Quotes About Ethics

But she would not participate in that sort of thing, even if it meant that she lost the election. If you won on the basis of lies and false promises—bribes, really—then your victory would be a hollow one.

Sometimes the world seemed so unfair: good people were tricked or bullied by bad people, and the bad people seemed to get away with it. If only he could do something about it, he said to himself. But then he thought: What can I possibly do? And the answer, it seemed to him, was: Not much.

If A says to B please tell C something, does B have any obligation to do so? It would depend, thought Isabel, on whether B had agreed to take on the duty of passing on the message. If he had not, then a liberal individualist philosopher would probably say that he did not have to exert himself. That was liberal individualism, of course, with which Isabel did not always agree. Don't go swimming with a liberal individualist, she told herself; he might not save you if you started to drown.

old-fashioned, gentle Scottish physician, unmoved by the considerations of profit and personal gain that could so disfigure medicine. That doctors should consider themselves businessmen was, Isabel had always felt, a moral tragedy for medicine.

Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.

Do not allow the profession of which you are a member to induce you to take a bleak view of humanity. You will encounter all sorts of bad behavior but do not judge everybody by the standards of the lowest. If you

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.

Moral Philosophy for two-year-olds, she thought. Don't throw food . It was as good a starting point as any to begin the teaching of responsibility towards the world around us. And it was helpful to back it up with some justification too: That's not nice . Again, a simple expression said it all.

But the real question, boys, is this: do we have a duty to do anything to stop things we may not like? Is it all right just to do nothing, provided that we don't do anything that makes matters worse?

And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read?

A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.

honesty required one to remind oneself that when there were bills to be paid, an offer of money was harder to reject than when there were no such bills. Other people's money, we tell ourselves, is always less deserved than our own.

Doing the right thing, she knew, was often not as enjoyable as doing the wrong thing. The wrong thing often made for a better story, but it was still the wrong thing--nothing could change that.

Moral philosophy] also has to bear in mind who we are, our human limitations. It's not just something that one does in armchairs. As she spoke, she thought of her own armchair. The last time she had sat in it, she had drifted off to sleep while watching the news. For a moral philosopher's armchair, she thought, it's somewhat under-used.

Von Igelfeld was not sure. He remembered reading that Hume believed that our minds vibrated in sympathy, and that this ability – to vibrate in unison with one another – was the origin of the ethical impulse. And Schopenhauer's moral theory was about feeling, was it not; so perhaps they were one and the same phenomenon.

Young man! If my notes should fall into your hands, remember that the best and most enduring changes are those which stem from an improvement in moral behaviour, without any violent upheaval.

Moral commonplaces are amazingly useful when we can find little in ourselves with which to justify our actions.

Take care of your clothes when they're new, but your honour from a tender age.

Une philosophie du vice Passa pour science des délices

Los proverbios morales son asombrosamente útiles en los casos en que, por mucho que lo intentemos, no se nos ocurre nada para justificarnos.

Though a gamester at heart, he never touched a card, for he considered his position did not allow him—as he said— to risk the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous

All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening

I wish to be Providence myself, for I feel that the most beautiful, noblest, most sublime thing in the world, is to recompense and punish.

I have heard it said that the dead have never done, in six thousand years, as much evil as the living do in a single day.