Quotes About Ethics

Providing information about how persons may end their life is not a crime, at least in the United States, or I would have spent many years behind bars!

Self-destruction by hanging is almost always an act of protest, a desire to shock and hurt someone. Therefore, believers in euthanasia avoid it. Even if the job of cutting down the body is left to the police or paramedics, this is an unacceptably selfish way to die, and I have never heard of a euthanasia supporter using it. Unless the neck is broken by the rope jerking the fall to a stop (as a professional hangman arranges), then it is death by strangulation, often not so quick.

If you have to help a person die, say nothing. Let the police do their own sleuthing.

Touching the person in the act of helping him or her to die is where criminal liability is possible. Giving an injection, holding the cup to the mouth, helping to put a plastic bag over the head and securing it – all are actions that prosecutors could use to enforce existing laws against assistance in dying.

Those who flaunt themselves are not clear Those who presume themselves are not distinguished Those who praise themselves have no merit Those who boast about themselves do not last

We ought not to do to our future selves what it would be wrong to do to other people.

What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history. If there are no rational beings elsewhere, it may depend on us and our successors whether it will all be worth it, because the existence of the Universe will have been on the whole good.

If there were no such normative truths, nothing would matter, and we would have no reasons to try to decide how to live. Such decisions would be arbitrary. We would not be the animals that can understand and respond to reasons. In a world without reasons, we would act only on our instincts and desires, living as other animals live. The Universe would not contain rational beings.

Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

Philosophers should not only interpret our beliefs; when they are false, they should change them.

This part of Kant's view is, I believe, a profound truth. We can be morally responsible in several other ways, or senses, but no one could ever be responsible, I believe, in any way that could make them deserve to suffer. Nor, I believe, does anyone deserve to be less happy.

Who with the Devil tries to play fair, weaves the net of his own despair. Oh, smile; what's a house between drunkards?

From which it follows that neither praise nor blame nor honours nor punishments are fair".

To be neutral in a situation of injustice is to have chosen sides already. It is to support the status quo.

If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

If you are neutral in a situation of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

The rubric of proportionality had to be observed—that the means were proportional to the objective.

And once I got old enough for such a thing to be a possibility, he told me that a man must be responsible for any seed he sows, for it's his duty to take care of a woman and protect her. And if I wasna prepared to do that, then I'd no right to burden a woman with the consequences of my own actions.

The law's a necessary evil--we canna be doing without it--but do ye not think it a poor substitute for conscience?

a Man's sense of Morality tends to decrease as his Power increases

If it was killing-and it was- then I thought it not murder, but a justifiable homicide, undertaken in desperate self defense.

He said the truth is the truth, and people should take responsibility for their own actions, which is right.

The thing was, some men needed killing. The Church didn't admit that, save it was war. The Mohawk understood it fine. So did Uncle Jamie.

he told me that a man must be responsible for any seed he sows, for it's his duty to take care of a woman and protect her. And if I wasna prepared to do that, then I'd no right to burden a woman with the consequences of my own actions.