Quotes About Ethics

With no serious downsides, a one-in-three potential benefit for end-stage cancer seems like it would spark further research, right? But who's going to pay for a study of something that can't be patented?

If most urban meat-eaters were to visit an industrial broiler house, to see how the birds are raised, and could see the birds being "harvested" and then being "processed" in a poultry processing plant, some, perhaps many of them, would swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat. For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what's happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.3513

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much."

How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?

1. There is no lying, stealing or violence involved

No law or prior pledge can insure loyalty if the cause itself becomes unworthy in the mind and conscience of the individual. In such cases, dishonoring the oath of allegiance may be a nobler course of action.

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.

The secret of life is sincerity and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

Campaign donors buy a get out of jail pass... essentially, fraud has been decriminalized.

John Locke's guiding axiom was that all men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor. A corollary to this logic was that landlords have a right only to what they themselves produce, not to exploit and appropriate the labor of their tenants:

Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing.

I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary.

Lamb Christology is inseparable from ethics. Paradoxically, the slaughtered Lamb reveals God and also reveals what it means to be faithful to God. It reveals how God saves humanity and how humanity in turn can serve God.

T]he commitment to a framework neutral among ends can be seen as a kind of value [...] but its value consists precisely in its refusal to affirm a preferred way of life or conception of the good.

Putting aside the issue of how compelling her need for money may have been, and how significant her understanding of the consequences, we suggest that her consent is irrelevant. There are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy.41

If you look closely at the price-gouging debate, you'll notice that the arguments for and against price-gouging laws revolve around three ideas: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.

This line of reasoning leads Kant to the second formulation of the categorical imperative: "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."23 This is the formula of humanity as an end.

The debate over the priority of the right over the good is ultimately a debate about the meaning of human freedom.

Here then is the link between freedom as autonomy and Kant's idea of morality. To act freely is not to choose the best means to a given end; it is to choose the end itself, for its own sake - a choice that human beings can make and billiard balls cannot.

prison cell upgrade: $82 per night.

the moral worth of an action consists not in the consequences that flow from it, but in the intention from which the act is done. What matters is the motive, and the motive must be of a certain kind. What matters is doing the right thing because it's right, not for some ulterior motive.

the idea that the right way of valuing goods and social practices depends on the purposes and ends those practices serve.