Ethical Dilemmas Quotes

The author relates that the word "OBSCENE" springs from the concept in Greek drama that certain actions would be performed outside the scene or off the stage. He clarifies that the Greeks did not shy away from shocking actions, but they knew that portraying them in the audience's view would drown out the emotional subtlety of the character development and ethical dilemmas. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Ethical dilemmas have a way of sneaking up on a person. If something smells funny, stay away from it. Or help get rid of it. ~ Price Pritchett

There are people, at the moment, who feel that all the important questions have been answered; all the important moral and ethical dilemmas have an answer; and that, at this point in history, everything's been worked out – and anyone who's exploring different ideas, or is doutbtful about these moral issues, is...evil.

...So I come from a different approach where, like, 'I don't know what's going on. I'm trying to work it out with other people, and I want the freedom to be able to explore. ~ Claire Lehmann

Science is important, but so is ethics, so is balancing life. To destroy life to save life - it's one of the real ethical dilemmas that we face. ~ George W. Bush

As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here's one answer that might apply to a Star Trek movie...

I want it to be about the most horrible, treacherous aliens ever known to man who are about to destroy life as we know it, leading to the most spectacular thrill ride of an adventure with fantastic space battles and huge explosions and great special effects -- a white knuckle ride for the movie audience.

Yeah, but what's it about?

I can write space battles with the best of them, but what makes that space battle interesting to me is: why are they fighting? What are the stakes? What does the hero lose if he loses? And what does he win if he wins? Why should we care?

I'm talking about the second level of story-telling. The level that examines what's going on inside the characters - their moral and ethical dilemmas, their doubts, fears, inner conflicts, how they change as the story progresses. These are the things that make us, as members of an audience, get emotionally involved. ~ Michael Piller

Intuitive Eaters march to their inner hunger signals, and eat whatever they choose without experiencing guilt or an ethical dilemma. ~ Evelyn Tribole

For the vast majority of us who reside in the troubled middle, there are no easy answers to the ethical dilemmas that biotechnology can pose. As biotechnology moves forward, we'll have to carefully evaluate each application on its own terms, trying to balance what's in the best interests of an individual animal with what's good for its species as a whole, for humanity, and for the world we all share. ~ Emily Anthes

Jake, our fearless leader. On a crazed kamikaze mission. I'd never seen him like this. Even in our lowest moments, he'd always been steady. Resolute. He weighed the costs, made a decision, forged ahead.
And I'd always wondered how he did it. How he kept it straight in his mind. Yeerks. Visser One. Aliens conquering humans, conquering the planet. Fighting the enemy without becoming like them. How did he sort through all that? The emotions, the ethical dilemmas, the moral crises? How did he wrap his brain around it all so he could make logical decisions? Smart decisions. The kind that saved the lives of his team. The kind that set the enemy back a small step or two.
But now I knew.
Jake didn't understand any of it better than the rest of us did. If he defeated the Yeerks, freed humanity, rescued Earth, that was good. But that was just a bonus. His main goal was much simpler. To save his family. That goal was what had given him strength. That goal was what had kept him sane. Allowed him to retain a center of calm focus amid the awful chaos.
His family. ~ Katherine Applegate

Certainly every historian brings certain predilections to the study of history. But every historian also has the ethical obligation to suspend judgment until finding the evidence overwhelmingly persuasive, the method beyond reproach, the results replicable, and the analyses sound. ~ George M. Dennison

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. ~ Susan Sontag

As the savage progresses, he acquires experience and formulates codes of 'right' and 'wrong' from his memories of those courses which have helped or hurt him... Then out of the principle of barter comes the illusion of 'justice' ... ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws. ~ Marc Bekoff

he gave an account of the Spenserian world that championed its ethical attitudes as well as their fairy-tale terms, with a rich joy in the defeat of dragons, giants, sorcerers, and sorceresses by the forces of virtue; it was a world he could inhabit and believe in as one inhabits and believes a dream of one's own; its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him...he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions, and Spenser transcended sensuality by making use of it ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The advance of our technology is coincidental with the loss of our appetite for ethical questions that ought to attend the implications of these new powers. . . In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; any nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time. ~ Thomas Lynch

We also have issue oriented storylines which are an examination of an issue, be it ethical or social. ~ David E. Kelley

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When morality is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue. ~ Edmund White

