Best 1285 quotes in «ethics quotes» category

For, however cautiously one proposes to control men's desires, the stark reality of the theory soon becomes shockingly plain. Dewey wants to manipulate men as completely as science manipulates physical nature. Certain manipulators will control the thoughts of the populace and make everybody desire what the manipulators want them to desire... The ideal is complete, inescapable control. No longer will it be possible for individuals to want those things they have heretofore wanted. Parents will not be able to want to teach their children their own religion; they will not be able to believe in inalienable rights.

For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them.

For me, all those systematic Bureaucracies of traditional schools jaded me. For me, I still I couldn’t understand why we have to have a factory style education for children living in the 21st century. Why hold them in place, asking them to read and repeat and giving them a number of tasks to finish? I still have no idea how exams and objective assessments could measure human behavior or intelligence. Is it some kind of barcoding human aptitude? Is it ethical anyway?

For scapegoating to occur, a community must agree on a target who can be blamed for anything that goes wrong. Sometimes a community just needs someone to BE wrong all the time, so they can know they are right. It really doesn’t matter if the person is actually guilty or wrong, as long as everyone agrees on it. That agreement allows the community to act against the scapegoat and feel justified. They can hate, abuse, ridicule, neglect, expel, wound or kill the scapegoat and actually experience feelings of joy and well-being afterward.

For preference utilitarians, taking the life of a person will normally be worse than taking the life of some other being, because persons are highly future-oriented in their preferences. To kill a person is therefore, normally, to violate not just one but a wide range of the most central and significant preferences a being can have. Very often, it will make nonsense of everything that the victim has been trying to do in the past days, months or even years. In contrast, beings that cannot see themselves as entities with a future do not have any preferences about their own future existence. This is not to deny that such beings might struggle against a situation in which their lives are in danger, as a fish struggles to get free of the barbed hook in its mouth; but this indicates no more than a preference for the cessation of a state of affairs that causes pain or fear. The behaviour of a fish on a hook suggests a reason for not killing fish by that method but does not in itself suggest a preference utilitarian reason against killing fish by a method that brings about death instantly, without first causing pain or distress. Struggles against danger and pain do not suggest that fish are capable of preferring their own future existence to non-existence.

For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity— one’s own and others’— but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.

For though men be ignorant, yet they are men

For we conceive it as the aim of a philosopher, as such, to do somewhat more than define and formulate the common normal opinions of mankind. His function is to tell men what they ought to think, rather than what they do think: he is expected to transcend Common Sense in his premises, and is allowed a certain divergence from Common Sense in his conclusions. It is true that the limits of this deviation are firmly, though indefinitely, fixed: the truth of a philosopher's premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions: if in any important point he be found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method is likely to be declared invalid. Still, though he is expected to establish and concatenate at least the main part of the commonly accepted moral rules, he is not necessarily bound to take them as the basis on which his own system is constructed. Rather, we should expect that the history of Moral Philosophy--so far at least as those whom we may call orthodox thinkers are concerned--would be a history of attempts to enunciate, in full breadth and clearness, those primary intuitions of Reason, by the scientific application of which the common moral thought of mankind may be at once systematized and corrected.

For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise.

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.

Frankly, Pedro Almodóvar's recent box office hit, Volver, is the first movie I've seen in which a young woman's retaliation against sexual violence doesn't ultimately boomerang around to destroy her

From the beginning, from the age of Adam to the time of kingship: from the powerful, pardon: from the poor, sins.

Funny how money speaks even more loudly than morals in this beautiful, superficial material world.

Give and Take The Chief takes less than he is given And gives more than he has taken.

Given our obsession with self, it is hardly surprising we think it is fine for us to live in a world with malleable moral markers, as long as we get our own way without being bullied by others into accepting their way of doing things. We want others to respect moral boundaries that we want to be free to ignore when it suits.

Given these five compelling reasons to reconsider dietary choice—anymal suffering and premature death, environmental degradation, world hunger, labor injustices, and our own health—it is not surprising that the world’s most commonly celebrated religions require and/or encourage a diet of greens, grains, fruits, and legumes, while simultaneously forbidding and/or discouraging the slaughter of anymals and the consumption of anymal products.

