Quotes About Ethics

It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none. Some people would agonise over minor slips or mistakes on their part, while others would feel quite unmoved by their own gross acts of betrayal or dishonesty.

Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?

We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on.

We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn't matter.

It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

The trouble with the world today, she thought, was that people were not prepared to stand up to bad behaviour. They looked away

It was, he thought, his gesture against the whole pro-euthanasia movement that talked so glibly of choice without realising the fire with which one played when tinkering with fragile taboos against killing others. Yes, he thought, Mrs Bates's life did not seem to amount to much, but to her it was all she had.

There are so many ways of falling off the high moral ground you've carefully built up for yourself. Moral ground is like that—slippery at the edges.

Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel.

Mma Ramotswe did not like lying, but sometimes it was necessary, particularly when faced with people who were promoted beyond their talents.

There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers.

The trouble with technology is that it's dehumanised us – it's removed the restraints of ordinary human interactions. So we lose the notion that the person with whom we're dealing is a person like us, with failings and feelings. It's exactly the same as in wartime. When people are engaged in conflict, they very easily lose sight of the humanity of the other. They become capable of doing things that they would never do in their ordinary lives.

If we were all responsible for the misdeeds of the governments that represent us, thought Isabel, then the moral burden would be just too great.

But please be careful—and never, never think that you are justified in doing something wrong just because you are trying to do something right.

Doctors are allowed to tell us things which they might not do themselves. They know what the right thing is, but they may not be able to do it themselves. That does not mean that their advice is bad advice.

The trouble with the world today, she thought, was that people were not prepared to stand up to bad behaviour.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought. Precious

You did not squeeze hands when you lied; it could not be done.

It had always struck her as wrong that we should judge ourselves-or, more usually, others-by single acts, as if a single snapshot said anything about what a person had been like over the whole course of his life. It could say something, of course, but only if it was typical of how that person behaved; otherwise, no, all it said that at that moment, in those particular circumstances, temptation won a local victory.

He knew that one should not punch people who annoyed one, although there was a case for it at times, a seemingly irresistible case.

The trouble with having a conscience, she said to herself, is that it never sleeps.

that was enough to make her blush with shame for the mere fact that Las Vegas existed. There

The loudly good are often not the best of people; the intuitively good, to whom it may not occur ever to discuss what they do, let alone why they do it, may be morally unsung, but are heroes nonetheless.

all the dilemmas and headaches that could make life a moral minefield.