Quotes About Ethics

What, after all, is the punishment for taking the Lord's name in vain? It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:16). What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? Also death (Exodus 31:15). What is the punishment for cursing one's father or mother? Death again (Exodus 21:17). What is the punishment for adultery?

But you seem to have a very strong intuition, which I share, that we should consider honesty to be a nearly ironclad principle, because it is to everyone's advantage so much of the time, and it allows us to live the kinds of lives and maintain the kinds of relationships we want to have.

Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable.

Mentir es confundir intencionadamente a los demás cuando esperan recibir una comunicación honesta.

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts you at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

the U.S. House of Representatives voted effectively to ban embryonic stem-cell research on February 27, 2003.

came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly

Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.

Some pleasures are intrinsically ethical—feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and compassion. To inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be brought into alignment with others.

Values are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures

There is no doubt that certain beliefs are incompatible with love, and this notion of "honor" is among them.

a person who commits each of these sins with abandon.

If, as I contend throughout this book, all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere—if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know—then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy.

A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.

It is time we realized that crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do not even exist.

Biblical worldview.

Well, let's make it simpler. Let's say we found a culture on an island somewhere that was removing the eyeballs of every third child. Would you then agree that we had found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being?

As an undergraduate at Stanford, I took a seminar that profoundly changed my life. It was called "The Ethical Analyst," and it was conducted in the form of a Socratic dialogue by an extraordinarily gifted professor, Ronald A. Howard.1 Our discussion focused on a single question of practical ethics: Is it wrong to lie?

religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.

What we condemn most in another person is the conscious intention to do harm.

There is undoubtedly an important secular debate to be had about the ethics of the death penalty, but it is just as obvious that we should be drawing upon sources that show a greater understanding of the human mind and modern society than is evident in Saint Paul.

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.

Bertrand Russell

Funny or not, the story reveals something distasteful about Sita: She will lie when it suits her needs.