Quotes About Ethics

I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you're my age, we'll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.

Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Since I don't smoke or drink or swear unconvincingly, symmetry is my only vice.

God only knew what the eleven-year-old might confess to me about the things I was right now doing wrong.

NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY

Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law. So why shouldn't trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains be able to sue humans for theft and endless damages? (p. 250)

It's a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant's: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

If nobody's losing money or getting hurt, the law doesn't give a fuck.

This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey.

He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You can't cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys—it will cause a riot.)

How ethical is it to let these animals go a long time before they die?

If destructive technology amplifies violence, constructive technology amplifies compassion, and the lessons of technology are universal.

The MP's hunted antelope with machine guns for fresh meat and for sport. Groves authorized only cold showers for his troops; their isolated duty would win them eventual award for the lowest VD rate in the entire U.S. Army.

All war is immoral. Logically, the 100 percent pacifist has the only impregnable position.

Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night.

Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden.

people are more likely to refrain from violence out of preference for a nonviolent existence than they are to do so out of fear of punishment.

of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.

Now we are all sons of bitches.' 

religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

I have often wondered why people never want to put a stone monument of the Eight Beatitudes on a courthouse lawn. Then I realize that the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus would probably not be very good for any war, any macho worldview, the wealthy, or our consumer economy.

The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves—by themselves—and in themselves.

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

First-half-of-life religion is almost always about various types of purity codes or "thou shalt nots" to keep us up, clear, clean, and together, like good Boy and Girl Scouts. A certain kind of "purity" and self-discipline is also "behovely," at least for a while in the first half of life, as the Jewish Torah brilliantly presents.