Quotes About Ethics

Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves-- autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, what then?

In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.

It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.

Good and evil, however, are views taken from a certain given standpoint, and from this standpoint good and evil are features forming a contrast, but as such they are always actualities; neither the one nor the other

Says the wolf in Æsop's fable: "Why is it right for you to eat the lamb, when for me it is supposed to be wrong?" Is not man in the same predicament as the wolf, and does not mankind slaughter more animals than all the wolves in the world ever ate?

aspects of the One and All in which a discrimination between good and evil is entirely lost sight

Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of the sinful.

There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

podemos decir que los "chulos bancarios" son tan despreciables como los proxenetas comunes.

The regrets that fester are overwhelmingly about failures to meet 'oughts', when we have let someone down, breaching an obligation.5 We learn from such regrets to keep our obligations. Although our decisions are biased towards momentary folly, when we consider our actions 'oughts' usually trump wants.

La otra opción es quedarnos de brazos cruzados mientras nuestras petroleras compiten con los chinos a ver quién soborna mejor.

Moral relativism and rights don't mix. Relativism undermines any appeal to rights: If rights exist, relativism is false; if rights exist, where do they come from? Again, we're pointed in the direction of a good God in whose image humans have been made—and thus who sets the parameters regarding our sexuality.

The never-angered person is morally deficient.

I shall continue to quote Dr. Fox: 'But within the academic game of science it is all too easy for the researcher to lose himself in an irrelevant problem, in an intellectual mind-game that may give him the prestige of widespread scientific publication. And he may forget how many animals died for him on his ego trip. A man of science must also be a man of conscience and integrity, constantly assessing the purpose and ethics of his work, whether it involves animals or human subjects.

Women] who won't say no for fear of offending someone will be taken advantage of and possibly even led into sin by spiritually immature colleagues and clients. [...] Just keep saying no, graciously but firmly, even if they threaten to take their business elsewhere.

Justice comes from the soul.

Sin makes us moral quadriplegics.

your alarm that is your conscience only sounds based on the standard that your heart has surrendered to. This means that a good and godly moral value system will all your conscience to function properly, but a bad and self-centered moral value system will mean that your conscience will do you harm.

I am very good at playing monkey games with my morality.

The scary deception of sin is that, at the point of sinning, sin doesn't look all that sinful.

Is there anything science should not try to explain? Science is knowledge and knowledge is power - power to do good or evil. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Jack asked himself: Would he have wanted to live out his life as a placid, contented, lobotomized Ferdinand the Bull? No. Then, what right did he have to inflict such a fate on anybody?

Cain is in each of us. We lose our temper, feel cornered and frightened, it can be the work of an instant. But to savour murder - that's not the prompting of Cain, that's Satan!