Quotes About Ethics

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

I don't really understand it. Never have. The more I think on it the more it horrifies me. How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible?

350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg.99

It is hard to imagine a more "pay-to-play" relationship than the one between Steyer and his grantees. It epitomizes the cynicism of Washington, D.C. And it exposes the news media's double standard.

What is inappropriate is accepting fossil fuel funding while attacking others for doing the same. Even less appropriate is lying about it.

really didn't care [about nuclear plant safety] because there are too many people in the world anyway. . . . I think that playing dirty, if you have a noble end, is fine.

When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, "Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.

environmental scientists, journalists, and activists have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.

I have to say there is part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian," writes University of California journalism professor Michael Pollan, in a passage from his 2007 book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. "Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris."70 The trouble with dogmatic vegetarianism

Whatever its psychological origins, vegetarianism appears to stem less from a rational consideration of the evidence than an emotional rejection of killing animals

Killing a chicken is not the same as murdering a human. There's an important difference there.

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It's chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago.

I argue that most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces, and that the most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason, terms that I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.

The Realistic Vision recognizes the need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing.

I mean if those moral principles are out there and God is just telling us what it is, then why do we need the middleman? Just tell us the reasons why it's wrong and okay. And if it's just because God said it what if he didn't say murder was wrong, would that make it right? No, it would still be wrong.

Any preference for my group's interests over yours must be justified by some unbiased, disinterested ethic. Which sounds simple but, given that we're dealing with Humans and not Vulcans, it's sometimes difficult for two parties to agree on basic principles, specially parties who are unable or unwilling to switch points of view. This is the power of ethical reasoning.

In other words, we can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, or Rawls's fairness ethics, but in science as well.

The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty through force or fraud. The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to believe and act as we choose so long as our beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.

For indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it. If the reader should object that I have abandoned ethics for the false doctrine that 'to understand all is to forgive all,' I can reply that it is only a temporary suspense of ethical judgment, made because 'to condemn much is to understand

It makes people believe if we just get back to those principles, like police brutalising and jailing homosexuals, we can be good once again.

Once moral progress in a particular area is under way, most religions eventually get on board—as in the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, women's rights in the twentieth century, and gay rights in the twenty-first century—but this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time.

as the Rutgers University legal scholar Gary Francione has done in his 2008 book Animals as Persons, where he outlined in logical detail why sentient nonhumans should legally be regarded as persons: "They are conscious; they are subjectively aware; they have interests; they can suffer. No characteristic other than sentience is required for personhood.

It is indeed probable that more harm and misery has been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. —Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960

As Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations , "Society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another.… If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least Ã¢â'¬Â¦ abstain from robbing and murdering one another.