Casuistry Ethical Theory Quotes

Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners. ~ Geoffrey Miller

The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste.
But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance. ~ Erich Fromm

From a nonpatriarchal metaethical standpoint, however, Singer's and Regan's theoretical similarities are as significant as their differences. In particular, both Singer's utilitarian theory and Regan's rights approach are developed within a framework of patriarchal norms, which includes the subordinatin of emotion to reason, the privileging of abstract principles of conduct, the perception of ethical discussion as a battle between adversaries, and the presumption that ethics shoudl function as a means of social control. ~ Brian Luke

Unfortunately for ethical egoism, the claim that we will all be better off if every one of us does what is in his or her own interest is incorrect. This is shown by what are known as "prisoner's dilemma" situations, which are playing an increasingly important role in discussions of ethical theory ... At least on the collective level, therefore, egoism is self-defeating - a conclusion well brought out by Parfit in his aforementioned Reasons and Persons. ~ Peter Singer

Though at times interested in reforms, notably prohibition (I have never tasted alcoholic liquor), I was inclined to be bored by ethical casuistry; since I believed conduct to be a matter of taste and breeding, with virtue, delicacy, and truthfulness as symbols of gentility. Of my word and honour I was inordinately proud, and would permit no reflections to be cast upon them. I thought ethics too obvious and commonplace to be scientifically discussed, and considered philosophy solely in its relation to truth and beauty. I was, and still am, pagan to the core. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

War is noble and heroic if a nation is defending its sovereignty from the invaders. War is disgraceful and unheroic, a despicable crime against humanity, if a dominant nation is invading another country and killing its innocent men, women, and children. The war, in the 21st century, is ostensibly the methodic game theory in offensive action that has no ethical and moral ground, whatsoever, but to intentionally kill and divide people, and, consequently, paralyze the political and economic stability of another nation. ( - Danny Castillones Sillada, The Existentialist Homo Technologicus) ~ Danny Castillones Sillada

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist. ~ Joseph McCabe

This is a subject I've given a lot of thought to, and I think I have the answer. I've tried to encompass in my theory all the sociological, mythological, religious, philosophical, muscular, economic, cultural, musical, physical, ethical, intellectual, metaphysical, anthropological, gynecological, historical, hormonal, environmental, judicial, legal, moral, ethnic, governmental, linguistic, psychological, schizophrenic, glottal, racial, poetic, dental [this was the logical link] artistic, military, and urinary considerations from prehistoric times to the present.I have been able to synthesize these considerations into one inescapable formulation: men can knock the shit out of women. ~ Fran Ross

Despite my admiration for scientific knowledge, I am not an adherent of scientism. For scientism dogmatically asserts the authority of scientific knowledge; whereas I do not believe in any authority and have always resisted dogmatism; and I continue to resist it, especially in science. I am opposed to the thesis that the scientist must believe in his theory. As far as I am concerned "I do not believe in belief," as E. M. Forster says; and I especially do not believe in belief in science. I believe at most that belief has a place in ethics, and even here only in a few instances. I believe, for example, that objective truth is a value - that is, an ethical value, perhaps the greatest value there is - and that cruelty is the greatest evil. ~ Karl R. Popper

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating. ~ Dennis Prager

At very best there are two problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler of a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary. To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and of those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction. ~ Marilynne Robinson

A lot of things that we cannot buy and sell in markets used to be totally legal objects of market exchange - human beings when we had slavery, child labour, human organs, and so on. So there is no economic theory that actually says that you shouldn't have slavery or child labour because all these are political, ethical judgments. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

This is not to say that power and security are the sole or even the most important objectives of mankind; as a species we prize beauty, truth, and goodness. . . . What the realist seeks to stress is that all these more noble goals will be lost unless one makes provision for one's security in the power struggle among social groups. . . . A moral commitment lies at the heart of realism. . . . What Morgenthau and many other realists have in common is a belief that ethical and political behavior will fail unless it takes into account the actual practice of states and the teachings of sound theory. ~ Robert Gilpin

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873), English philosopher, political theorist, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century whose works on liberty justified freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's. He clearly set forth the premises of the scientific method. ~ John Stuart Mill

I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious. ~ Philip Kitcher

I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he'd liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn't the pure ethical person she'd perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her.

Keith said, "It's like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice."

I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. "It's a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT'S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!"

I tried to explain what I meant.

I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn't know what their true sexuality was like, because they'd been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don't tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of t ~ Emily Gould

I can't stand theory because it is imposed by the intellectual. And the intellectual is, by definition, not a creative person. The intellectual is a person who talks about the creative process, but often doesn't understand it. ~ Mary Pratt

The more I thought about Jocelyn's theory, the less bizarre it seemed. Yes, there were things about it that were absolutely cuckoo - Mrs Chang's Mexican double and so forth - but still, overall the idea was not without its merits. It made a strange sort of sense to me, on an intuitive, metaphorical level. Being in here - going crazy - it did feel like your life had been hijacked in some inexplicable way. It did feel like a parallel universe, separated from the real one by only the flimsiest of partitions. ~ Gavin Extence

One man's generalisation is another man's succinct yet profound summation of a complex theory or argument. ~ Stewart Stafford

Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult. ~ Michel Houellebecq

The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen - that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word 'persecution'…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof - then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are. ~ G.K. Chesterton

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book. ~ Terry Pratchett

We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong? ~ Will Durant

Barbarianism and finesse cannot be rolled into one, Pricey defeats this theory. The barbarianism born from his fight to make it in life, his finesse brought about by his sensitivity that was deprived of him when he was a child. ~ Stephen Richards

I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory. ~ Leslie Fiedler

There really is no ethical difference between eating a cat or a chicken, a dog or a pig. ~ Steve-O

One of the big take-aways from a lot of economic theory is that people should engage in consumption smoothing. ~ Emily Oster

DNA sequencing opens vast ethical issues. We shall be able to know who has defective genes. What will it mean when we can be sure we're not all born equal? Worked out, the implications will scare a lot of people. Insurance companies will not want to cover those with a genetic predisposition to illness, for example. Here lurk myriad lawsuits. ~ Gregory Benford

Two centuries ago Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians and a founder of number theory, described his brainchild as "the queen of mathematics." Queens are regal, but they are also largely decorative, and this nuance was not lost on Gauss. ~ Ian Stewart

In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task ... ~ Albert Einstein

With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them. ~ Peter Singer

What we have, in fact, is not a theory at all but a large collection of approximate calculations, together with a web of conjectures that, if true, point to the existence of a theory. ~ Lee Smolin

What were we like then in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were angels harboring each other in the notion of desirelessness, dazed in our acquiescence to the drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover. ~ Don DeLillo