Quotes About Ethics

does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely.

There are only three sins - causing pain, causing fear, and causing anguish. The rest is window dressing.

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

Never yield to pressure, only to principle.

Having a bottom line makes it easier to resist pressure and temptations of the moment.

Kitsch lives with one foot in the realm of aesthetics and another foot in the realm of ethics.

I never sold out before because nobody ever asked me. In all it took around twenty minutes.

Imagine the big rating agencies as three competitive saloons standing side by side, with each free to set its own drinking age. Before long, nine-year-olds would be downing bourbon

Sense of sacrifice is good but only if you're sacrificing your own life; once you sacrifice another's life you've overstepped the mark.

The assault on the human world in the name of science is more pseudo-science than science, and rejoices in its bald, unmoralised image of 'what we really are'. What we really are from the scientific point of view is precisely what we really aren't.

modern economies have developed ways of avoiding costs or passing them on that effectively remove the sanctions from dishonest or manipulative behaviour. The

Even socialists steer away from any criticism of the real corporate predation, which is the predation on future generations in which we too are involved. Like

Why do the defenders of the market not raise their voices against the practice of externalizing costs in that way? After

Beneath every society where self-interest pays off, lies a foundation of self-sacrifice.

Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world - a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything - virtue included - on sale.

The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And

Throughout the proofs of the Ethics , therefore, the reader can never be certain whether the extraordinary ideas which are brought so compellingly before him are fiction or reality.

In the event things got worse, and Spinoza gave up the idea of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would create such a cloud of hostility as to obscure, in the minds even of reasonable people, the real meaning of its arguments. Meanwhile, the book was read attentively, and at least one club existed for the express purpose of working through its proofs.

I think we can all see the force of the idea that there are certain things that cannot be done to human beings – certain basic goods, including life itself, that cannot be taken away from them unless they in some way forfeit them. Life

Beauty is a value as important as truth and goodness

This is how Kant explains the moral motive. When I ask myself not what I want to do, but what I ought to do, then I stand back from myself, and put myself in the position of an impartial judge.

The moral motive comes from setting all my interests aside, and addressing the question before me by appealing to reason alone—and that means appealing to considerations that any rational being would be equally able to accept. From that posture of disinterested enquiry we are led inexorably, Kant thought, to the categorical imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim which we can will as a law for all rational beings.

Conservatives believe in unchosen obligations (pieties), whereas classical liberals think that the only source of obligation is choice.

Of course it does not apply to me. I am the soul of honor, kindness, mercy and goodness. Trust me in all things.