Quotes About Ethics

Robert Torricelli, a powerful fund-raiser who helped raise more than $100 million for the Democratic party, took inappropriate gifts from a businessman, including an $8,000 gold Rolex watch, for which he was severely admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee in July. To recap: raising $100 million in contributions from gigantic corporations - ethical; taking a watch - unethical. That's the Senate Ethics Committee, an oxymoron since 1974.

Marriage and parenting are the two strongest vows anyone will ever make. When you see these commitments being carelessly discarded, you can be certain that the ethics of that generation have been abandoned. ... What our society needs is a good dose of biblical ethic from God's people - the kind of ethic that requires us to keep our word no matter what the costs. Situational ethics have so shaped our society that even God's people have lost the concept of absolutes when it comes to keeping our word.

My view of ethics and of its priority is connected to my view that we are fundamentally relational beings - both the product of human interactions, as well as committed as part of the expression of our own humanity to various social involvements. I see ethics as having two places in the maintenance of these relational activities - first as providing the basic coinage of our interactions qua humans and second as mediating the various roles we assume as humans.

The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an 'ethics of communication'. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general.

A minimal level of sportsman ethics afield is mandated by written law. Beyond that, say, when an action is legal but ethically questionable, or when (as Aldo Leopold long ago pointed out) no one is watching, hunter ethics is an individual responsibility. As the existentialists would have it, we determine our own honor minute by minute, action by action, one decision at a time.

Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics.

Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

As I understand it, Kantian constructivism is partly a position in normative ethics and partly a position in metaethics. In metaethics, it is the position that ethical claims have truth values, but their truth conditions consist not in a set of objective facts to which they correspond, but instead in the outcome of some procedure of deliberation resulting in decisions about what to do.

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

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.

The garden [of Eden] is the realm of pure beauty from which man is expelled when he becomes interested in ethics, in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The return into paradise, the homecoming, depends on him penetrating the veils of morality to glimpse again the lineaments of lost beauty.

It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide our attention when we're listening, and how we can refine what we're doing musically. Also how we can create our own music, and what opportunities that can bring us, as creative musicians. And then insisting that musicians put themselves through an intellectually rigorous process, which involves a lot of reading and writing, while insisting that music scholars think about ethics.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

All the dry ethics of the world turn to dust because apart from God they are lifeless.

Work ethics eliminates fear.

Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.

Ethics to me is very important.

I don't think there's anything in the compromise that means that there's a clash of ethics.

I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.

I wouldn't advocate for a feminism that's buttoned-up and divorced of the messiness of our real lives. Your feelings are your feelings, but you're not going to litigate your feelings about my body. The feminist ethics that I signed up for were respect for my bodily autonomy, that my experience is my experience, and that I'm an expert in my own life.

In just about every area of society, there's nothing more important than ethics.

For some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the metaphysics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a firm foundation for ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that was our only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger. Only one small problem remained. I must find a way to convert the world to my way of thinking.

The rejection of all abstract formalism. Materialism reminds every science of its real source: the world men transform. No science can, whether in its history or its object, grasp its own origins within itself or constitute itself as a closed world, exhaustively defined by internal rules. Materialism refers every science and every activity to the reality they depend on, even if this dependence is masked by a great many abstract mediations: mathematics as well as logic, aesthetics as well as ethics and politics.

If wrong decisions, both from a governance perspective and ethics, happen, this is a slippery slope that we will go down. Unless and until you recognise this, you will not take the right decisions.

Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined.

Perhaps, indeed, there are no truly universal ethics: or to put it more precisely, the ways in which ethical principles are interpreted will inevitably differ across cultures and eras. Yet, these differences arise chiefly at the margins. All known societies embrace the virtues of truthfulness, integrity, loyalty, fairness; none explicitly endorse falsehood, dishonesty, disloyalty, gross inequity. (Five Minds for the Future, p136)

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

We can speak of politics, ethics, and in this way, speak about the world. But at the same time, it's always in a way that is totally nebulous and abstracted, this way of thinking about reality. And that's why I write the way I do - it's an almost immortal way to show dependence on the biological, the political, the moral parts of us. I say immortal because we now have to find new formats, new eloquences, and resolve within ourselves this "constructed" life, a life that is incomplete, imperfect.

The denial of any distinction between foreseen and intended consequences, as far as responsibility is concerned, was not made by Sidgwick in developing any one 'method of ethics'; he made this important move on behalf of everybody and just on its own account; and I think it plausible to suggest that this move on the part of Sidgwick explains the difference between old-fashioned Utilitarianism and the consequentialism, as I name it, which marks him and every English academic moral philosopher since him.

The best leaders operate in four dimensions: vision, reality, ethics, and courage.

Mysticism has often been misunderstood as the attempt to escape this simple, phenomenal world to a more pure existence in heaven beyond. This is not mysticism, but Gnosticism. Biblical mysticism is the attempt to exit 'this world' to an alternative reality that pervades the old order. Its goal is to jettison the mind-set that says 'greed is good,' selfishness is normal,' and 'killing is necessary.' Mysticism in biblical terms is not escapism, as so many have caricatured it, but a fight for ethics and social change.

Politics and ethics belong to different worlds.

Legal ethics is a misnomer ... lawyers conducting themselves legally are not necessarily conducting themselves morally ."...and ..."The zero sum nature of the legal system, combined with the universal adoption of zealotry as the marching orders of practioners and prosecutors, transforms the moral mission of the legal system from one of truth-seeking, storytelling, and justice, to one of fabrication, distortion, and manipulation in pursuit of victory. These victories, however, make us all losers.

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics.

Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient relationship must be changed... The primary function of health care regulations should be to limit an individuals own decision-making!

Being a moral realist I see normative ethics as a search of the truth about our obligations and a search of explanation; the idea is that moral principles can help us to a moral explanation of our particular obligations.

Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality - the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life.... Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. Certainly what one is, is of far greater importance than what one appears to be.

What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it — that's in the first reader for squares — is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.

The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.

Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.

We cannot respect something just because millions or billions believe in it! We can respect something only if it is complying with the high intelligence and ethics!

Some of us find our way with a single light to guide us; others lose themselves even when the star field is as sharp as a neon ceiling. Ethics may not be situational, but feelings are. We learn to adjust, and, over time, the stars we use to guide ourselves come to reside within rather than without.

Ethics evolve naturally, and we trample upon them with laws created by reason and experience.

Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

Doing the right thing doesn't always bring success. But compromising ethics almost always leads to failure.

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.