Quotes About Ethics

But it is certainly true that in the long run that choice is up to us: what we ask our technology to do, what we ask its designers to optimize, what we believe is the good life that we are pursuing together.

I am the most forgiving of men… but standards must be maintained!

Anything that feels good couldn't possibly be bad.

If one has a good reputation and trusted, the rules can be bent to accommodate.

Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.

It was wrong. But it was worth it.

It was so hard to live the right kind of life, even if you knew what it was.

The only purpose of government—as opposed to the state of nature—is to replace "might makes right" with a system of justice.

in some states it was illegal to sell contraceptives to those who were unmarried.

How can we do this to him? I asked myself. We are going to kill him. We were saying, "Okay, Louie, you must die now," and not giving him any choice about it. We were going to send him into a room and let someone give him a shot so that he would never wake up. But then I remembered what he had looked like the night before, and how much he was hurting, and knew we were doing the right thing.

didn't like Mr. Nicholls, it wasn't as if he were doing anything illegal. And when I told them that I wouldn't want Joey and Nate to feel as if I'd abandoned them, we agreed that I should continue sitting for them as long as I didn't feel too uncomfortable around Mr. Nicholls.

A total prohibition against lying is also ethically incoherent in anyone but a true pacifist.

I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we would do and should want - and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may on day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind.

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis."16

if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Marquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.

Unless one commits to telling the truth in situations like this, however, one finds that the edges creep inward, and exceptions to the principle of honesty begin to multiply.

If lying seems the only option, given your fear or physical limitations, it clearly shifts the burden of combating evil onto others.

which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it? Mother

Communications like these can still be awkward, but a wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can generally be avoided by following a single precept: Do not lie.

Integrity consists of many things, but it generally requires us to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse. The ethical terrain here extends well beyond the question of honesty—but to truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives. To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.

The fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation for goodness.

And the fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.