Good Bones" Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

God has not yet revealed himself to no one in no unclear terms. Religions are attempts to find him; on that level they are all equal

Good intentions are good netiquette. A conscious effort to be nice others on the internet. NetworkEtiquette.net

Good decision making is the result of years of experience making and learning from one's choices - good and bad.

Goodness is both an ethical and an esthetic standard.

Good philosophy is always hate speech to evil doers.

Good, then, is indefinable....

Gray is not a substitute for black and white. You don’t bump into people without saying you’re sorry. When you shake hands, it’s supposed to mean something. If someone is in trouble, you reach out.

Guld er Guld, hvor det end findes, og Lærdom er Lærdom, af hvis Mund den end flyder; Forskiellen alleene kand være, at dens Lærdom, hvis Levnet svarer dertil, opbygger meer, end en andens, der intet andet haver at beraabe sig paa, uden paa den Ære at være indskreven udi Kirkens Matricul, og at han haver faaet Ret til at igiennemhegle Mennesker for det, som han dagligen selv øver.

Greatness should have no victims Greatness should need no victims.

He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante's Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man's unvarnished verdict of himself?

Happiness seems to depend on leisure, because we work to have leisure, and wage war to live in peace.

Hasanati ni matendo mema. Mema yanatoka kwa Mungu. Mabaya yanatoka kwa Shetani. Mke mwema anatoka kwa Mungu. Mke mbaya anatoka kwa Shetani. Mke mwema ana hekima na busara, ana maadili na tabia njema, ana utu na uchapakazi, ana wema na upendo, na ana aibu kwa wanaume.

Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society

He explained that ethics are the principles or rules for how we act in the world... 'The thing is, it doesn't matter whether or not (she) had it coming... What does matter is your behavior, not hers. Your ethics, not hers. The way you conduct yourself, not the way she conducts herself... We all must learn to act, not react.

He moved now, A tiny jerk of movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn't grasped before. that his fingers showed white and bloodless against he dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense that skin seemed to stretch taut over the bones beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn't calm. He was violently angry. "WHY, Captain?" he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. "I would have the the real question was WHY NOT?

He is Your Customer, the Reason behind Your Customs.

He moved now, A tiny jerk of movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn't grasped before. that his fingers showed white and bloodless against he dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense that skin seemed to stretch taut over the bones beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn't calm. He was violently angry. "WHY, Captain?" he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. "I would have thought the the real question was WHY NOT?

He had brought up their unspoken worries and a series of morally ugly questions. Whom do you save? Can you save both? Or do you save only yourself? Do you do nothing and risk nothing, or die from whatever happens to come along as you sit on a log waiting for whatever comes? They agitated over the questions in private thought, wishing to forget morals and just be out of this place. Who else had discarded morals and saved themselves? Could they live with themselves later? If they put away the concerns of the Lajamee, how soon would they push aside one another’s welfare? At what point do people resort to “every man for himself”?

Helping is not, as conventionally thought, a charitable act that is praiseworthy to do but not wrong to omit. It is something that everyone ought to do.

He's bound to have done something,” Nobby repeated. In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done.

He sells his loyalties to the highest bidder. Shouldn’t even a mercenary have morals? That’s the textbook definition of a whore!

High self respect is a characteristic that we earn from our environment by showing courtesy and naturally exhibiting behaviors that can praise others about the output of our intellectual accomplishments instead of chasing them for attention.

He that doth not as other men do, but endeavoureth that which ought to be done, shall thereby rather incur peril than preservation; for whoso laboureth to be sincerely perfect and good shall necessarily perish, living among men that are generally evil.

He who stands by his heart has God in him. Our conscience is what unites us with God.

Higher education is an institution where you to take the responsibility of your own learning and your instructors will only lend you the knowledge. You should understand as a student in higher education that your instructors will not be held accountable for your failure because you are considered as a grown adult to make the decision whether or not you will take pride in your education and pursue career opportunities.

He would have been careful not to violate his conscience in any way that might keep him from devoting his full attention to the sin he had decided to commit. Pedro was not really very different from all men, at least in that. Not very different from the bank teller who makes sure to give every customer exact change, even while he is embezzling.

High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work.

History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?

How little we really know about the life all around us. Would we be so cavalier and ruthless with it if we understood it better?

how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness

Humanity might bless earth--if we work with and for creation, if we master our selfishness in service to all our neighbors, if we cultivate wildness as a kind of wealth.