Quotes About Ethics

Now that we can clone humans they've removed the one pleasurable thing about having a child.

BP has put more birds in oil than Colonel Sanders.

What does it take to turn the hero into a villain?

David [Foster Wallace] is a Cosmopolitan subscriber; he says reading 'I've Cheated - Should I Tell?' a bunch of times a year is 'fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.

It is one thing to accept that one is powerless to stop the suffering in the world, but quite another to benefit from what brings misery to others.

At what point, I wondered, does silence become complicity?

Think you it is easy to get a well-known and beautiful woman alone, away from her husband, at so public a gathering? Think you that, in the company of dozens of guests and nearly as many gossipy servants, a man can just pull such a woman aside into a private closet? It would not be easy for any ordinary man--at least I suspect it would not. I cannot say how ordinary men go about their business.

Two wretched Moslems asserted "that the firing was done by the people of the English;" I asked one of them why he lied so, and he could utter no excuse: no other falsehood came to his aid as he stood abashed, before me, and so telling him not to tell palpable falsehoods, I left him gaping.

A headman who went with us plagued another chief to give me a goat; I refused to take what was not given willingly, but the slaves secured it; and I threatened our companion, Kama, with dismissal from our party if he became a tool in slave hands. The arum is common.

I overhear the Manyuema telling each other that I am the "good one." I have no slaves, and I owe this character to the propagation of a good name by the slaves of Zanzibar, who are anything but good themselves. I

With others arguments are useless, and the only answer I care to give is the remark of an English sailor, who, on seeing slave-traders actually at their occupation, said to his companion, "Shiver my timbers, mate, if the devil don't catch these fellows, we might as well have no devil at all.

Emancipation was a mistake;" and these fast writers drew along with them a large body, who would fain be slaveholders themselves. We must never lose sight of the fact that though the majority perhaps are on the side of freedom, large numbers of Englishmen are not slaveholders only because the law forbids the practice

Dehumanization isn't a way of talking. It's a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.

Three years earlier, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq became public, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio broadcaster in the United States, whose syndicated radio show has, at last count, 13 million listeners—described the prisoners who had been killed, raped, tortured, and humiliated by or at the behest of U.S. military personnel, as less than human. "They are the ones who are sick," fumed Limbaugh.

Michael Savage (the pseudonym of Michael Alan Weiner) is another popular radio host whose syndicated radio program is followed by 8 to 10 million listeners. Like Limbaugh, Savage derided the detainees as "subhuman" and "vermin," and suggested that forcible conversion to Christianity is "probably the only thing that can turn them into human beings.

A kid might help another kid who fell into a river, and a kid might help another kid search for a lost baseball, but there isn't a kid I've met who will help another kid out of a humiliating situation. We just aren't built that way.

And if I'd found you lying there in the sun, and left you? What would you call that if not murder? --- It's not the same, Cain mutters. --- Is to me. A man who witnesses a death without trying to prevent it is as responsible for the man who causes it.

Always tell the truth. It's the easiest thing to remember.

Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

Euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person.

If you hack the Vatican server, have you tampered in God's domain?

If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God.