But Nietzsche's tragedy is found here once again. The aims, the prophecies are generous and universal, but the doctrine is restrictive, and the reduction of every value to historical terms leads to the direst consequences. Marx thought that the ends of history, at least, would prove to be moral and rational. That was his Utopia. But Utopia, at least in the form he knew it, is destined to serve cynicism, of which he wanted no part. Marx destroys all transcendence, then carries out, by himself, the transition from fact to duty. But his concept of duty has no other origin but fact. The demand for justice ends in injustice if it is not primarily based on an ethical justification of justice; without this, crime itself one day becomes a duty. When good and evil are reintegrated in time and confused with events, nothing is any longer good or bad, but only either premature or out of date. Who will decide on the opportunity, if not the opportunist? Later, say the disciples, you shall judge. But the victims will not be there to judge. For the victim, the present is the only value, rebellion the only action. Messianism, in order to exist, must construct a defense against the victims. It is possible that Marx did not want this, but in this lies his responsibility which must be examined, that he incurred by justifying, in the name of the revolution, the henceforth bloody struggle against all forms of rebellion. ~ Albert Camus

This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make.
We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility. ~ Sam Harris

Sir John Templeton: "My ethical principle in the first place was: 'Where could I use my talents that God gave me to help the most people?'" ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We are today engaged in a war. It is an economic war over our
sovereignty as human beings with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. The "pursuit of happiness" means the right
to create wealth through our labor and to enjoy the fruits thereof.
The battle now is over who has the moral, the ethical, and the legal
right to the fruits of our labor. Are we to be free, or are we to be
slaves? Just whose money is it anyway? ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

Religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness. ~ Karen Armstrong

On domestic policy, Donald Trump agreed with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the Wall Street bailout, the TARP bailout of big bank. I think the government ought to be standing with mainstream, with working men and women. And then you put on top of that the ethical issues, whether it is refusing to release his taxes. And that's a real problem. ~ Ted Cruz

There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility. ~ Karl Lehmann

Christian ethical decisions should be based upon personal honor, interpersonal relationships with others including non-Christians, and moral implications of the decisions. Anything less than this violates the teachings of Jesus. ~ Scott S. Haraburda

Netiquette: The social code of network communication. Internet code of conduct based on the Golden Rule. Ethical philosophy of common rules. ~ David Chiles

One's freedom is one's love and one's love
is one's undoing, it's all in the dictionary... ~ Duncan McNaughton

Having children-the responsibility of rearing good, kind, ethical, responsible human beings-is the biggest job anyone can embark on. You have to take a leap of faith and ask lots of people for their help and guidance. ~ Maria Shriver

What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness. ~ Bill Mollison

Women were still strange and inscrutable creatures. Men didn't understand them. And women didn't understand themselves either. It was always a performance of some sort. Everywhere you went, it was like there was a spotlight shining down on your head. You were on a stage when you were on the trolley. You were being judged and judged and judged. Every minute of your performance was supposed to be incredible and outstanding and sexy.
You were often only an ethical question away from being a prostitute. ~ Heather O'Neill

Perhaps we still have a basically superstitious tendency to associate failure with dishonesty and guilt - failure being interpreted as "punishment." Even if a man starts out with good intentions, if he fails we tend to think he was somehow "at fault." If he was not guilty, he was at least "wrong." And "being wrong" is something we have not yet learned to face with equanimity and understanding. We either condemn it with god-like disdain or forgive it with god-like condescension. We do not manage to accept it with human compassion, humility and identification. Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy. ~ Thomas Merton

When television families aren't gathered around the kitchen table exchanging wisecracks, they are experiencing brief but moving dilemmas, which are handily solved by the youngest child or by some cute extraterrestrial houseguest. Emerging from Family Ties or My Two Dads, we are forced to acknowledge that our own families are made up of slow-witted, emotionally crippled people who would be lucky to qualify for seats in the studio audience of JEOPARDY! ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

I submit that style, too, is an answer to a common want; but not so much to formulated problems as to felt difficulties of an emotional kind. . . . Style is fundamentally a pose, a stance, at times a self delusion, by which the people of any period meet the particular dilemmas of their day. ~ Jacques Barzun

I am failed for some subject in exam
But my friend passed in all ,
Now he is a college students
And I am author and ethical hacker , ~ Meet Chauhan

