Quotes About Ethics

The end did not justify the means, but justifiable means that brought about a fair and necessary conclusion were not to be dismissed.

Mindless, stupid men! Playing with the lives of other men

he didn't give a damn about being popular; he cared only about being right.

It's not the meek who are inheriting the earth, Jason, it's the corruptors

A corruption of intentions.

There are fights that you may lose without losing your honor; what makes you lose your honor is not to fight. -Jaques Jaujard

When I am billeted a German home even for one night I go out and search for the chickens and rabbits or pets and give them water and food if possible. Generally the family has pulled out too rapidly to care for such things. I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it.

There are fights that you may lose without losing your honor; what makes you lose your honor is not to fight them."19

I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it."7

A leader, or those who aspire to that role, regardless of whether in the public or the private sector, must have integrity.

I considered the practice the equivalent of involuntary servitude and a breach of faith with those affected, and I was determined to end it. A few months before I retired, not one soldier was on stop-loss.

It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.

The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go.

the struggle of the noble, free-thinking

And what is good, and what is not good- need we ask anyone to tell us this things?

Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.

In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn't used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person's moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuitions.

In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions—religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit—bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.

How's this for a display of human kin selection: Subjects were given a scenario of a bus hurtling toward a human and a nondescript dog, and they could only save one. Whom would they pick? It depended on degree of relatedness, as one progressed from sibling (1 percent chose the dog over the sibling) to grandparent (2 percent) to distant cousin (16 percent) to foreigner (26 percent).55

The contrast between rapid, automatic moral intuitionism and conscious, deliberative moral reasoning plays out in another crucial realm and is the subject of Greene's superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so challenging.

This level is egoistic in that rules and their application come from within and reflect conscience, where a transgression exacts the ultimate cost—having to live with yourself afterward. It recognizes that being good and being law-abiding aren't synonymous.

When deontologism and consequentialism contemplate trolleys, the former is about moral intuitions rooted in the vmPFC, amygdala, and insula, while the latter is the domain of the dlPFC and moral reasoning. Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.

Conversely, instruct subjects to "carefully consider" their decision, or prime them to value reflection over intuition, and they'd be more selfish. The more time to think, the more time to do a version of "Yes, we all agree that cooperation is a good thing . . . but here is why I should be exempt this time"—what the authors called "calculated greed.