Quotes About Ethics

Still more striking is the fact that Kant unites epistemology and ethics specifically through the concept of law.

Strauss's later judgment on the Kantian-Cohenian idea of ethical socialism was dispositive: Cohen's thought belongs to the world preceding World War I. Accordingly, he had a greater faith in the power of modern Western culture to mold the fate of mankind than seems warranted now. The worst things he had experienced were the Dreyfus scandal and the pogroms instigated by Czarist Russia; he did not experience Communist Russia and Hitler's Germany.

He wrote about this claim, that the evils of Auschwitz could not be assimilated into the Hegelian system and hence by implication by any philosophical thought and indeed by any thought at all, briefly in his book The Religious Dimension of Hegel's Thought, published in 1968, and then again in an essay, "Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?

Consequently, no idea – no complete series of answers to why-questions – can ever be an object of human knowledge. Yet, Kant argues, without ideas morality would be impossible:

But it comes to me that two wrongs don't make another wrong.

Lord, I don't understand it, but when a person does something wrong, it never feels wrong until later. It's never as evil as you'd imagined.

Everybody's always doing the same old things--- you know, doing unto others before they can do unto you.

There are situations in which torture is not merely permissible but morally mandatory.

Old saying, 'What goes around comes around.' You could have avoided ALL this turmoil IF YOU had only played fair.

The cardinal sin in sports, what could really wreck it, is not cheating to win, which has gone on forever, but cheating to lose. That threatens a fundamental aspect of sports' appeal, which is their spontaneity. If games are fixed, they're no different from movies they're scripted.

There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.

There was no such thing as situational integrity.

In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty. —Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

The idea that every government official counts as all-wise and incorruptible makes no more sense than the assumption that each corporate honcho displays flawless judgment and stainless ethics.

Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are." ? John Wooden Quote

The selling of food matters as much as the food itself… if not more.

In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted.

Is that why you do good deeds, Richie? To shorten your time in Purgatory?' 'Oh, honey,' he said, brushing lint from an orange sleeve. 'I'm going to hell. That's where the action is.

If it feels like you're choosing between the lesser of two evils, don't. There is always a higher choice.

Our moral and cultural traditions have not kept pace with our economic possibilities. We try to match new demands with a spiritual life not designed for them.

Liberty is the object of the Republic. Liberty needs virtue. Virtue among the people is impossible without religion.

cannot associate with one another without creating a moral relationship.

The outcome is a result of the integrity of the process.

If the execution of a million or more sentient beings, the destruction of a dozen planetary communities, isn't enough—if the members of the Council need a living victim paraded in front of them to move them to act—then shame on them. And shame on us.