Best 1285 quotes in «ethics quotes» category

Empathie hat im Lauf der Geschichte oft dazu gedient, die Unterdrückung der niederen Schichten in einer Art und Weise aufzubereiten, die die Oberschicht verkraften kann. Indem das Leid dieser unterdrückten Gruppen auf unterhaltsame Weise nachvollziehbar gemacht wird, können die Mächtigen symbolisch Buße für ihre Rolle in diesem ungerechten System tun, während sie gleichzeitig jegliche Verantwortung für dessen Existenz abstreifen.

Especially when it comes to animals used for food, humanity’s reasoning power and concern about fairness plummets.

Ethics are not always ethical just as morals are not always moral.

Ethics is a skill

Ethics is nothing other than reverence for life because God is within every other human being you come in contact with either physically, or emotionally. Living with reverence for life is attuning goodliness, which is a state of godliness.

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

...ethics were in most cases a burden that could be reasonably ignored in pursuit of necessity.

Ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief.

Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.

ethics is at the center of both spiritual practice and social transformation. Without a strong ethical foundation, we inevitably fall into contradictions-between means and ends, between our actions and our ideals." (p. 9)

Ethically, she couldn't cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious.

Ethics is the key which opens big doors to business success. However once it gets lost, the same access is locked for ever. The newly acquired access gets eclipsed with lost reliability.

Ethics are nothing more than seeking perfection in everything we do….

Ethics is a dream.

ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices - dilemmas.

Even the richest of brands are robbed by poor character.

[...] every decent man confronted by a totalitarian regime ought to have the pluck to commit high treason.

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

Every man is worth just so much as the things about which he busies himself.

Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveler dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind

Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveller dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind

Every ought simply has no sense and meaning except in relation to threatened punishment or promised reward … . Thus every ought is necessarily conditioned through punishment or reward, hence, to put it in Kant’s terms, essentially and inevitably hypothetical [with if-clause] and never, as he maintains categorical [without if-clause] … Therefore an absolute ought is simply a contradictio in adjecto.

Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.

Every social ethic is doomed to failure if it is blind to personal responsibility" (The Ten Commandments, 10).

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?

Every time we raise the camera to our eyes, we become morally responsible to “the photographed” as well as the viewers. Photography cannot be just a privilege, it’s a responsibility that should not be abdicated.

Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There’s no longer a need for the social construct of religion.

Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line with the laws of logical reasoning are no refutation of these but the sign of a muddled mind (or would one accept someone’s observational report that he had seen a bird that was red and non-red all over at the same time as a refutation of the law of contradiction rather than the pronouncement of an idiot?).

...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.

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 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 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.

Everything good is good because of the love it contains.

Evolution, energy, and ethics are the core elements that will guide us along the challenging path toward the Life Era: the first - evolution - because a good understanding of our universal roots and of our place in the cosmic scheme of things will help us create a feasible future course; the second - energy - because our fate will bear strongly on the ways that humankind learns to use energy efficiently and safely; and the third - ethics - because global citizenship and a planetary society are crucial factors in the survival of our species.

Face the complexity involved in making ethical choices.

Find out the difference between ethics and morality, but never forget to be kind.

First premise: If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it. Second premise: Extreme poverty is bad. Third premise: There is some extreme poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance. Conclusion: We ought to prevent some extreme poverty.

For a merely conscious being, death is the cessation of experiences, in much the same way that birth is the beginning of experiences. Death cannot be contrary to an interest in continued life any more than birth could be in accordance with an interest in commencing life. To this extent, with merely conscious beings, birth and death cancel each other out; whereas with self-aware beings, the fact that one may desire to continue living means that death inflicts a loss for which the birth of another is insufficient compensation.

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 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 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 men be ignorant, yet they are men

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.