Top 86 Philosophy Of Ethics Quotes
#1. That's a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals.
Peter Singer
#2. Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only 'Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?' Where you cannot it is to be rejected...
Immanuel Kant
#3. Something is objective if it is independent of people's opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people's opinions.
William Lane Craig
#4. No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
Albert Camus
#5. There are people dying from famine on the roads, and you do not issue the stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, 'it is not owing to me, it is owing to the year.' In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying, 'it was not I, it was the weapon?
Mencius
#6. Colleges don't teach economics properly. Unfortunately we learn little from the experience of the past. An economist must know, besides his subject, ethics, logic, philosophy, the humanities and sociology, in fact everything that is part of how we live and react to one another.
Bernard Baruch
#7. The greatest ethical test that we're ever going to face is the treatment of those who are at our mercy.
Lyn White
#8. My personal philosophy of life is one of ethics.
Alva Myrdal
#9. If ethics is not the engine of success, in the train of growth, it sure is a guard, with a flag, which may be green, or at times red
Priyavrat Thareja
#11. 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
#12. Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.
Christine M. Korsgaard
#13. For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them.
G.E. Moore
#14. It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. ( ... ) The "Tell the truth!" imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman.
Milan Kundera
#15. Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#16. The Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of such a theocratic ethics, with "Reason" in the place of God. This does not amount to much more than a change of names.
Raymond Geuss
#17. If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government,
Peter Singer
#18. Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.
G.E. Moore
#19. In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power completely to articulate it.
Leon R. Kass
#21. Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business ... because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people.
Stefan Molyneux
#22. ...our ultimate moral principles can become so completely accepted by us, that we treat them, not as universal imperatives but as matters of fact; they have the same obstinate indubitability.
R.M. Hare
#23. Thus I assume that to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.
John Rawls
#24. There are already plenty of people who will take a firm stand on the need to be competely impartial between right and wrong.
Martin Cohen
#25. It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.
Marcus Aurelius
#26. The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the "philosophy of human affairs;" but more frequently Political or Social Science.
Aristotle.
#27. Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
Vaclav Havel
#28. If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
~(Camus, as quoted by Tony Judt)
Albert Camus
#29. Was the excellence of Socrates or of Shakespeare normal? Was it not rather abnormal, extraordinary? It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal...
G.E. Moore
#30. The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
Sam Harris
#31. Freemasonry embraces the highest moral laws and will bear the test of
any system of ethics or philosophy ever promulgated for the uplift of man.
Douglas MacArthur
#33. I have gained this by philosophy ... I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.
Aristotle.
#34. I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.
David Pearce
#35. ...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.
G.E. Moore
#36. I have an ethics background. It doesn't mean you're perfect. But I tried to set an entirely different bar for politics in D.C. that's based on ethics and first principles and political philosophy, and not this constant bickering of, 'Are you Right or Left?'
Dave Brat
#37. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.
Aristotle.
#38. Netiquette: The social code of network communication. Internet code of conduct based on the Golden Rule. Ethical philosophy of common rules.
David Chiles
#39. What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.
Epictetus
#40. It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed."
"That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.
Terry Pratchett
#41. What's the point of having beliefs and values if we don't stand up for the former and live by the latter?
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
#42. ....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.
G.E. Moore
#43. [A} maxim's legal character must be intrinsic: it must have what I shall call 'lawlike form.' this is why legal character, or universality, must be understood as lawlike form, that is, as a requirement of universalizability.
Christine M. Korsgaard
#44. It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. ...in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.
Immanuel Kant
#46. It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit
Aristotle.
#47. 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
#48. Evil ethicists are the holocaust of humanity; if philosophy can be the instant sunlight to their endless vampirism, it will save more lives than all the doctors who have ever lived.
Stefan Molyneux
#49. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature.
Okakura Kakuzo
#50. Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
Carl Sagan
#51. People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.
Simon Blackburn
#52. If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of of your power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having...a value conferring status.
Christine M. Korsgaard
#53. Man created Guilt. Guilt is the Perpetual Engine that Drives the World.
Vineet Raj Kapoor
#54. I don't want to accidentally end up looking back on my life to find that I'm ashamed of myself, I want to live a life I can be proud of.
Alice Bag
#55. One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both.
Neel Burton
#56. Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, Why?
Thomas Cathcart
#57. Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.
Steven Pinker
#58. Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
Immanuel Kant
#59. Love is the essence of all religion, mysticism, and philosophy, and for the one who has learned this, love fulfills the purpose of religion, ethics, and philosophy, and the lover is raised above all diversities of faiths and beliefs.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#61. Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).
Baruch Spinoza
#62. It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.
Roger Scruton
#63. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.
John Gray
#64. The ethics of peace is liberal; it's not conservative based.
Henry Johnson Jr
#65. The sign of a good conscience is for a man to be in support of basically everything that Westboro Baptist isn't.
Luke Myer
#66. The secret of the power of Christianity is not in its ethics. It is not in Christian ideas or philosophy ... the secret of Christianity is found ... in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Billy Graham
#67. Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.
Terry Pratchett
#68. Ethics is nothing other than reverence for life because God is within every other human being you come in contact with either physically, or emotionally. Living with reverence for life is attuning goodliness, which is a state of godliness.
Vishwas Chavan
#69. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, we are not the left.
Peter Singer
#70. As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
[Letter to William Short, 31 October 1819]
Thomas Jefferson
#71. The first questions naturally raised by a person emerging from the fog of childhood are the same questions that led Aristotle and other great philosophers to think and write deeply on the subjects of first philosophy and ethics.
Alan E. Johnson
#72. Ethics are complete, profound and alive only when addressed to all living beings. Only then are we in spiritual connection with the world. Any philosophy not representing this, not based on the indefinite totality of life, is bound to disappear.
Albert Schweitzer
#73. Only a self capable of being jolted out of its mundane complacency is up to the task of both hearing what repair demands and helping to invent new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends.
Jill Stauffer
#74. An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#75. Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
#76. Atheism is a way of humility. It's to think oneself to be an animal, as we are actually and to allow oneself to become human.
Andre Comte-Sponville
#77. There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.
I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
Jorge Luis Borges
#78. The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant
#79. Putting yourself in the place of others ... is what thinking ethically is all about.
Peter Singer
#80. 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.
Eraldo Banovac
#81. As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
Jostein Gaarder
#82. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.
Thomas Jefferson
#83. ... if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#84. The processing of universals is the job of the unconscious. If we feed it the opposite it breaks; when it breaks we break and the people around us break.
Stefan Molyneux
#85. It is only when one is under extreme duress that one's true character is revealed.
Christopher Earle
#86. Russell's books should be bound in two colours, those dealing with mathematical logic in red - and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue - and no one should be allowed to read them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
