Philip Kitcher Quotes

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

One goal of ethical inquiry might be to uncover strategies available for use when values conflict or when rules are incomplete.

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

The act of willing this or that, of choosing among various courses of conduct, is central in the realm of ethics.

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.

It is difficult for me to regard anyone who obeys no moral principle in his conduct to be a religious man.

Morally considered, laughter is next to the Ten Commandments.

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

A different vision of ethics is that of a collection of resources people can use to act better. The resources might be firm rules that could always be relied on. Or they might be ideals that could often be followed without thinking but that sometimes conflicted with one another.

If one must do a wrong, it's best to do it pursuing power-otherwise, let's have virtue.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.

He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.