Children aren't helped to become caring members of a community, or ethical decision-makers, or critical thinkers, so much as they're simply trained to follow directions. ~ Alfie Kohn

One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical. Canonise 'business success,' and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes! ~ Ida Tarbell

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best. ~ Thomas Huxley

Reliable scientific knowledge is value free and has no moral or ethical value. Science tells us how the world is ... Dangers and ethical issue arise only when science is applied as technology. ~ Lewis Wolpert

Why must you know the details of my troubles to have compassion? Is it not enough to show compassion simply because you know that everyone has troubles? ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism. ~ Russ Shafer-Landau

But when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the "M" disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure: the ethics of excellence. ~ Price Pritchett

… a move from the idea of an architect as expert problem-solver to that of architect as citizen sense-maker; a move for a reliance on the impulsive imagination of the long genius to that of collaborative ethical imagination, from clinging towards notion of total control a relaxed acceptance of letting go. ~ Jeremy Till

Without "ethical culture", there is no salvation for humanity. ~ Albert Einstein

Everyday we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements. ~ Peter Singer

To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed. At least, that's what he told himself. Better to deny the existence of objective morality than to live in its shadow. Better to tell yourself that the world of right and wrong is not the world you belong to. In the bathroom mirror he saw the face of a man his seventeen-year-old self would have disdained with the vanity of someone yet unaware of the many means the world has to break him. ~ Anthony Marra

A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive because of any ethical reason it does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would kill it. It survived because it is a source of pleasure and because the passionate few can no more neglect it then a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read "the right things" because they are right. That is to put the cart before the horse "the right things" are the right things solely because the passionate few like reading them …

Nobody at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern works. To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an exceedingly long time. Modern works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive Generations; whereas, with Classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. Your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative to decide your taste is unformed. It needs guidance and it needs authoritative guidance.

Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: ~ S. I. Hayakawa

We try not to waste food in general. Because as a meat eater it's just responsible to eat as much of the animal as you can. It's also instilled in my family culture, where it's not even an ethical thing, it's just that all those parts are delicious, too. You eat the ears, you eat the intestines, you eat the livers, the hearts. ~ Thu Tran

A good lawyer is part con man, part priest
promising riches, threatening hell. My ethical rules are simple. I won't lie to the court or let a client do it. But I've never been in this position. How far would I go for a woman who mattered? Is there anything I wouldn't do to win? ~ Paul Levine

Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems. ~ Charles W. Colson

What you call looking like an idiot are splashes of mediatic splendor that give shine to your personality and make you more human, more likable. If ethical and aesthetic principles no longer exist, looking like an idiot disappears as a consequence. ~ Niccolo Ammaniti

Take for example job applications. In the 21st century the decision wherever to hire somebody for a job while increasingly be made by algorithms. We cannot rely on the machines to set the relevant ethical standards, humans will still need to do that, but once we decide on an ethical standard in the job market, that it is wrong to discriminate against blacks or against women for example, we can rely on machines to implement and maintain these standards better than humans. A human manager may know and even agree that is unethical to discriminate against blacks and women but then when a black woman applies for a job the manager subconsciously discriminate against her and decides not to hire her. If we allow a computer to evaluate job applications and program computers to completely ignore race and gender we can be certain that the computer will indeed ignore these factors because computers do not have a subconscious. Of course it won't be easy to write code for evaluating job applications and there is always the danger that the engineers will somehow program their own subconscious biases into the software, yet once we discover such mistakes it would probably be far easier to debug the software than to get rid humans of their racist and misogynist biases. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

As I've progressed in my career, I've come to appreciate - and really value - the other attributes that define a company's success beyond the P&L: great leadership, long-term financial strength, ethical business practices, evolving business strategies, sound governance, powerful brands, values-based decision-making. ~ Ursula Burns

I undertake that, in the exercise of my functions of that office I will have regard to any guidance with respect to ethical standards issued by the secretary of state under Section 66 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999. ~ Ken Livingstone

If I do eat meat, it's got to be ethical. I want to know that it lived a great life before it was killed humanely. ~ Ricky Gervais

Even if these stories are 3,000 years old, there's still so much about the characters, about the dilemmas, about their understanding of the universe that still resonates. The whole idea of order and chaos, which is really central to the ancient Egyptian understanding of the world, is still very much with us. ~ Rick Riordan