, limits their ability to make money on the side, and requires the disclosure of those contributors. Hopefully, politicians are also limited to some extent by their conscience. A sense of decency and good judgment ought to prevent politicians on both sides of the aisle from engaging in certain transactions—even if they think they can get away with it.

Politics in modern America has become a lucrative business, an industry that has less to do with policy and a lot more to do with accessing money and favors. As we will see, bills and regulations are often introduced not to effect policy change, but as vehicles for shaking down people for those money and favors.

Complexity is a useful and lucrative method of legal extortion for politicians

They were directed to hire certain well-connected advisers and lobbyists in Washington. "You hear about bribery in China," says Herbold. "They have nothing on us. We are just more sophisticated about it.

Throw Them All Out

But the problem is not just with accumulated power, but also with those who seek it. As scientist and author David Brin pointedly noted, "It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible.

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end.

Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.

Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations about honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.)

Putting yourself in the place of others...is what thinking ethically is all about.

We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

Until we boycott meat, and all other products of animal factories, we are, each one of us, contributing to the continued existence, prosperity, and growth of factory farming and all the other cruel practices used in rearing animals for food.

The unchallenged assumption is that humans may use animals for their own purposes, and they may raise and kill them to satisfy their preference for a diet containing animal flesh.

If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us.

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.