Quotes About Ethics

The internet is now a forum for public prosecution.

Asians love schoolgirls in uniforms. They say the Japanese can buy used schoolgirl panties from vending machines. And from shops hidden away in apartment buildings. Burusera shops, they call them. The smell is very important; it adds value to the commodity. I wonder how Marx would have dealt with that?

Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon.

Much everyday anger results when we confuse our own personal wants with general moral codes.

Show me a transcript of the words you've spoken, typed, or texted in the course of a day, an account of your doings, and a record of your transactions, and I'll show you your religion.

The tension between what is and what ought to be drives the growls against hypocrisy and the satirization of the self-satisfied and uptight.

Since causing massive unnecessary harm is wrong if anything is wrong, the judgement that factory farming is an indefensible institution seems inescapable.

Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative?

There is an explanatory link between ought and is, and this provides one of the ways in which reason can indeed address moral issues.

It's all right for a leader to be ruthless, Adele thought. He shouldn't be whimsical, though, and he especially shouldn't be whimsically ruthless.

that was what being a Champion was all about: dealing with bullies who preyed on other people. Duke Ronald hadn't been a bad example of the type, but the whole breed had to be stopped. Otherwise people would grow up believing that if you had the strength to do it, you could take anything you wanted.

I don't make decisions based on money.

Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices. This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please.

Upon the exposure of his bribery, it is reported he said, "I should have paid more.

What do I consider myself now? A man attempting to be good. In this endeavor I have no use for church and steeple. If another man does, I only wish he finds what he needs.

God save us from religion.

Bentham maintained that what mattered about an action was how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided. He enjoined us always to act so as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

Deontology states that there are certain things, like torture, that you just shouldn't do.

Most people seem to believe that not only is it permissible to turn the train down the spur, it is actually required—morally obligatory.

Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moral truths.

In order to build a good reputation, you have to view your own actions in the same way that the people judging you will view them.

Never ask one of your peers to carry bad news for you. If there's going to be a disaster in any part of the organization that you're running, whether it's a personnel issue or a financial issue, always inform the boss yourself.

What was once an open space between law and freedom, one governed by character and truth, is now deserted, so law must now do what character has abandoned.

What has happened, of course, is that over a period of time our society has slowly exited the moral world and it now lives, instead, in a psychological world. The difference is that in one there is right and wrong and in the other there is not. In this other world, we are comfortable or not, psychologically healthy or not, dysfunctional or not, but we are never sinners.