Quotes About Ethics

Real ethical development is hard work and takes a long time.

For the Stoics, what distinguishes our species is the ability to reason and our high degree of sociality, from which it follows that we should spend our existence intent in using our mind to improve social living.

foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that or which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about this beyond the possibilities of knowledge." So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, who thought-in the tradition of writers and philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Paine-that we have a moral duty to distinguish sense from nonsense.

Jains, in contrast, believe that karma is a physical particle that floats about and is attracted to sentient beings, depending on their actions and their intentions.

Cicero concluded that "the actual hitting of the mark [is] to be chosen but not to be desired,

At the heart of the Torah, in the middle of the book of Leviticus, we find the commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (19:18).

I came to understand later that the requirement to extirpate anger in the Buddhist and Stoic cases has to do with the primacy of ethics in both philosophies. The aim of ethics is to do good, to reduce pain and suffering (dukkha), and, if possible, to bring happiness in its stead. Anger, at least in one standard mode, aims to hurt, to do harm, to inflict suffering. And one should never aim to do that.

The basic idea of the new philosophy was that in order to figure out how to live a life worth living, a eudaimonic life, as both modern philosophers and psychologists still refer to it, we have to master two things: we need to develop a decent understanding of how the world works, so not to engage in wishful thinking and waste a lot of time and resources; and we need to reason as well as we can about things, or we risk arriving at the wrong conclusions as to what to do and how.

There are two crucial ideas underlying Stoicism, and they each correspond to one major promise the philosophy holds for its practitioners. The first crucial idea is that life is fundamentally about being a morally good person, which is achieved through the continuous practice of four cardinal virtues. The second idea is the so-called dichotomy of control, the notion that some things are "up to us," as the Stoics say, and other things are not.

Stoics shifted the emphasis very much toward the social, essentially arguing that the point of life for human beings is to use reason to build the best society that it is humanly possible to build.

Para decidir cuál es la mejor forma de vivir (ética), hay que entender cómo funciona el mundo (física) y razonar adecuadamente sobre ello (lógica).

In contrast, Confucians hold that we should show compassion to all human beings, but we have special obligations to certain individuals because of the specific relationships we have with them, relationships that make us who we are—family, community, and friendship. So part of the justification for differentiated care is the special debts we acquire through the relationships that help define us.

The way the Stoics put all of this into practice is by means of the four cardinal virtues: practical wisdom, the ability to navigate complex situations, especially morally salient ones, in the best way possible; courage, of the moral kind, as in the courage to stand up and do the right thing; justice, meaning treating others as worthy of the respect and dignity that comes with being fellow humans; and temperance, responding to situations in just measure, without excess or defect.

Eugenicists weren't just about propaganda, they catalyzed significant political action. As early as 1896 the state of Connecticut passed a eugenic law according to which anyone who was epileptic, imbecile, or feeble-minded could not obtain a marriage license.

These are often referred to as the three Stoic disciplines: desire, action, and assent.

Two of the four Stoic virtues are pertinent to regulating desire: courage (to face facts and act accordingly) and temperance (to rein in our desires and make them commensurate with what is achievable).

I wonder why people work so hard to become politicians just in order to do something wrong.

La hermosura, señora Clara —le dije con voz áspera—, debe ir acompañada de la virtud para ser hermosura valedera pues, de otro modo, sólo es buena apariencia y como tal, fácil de perder.

pues no es digno de personas de bien poseer a otras en condición de objetos.

Act sensibly. Act sincerely. Act selflessly. Act splendidly.

Suppress hate; love generously. Work passionately, live honorably, and love genuinely.

Think honestly. Think humbly. Think honorably. Think happily.

Your talents determine what you should do; your character, where you end up.

People always think there's this huge hundred-foot-high barrier that separates doing good from doing bad. But there's not. There's nothing. There's not even a little anthill. You just take one baby step in any direction and you're already there. You've doing something awful. And your life is changed forever.