Normative Ethics Quotes

A recent canvass of professional philosophers found the percentage of respondents who "accept or leans toward" various positions. On normative ethics, the results were deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%. On metaethics, results were moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%. On moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0% (Bourget and Chalmers 2009). ~ Nick Bostrom

No science and no analysis of the future consequences of various actions taken today can in itself tell us what to do. We need, in addition, to factor in what kind of future we value, and to what extent we care at all about the future compared to more immediate concerns here and now. The later aspect is usually modeled and economics by the so-called discount rate, which has played a prominent role in discussions of climate change on a decadal and centennial time scale, but hardly at all in the context of longer perspectives or the various radical technologies[.] We are less used to thinking about ethical issues on long time scales, so our intuitions trying to fail us and lead to paradoxes. These issues need to be resolved, because dodging the bullet would in my opinion be unacceptably irresponsible. ~ Olle Haggstrom

I don't want to become like him. Become one of those people who believe it's okay to do anything to anyone if it achieves the 'right' end. ~ Lisa M. Lilly

I sail through life with great trust in my heart. Whoever stains and breaks that trust will be in a cold water best left behind.
I felt the cold breeze of monetary means through the low ethics of money driven minds.
I securely docked in a shore I call home without the cloaks of dead winter I saw on people who have used me. ~ Angelica Hopes

Deplorable practices adopted during the last century were repeatedly declared necessary if regrettable in order to win the war. Oddly enough, we've yet to win. You'd think somebody would have asked before this why the regrettable but necessary measures haven't actually produced the promised results. ~ Jack Campbell

To recognize untruth as a condition of life
that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The eighth deadly sin is lies that harm. ~ Maria Karvouni

Some men don't gel when it comes to work - you have different work ethics, different opinions, different points of views, different methods of filmmaking - and we didn't gel. ~ Antoine Fuqua

In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power completely to articulate it. ~ Leon R. Kass

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

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

One of the great myths in America is that sports build character. They can and they should. Indeed, sports may be the perfect venue in which to build character. But sports don't build character unless a coach possesses character and intentionally teaches it. Sports can team with ethics and character and spirituality; virtuous coaching can integrate the body with the heart, the mind, and the soul. ~ Joe Ehrmann

Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance. ~ Henry Giroux

I want to show that there are indeed some universal ethical principles which could help everyone to achieve the happiness we all aspire to. ~ Dalai Lama

True knowledge is that which establishes harmony and synthesis between ience on the one hand and spirituality and ethics on the other. ~ Sai Baba

Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Taking care of our planet is like taking care of our houses. Since we human beings come from Nature, there is no point in our going against nature, which is why I say the environment is not a matter of religion or ethics or morality. These are luxuries, since we can survive without them. But we will not survive if we continue to go against nature. ~ Dalai Lama

Conscience is the parliament in our mind. It depends on who holds the majority ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

We've also evolved the ability to simply 'pay it forward': I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son onto his back to carry him across a flooding river. 'When I am older,' said the boy to his father, 'I will carry you across this river as you now do for me.' 'No, you won't,' said the father stoically. 'When you are older you will have your own concerns. All I expect is that one day you will carry your own son across this river as I no do for you.' Cultivating this attitude is an important part of Humanism
to realize that life without God can be much more than a series of strict tit-for-tat transactions where you pay me and I pay you back. Learning to pay it forward can add a tremendous sense of meaning and dignity to our lives. Simply put, it feels good to give to others, whether we get back or not. ~ Greg M. Epstein

Asking for outside help, or even if it comes unasked, to allow outside help, needs a certain gracefulness and humility. Otherwise, you cannot allow outside help. Lots of people cannot receive something gracefully. Always, the social ethics have taught you that giving is important, taking is not important. Yes, taking is not important, taking is ugly, but receiving is very important. ~ Jaggi Vasudev

For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men. ~ Albert Claude

Seriously... a sermon is not going to achieve anything. We all know perfectly well that one must not commit suicide. And yet there are times when the world we live in becomes so tough on us that we play with the thought. Therefore, it's useless to appeal to ethics; he ought to go with a more practical and concrete approach. If I were to stop suicide, I would do it like this: "Dying means falling into an eternal state of nothingness, a perfect void that can't be conceived by anything that is alive. Just think about it: your brain goes away. You do not have any thought anymore. Surely, you've heard of the phrase 'I think, thus I am,' no? Give it some careful thought. Nothing exists. Do you get this? Nothing exists. How many seconds could you endure being in a world without sound, without light, and without any kind of sensation? A world where you don't even get hungry. Where you have no desires at all. Can you follow me? But death is a perfect void, so it exceeds even such a sensation-less world. There is no future. Heaven is just a construct people who fear death made up. You should know why there will always be people who believe in a world after death despite the advent of science; it's because they are scared. Scared of what waits beyond death. So, don't think ending your own life will save you! It simply ends. It E-N-D-S. Suicide is the act of killing yourself, and dying without comprehending the meaning of death is but escaping from reality. Although the result is the sam ~ Eiji Mikage

This House cannot function without an open, accountable, and independent ethics process; and the molestation of that process by the majority is an abuse of power that cannot stand. ~ Louise Slaughter

More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency. ~ Peter Singer

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:

When all of us are communicating and talking when we're out in the world, we'll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we're not perfect, we're not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don't have attention, sometimes people use words you don't know. Sometimes people use languages you don't know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they're not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language.

And what's a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you're not sure if it's just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn't have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the l ~ Junot Diaz

The only ideological or political factions that have made any attempt at an ethics consistent with Darwinian science, to this point at least, have been the socialist eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and the Nazi movement that sprang from it. Obviously, ~ David Bentley Hart

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

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. ~ Henry Sidgwick

Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled. ~ Immanuel Kant

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. ~ Aldo Leopold

No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition. ~ Albert Camus

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient. ~ David Foster Wallace

Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics. This is why, when pressed, the atheist will often attempt to hide his lack of conviction in his own beliefs behind some poorly formulated utilitarianism, or argue that he acts out of altruistic self-interest. But this is only post-facto rationalization, not reason or rational behavior. ~ Theodore Beale

If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. ~ Robert Noyce

What is good is irrepressible. ~ Robert A. Giacalone

The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality. ~ Albert Schweitzer

The inspection once completed it is usual to put everything carefully back in place as far as possible. It is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence. ~ Samuel Beckett

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 et ~ Daniel Nayeri