Quotes about morality

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.

The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.

There is nothing important except people. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.

She was not so naive as to think there was any necessary relation between religion and morality, or that if there was a relation it was likely to be a benevolent one.

“The mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties.”

“If so,” said the stranger with fierce certainty, “it is an immoral mission.”

“When someone asks for the ethics tape, we know they’ve already decided to invest. They just want some reassurance so they can feel good about it, too. That’s the thing you learn about values, Jones: they’re what people make up to justify what they did. Did you take business ethics in college?”

“Yes.”

“They teach you people’s behavior is guided by their values, right? That’s a load of crap. When you watch people like we do, you find out it’s the other way around. Look, I believe in what Alpha does, I really do. But do I worry about whether every little thing we do is ethical? No, because you can rationalize anything as ethical. You talk to a criminal—a tax dodger, a serial killer, a child abuser—and every one of them will justify their actions. They’ll explain to you, totally seriously, why they had to do what they did. Why they’re still good people. That’s the thing: when people talk about the importance of ethics, they never include themselves. The day anyone, anywhere, admits that they personally are unethical, I’ll start taking that whole issue seriously.”

But what can I say? That’s how business works. Nobody gives a crap about ethics. That’s why people like me will always be successful.

She dabs at her eyes. “Jesus, you nearly killed me.” She takes a deep breath. “Whoo. Okay. Tell me how you justify buying a new pair of shoes.”

“What?”

“When there are starving people in Africa, what kind of person spends two hundred bucks on shoes? See, once you buy into that paradigm, it’s a bottomless pit. You can never feel good about yourself while there’s anybody in the world poor or hungry, which there always is, Jones, and has been since the dawn of time, so you feel guilty and hypocritical all the time. I’m consistent. I admit I don’t care. You want me to reassure you that Alpha is ethical, but I’m not going to do it, because ethics is bullshit. It’s the spin we put on our lives to justify what we do. I say, be big enough to live without rationalizations.”

The heart of the question concerns the presumption of a universal human Subject, capable of reducing ethical issues to matters of human rights and humanitarian actions. We have seen that ethics subordinates the identification of this subject to the universal recognition of the evil that is done to him. Ethics defines man as a victim. It will be objected: 'No! You are forgetting the active subject, the one that intervenes against barbarism!' So let us be precise: man is the being who is capable of recognizing himself as a victim.''

“Ethicists are a mixed lot,” he says, “generally not worrying about their own problems, just somebody else’s problems.”

According to the way it is generally used today, the term 'ethics' relates above all to the domain of human rights, 'the rights of man'- or, by derivation, the rights of living beings. We are supposed to assume the existence of a universally recognizable human subject possessing 'rights' that are in some sense natural: the right to live, to avoid abusive, to enjoy 'fundamental' liberties (of opinion, of expression, of democratic choice in the election of governments, etc.) These rights are held to be self-evident, and the result of a wide consensus. 'Ethics' is a matter of busying ourselves with these rights, of making sure that they are respected.

It is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed to it — we must trace its existence as far back as to the lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time — always at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the Roman Empire — even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life.

Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and finally — in ideal, at least — to the whole of mankind.