Quotes about morality

Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take.

The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports.

The kinds of behaviour to which moral values and disvalues are ascribed are indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural, descriptive differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differences in value.

I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.

Good and evil are constructs lesser beings build to create divisions in places where rigor and intelligence are insufficient. It is a sloppy shorthand, and prone to error.

“I try to do the right thing, Holden. But there are times when it’s not obvious what that is.”

“I agree with you,” Holden said. “Right up to the part where you tell me this is one of those times.”

“We’re the ones who followed the rules here. We came with science teams and a hard dome. We hired them to build our landing platform, and they killed us. We’re the good guys here.”

“And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though.”

“There’s a right thing to do,” Holden said.

“You don’t have a right thing, friend,” Miller said. “You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”

There was nothing—in Eliot’s admittedly limited experience—more tedious than virtue.

“Go with it?”…

“Don’t fight against inevitability,” I translated loosely. “Life is until it is not, so why get fussed? Don’t hurt anyone, try not to give your dinner guests food poisoning, be clean in word and deed—what else is there? Just be a decent person in a decent world.”

“Everyone’s a decent person,” she replied softly, “in their own eyes.”

Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you’re not helping people, just servicing the machine.

Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers.