Best 1285 quotes in «ethics quotes» category

We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different--cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness--but because our perception of them is different.

[W]e must start from somewhere in current folk morality, otherwise we start from somewhere unintuitive, and that can hardly be a good place to start

We need to learn from one another. Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern the world in the ways of peace, decency, and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.

We often confuse determination with its evil twin: fixation. While determination is our ability to stand our ground while pursuing our goals. Fixation, on the other hand, is an unhealthy attachment to an ideal.

We must not, however, begin with theology. The religion which is founded merely on theology can never contain anything of morality. Hence we derive no other feelings from it but fear on the one hand, and hope of reward on the other, and this produces merely a superstitious cult. Morality, then, must come first and theology follow; and that is religion.

We stand at a crossroads. Do we choose 'the will to power' or 'the will to humanity,' or perhaps a new configuration of both: the power of humanity?

We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, argued Vivekananda, then it must be `according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else'. It was important, therefore, to learn to look at the duty of others through their own eyes and never judge the customs and observances of others through the prism of our own standards.

We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.

What all ethical theories critically lack, Christianity uniquely offers: the perfect, ethical example. Christians are not restricted solely to abstract principles for ethical conduct, because in Jesus we have a model for good living.

We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.

We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

We should strive to focus our lens on what connects us as humans as opposed to our differences. In doing so, not only can we challenge the Orientalist and colonial aspects of traditional photographic narratives, but we can also create a new visual legacy marked by equitable discourse.

What happens when those of us living at the pace of fashion try to insert an awareness of these much larger cycles into our everyday activity? In other words, what's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year impact of tossing that plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. Unless we're living in utter harmony with nature, thinking in ten-thousand-year spans is an invitation to a nightmarish obsession. It's a potentially burdensome, even paralyzing, state of mind. Each present action becomes a black hole of possibilities and unintended consequences. We must walk through life as if we had traveled in to the past, aware that any change we make—even moving an ashtray two inches to the left—could ripple through time and alter the course of history. It's less of a Long Now than a Short Forever. This weight on every action—this highly leveraged sense of the moment—hints at another form of present shock that is operating in more ways and places than we may suspect. We'll call this temporal compression overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It's the effort to make the "now" responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.

What did you give your kids, besides a lottery of genes? A stance--that mix of bluff and confidence, backbone and wussiness that passes for personality or character. One talks less about ethics after third grade. Don't steal candy or hit other children, if they hadn't learned the costs of violence on their own.

… what I’m saying is that if we and all the other species on earth are the only life forms in the universe and if there are no gods and let’s face it apart from a few tired scrolls written 300 years after the death of Jesus and his disciples there is no actual proof of a God or gods then we, the humans, who are meant to be at the height of the evolutionary tree, are in fact at the bottom because no other species on this planet is enslaved to the economy. Every other species is born free and lives free. We humans are born into economic slavery and life crippling debt.

What interests me, personally, is work which in some way, speaks the truth to power…I don’t think we speak the truth to power for power’s ear, but for the ear and the imagination of future generations, who would seek to live in a world free from the malign and self-serving influence of those who wield it.

We take comfort in the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between good and evil, but maybe we should understand, as Zimbardo's work suggested, that evil is incremental - something we are all capable of, given the right circumstances.

We talk about society because we want to align ourselves with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself *against*, and you don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.

What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?

What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.

What is so 'only' about 'yourself'? Is not the first thing one has to learn in this respect that to do something for yourself--I mean, the right kind of thing--is just as valuable and ethical than to do it for somebody else? Wouldn't you say that the good feeling we get simply because we did 'it' (whatever) for somebody else is cheating, in that it postpones the question: what is it good for?

What is stealing?When is it excusable? When is it a crime?' Thomas looked uncomfortable as he read. Christian perked up. Belle saw Christian listening with interest and looked down at her shoes. 'An action becomes stealing when one of two conditions are met. First, when there is harm to the victim. Second, when the act is done for personal gain.' Thomas looked up and smiled. He seemed happy with where the speech was going, and Belle breathed a sigh of relief. Christian's face had gone white. He stood frozen in his spot. Belle smiled as if to say that things were different with him. That stealing was different in their world. She was torn between excitement for Thomas and embarasment for Christian. 'If both these criteria are met, there is no question where society stands. When of two criteria is in question, society begins to debate. For example, is it wrong when someone takes something that has been thrown away? Perhaps not, since there is no detriment to the victim. Is it wrong when someone takes a loaf of bread to feed a starving baby or taxes the rich to help the poor? Perhaps not, since the motive is unselfish.' Victoria wasn't even looking at Thomas anymore. She was glaring at Belle. She looked like she was about to lunge at her. Belle signaled to her that perhaps she should take notes. But Victoria wasn't used to preparing rebuttals without advanced notice. 'When neither of the criteria is met, however, I propose that there is no crime against ethics. Is it wrong to take a syringe from a drug addict? Of course not.

What need does the earth have of us?

What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy. Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea. If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?

What’s the point of having beliefs and values if we don't stand up for the former and live by the latter?

What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?

What we are doing to strangers in other communities right now is, therefore, far more serious and far more widespread than the harm we would do if we were in the habit of occasionally sending out a group of warriors to rape and pillage a village or two. Yet causing imperceptible harm at a distance by the release of waste gases is a completely new form of harm, and so we lack any kind of instinctive inhibitions or emotional response against causing it. We have trouble seeing it as harm at all.

When an individual spreads rumors about others, it erroneously damage their reputation. Therefore, this individual would eventually face the consequences from the victim because this kind of behavior is considered as a civil offense which consist of slander statements.

What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.

What we need is not truths which will serve us, but a truth which we may serve.

When public executions were abolished, it was not because the majority desired their abolition; it was because a small minority of exceptionally sensitive reformers possessed sufficient influence to have them banned.

When did it become okay to be more offended by what someone with no power says than by what someone with power does?

When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche's thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right.

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.

When the awful time of reckoning comes, and the Jehovah God appears to demand why his command has been disobeyed, Adam endeavors to shield himself behind the gentle being he has declared to be so dear. ‘The woman thou gavest to be with me, she gave me and I did eat,’ he whines—trying to shield himself at his wife's expense! Again we are amazed that upon such a story men have built up a theory of their superiority!

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?

When we make ethical judgments, we must go beyond a personal or sectional point of view and take into account the interests of all those affected, unless we have sound ethical grounds for doing otherwise. This means that we weigh interests, considered simply as interests and not as my interests, or the interests of people of European descent, or of people with IQs higher than 100. This provides us with a basic principle of equality: the principle of equal consideration of interests. The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions. This means that if only X and Y would be affected by a possible act, and if X stands to lose more than Y stands to gain, it is better not to do the act. We cannot, if we accept the principle of equal consideration of interests, say that doing the act is better, despite the facts described, because we are more concerned about Y than we are about X. What the principle really amounts to is: an interest is an interest, whoever's interest it may be.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

When you raise the camera to your eye you become responsible for contextualizing the history of the person you are photographing. It is critical that photographers take that responsibility as seriously as they do the photograph itself. Stories need to be approached with intellectual curiosity rather than a mere visual curiosity. It is also critical they consider the people they are photographing as collaborators, not “subjects.

When you repay evil with evil, you become evil.

whether they knew of didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. (...) by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, "My conscience is clear! I did not know! I was a believer!" Isn't his "I did not know I was a believer!" at the very root of his irreparable guilt?

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

Wherever you work, work hard and educate yourself continuously. You must never forget social welfare, ethics and honesty. However, there is no guarantee for your career progression. Therefore, don't expect that only the best people will be promoted.

While mistakes may be local, in today’s connected world embarrassment is global

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

When you initiate something creative and develop your policies that are solution based, you would then be able to flourish audiences who can heavily rely on your ideas for future success.