Quotes About Ethics

Christians.....expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide.

Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.

WHICH way should the balance swing? Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.

An atheist is a person who believes that the murder of a single little girl—even once in a million years—casts doubt upon the idea of a benevolent God.

Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions.

And just as some people have obvious moral deficits, others must possess moral talent, moral expertise, and even moral genius. As with any human ability, these gradations must be expressed at the level of the brain. Game

And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not "deserve" our success in any deep sense.

Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers and better or worse ways to put them to use.

Any person who lies awake at night worrying about the private pleasures of other consenting adults has more than just too much time on his hands; he has some unjustifiable beliefs about the nature of right and wrong.

It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis. Any person who intentionally loosed such horrors upon the earth would be ground to dust for his crimes.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about

According to a recent poll, 36 percent of British Muslims (ages sixteen to twenty-four) think apostates should be put to death for their unbelief.60 Are these people "morally motivated," in Haidt's sense, or just morally confused? And

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago - and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since - is no one to consult on questions of ethics. Indeed, to judge him on the basis of his works is highly invidious undertaking.

to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil (this is traditionally called the problem of theodicy) is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is not little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.

When was the last time that someone was criticized for not respecting another person's unfounded beliefs about physics or history? The same rules should apply to ethical, spiritual, and religious beliefs as well.

To see how fully our moral intuitions must shift, consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine that every relevant change in the human brain could now be made cheaply, painlessly, and safely. In fact, the cure could be put directly into the food supply, like vitamin D. Evil would become nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.

Lying is the royal road to chaos.   As

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.

I do not remember what I thought about lying before I took "The Ethical Analyst," but the course accomplished as close to a firmware upgrade of my brain as I have ever experienced. I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.

If a reporter doesn't like the person he's writing about, it shows up in his article.

I'd be willing to bet you, if I was a betting man, that I have never bet on baseball.

He that applauds him who does not deserve praise, is endeavoring to deceive the public; he that hisses in malice or sport, is an oppressor and a robber.