Karl Iagnemma Quotes

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

I wanted to play around with the format, really tear it to pieces and shake it up. For example, if Mitch saves someone from drowning, and that person then goes out and releases a virus that kills a million people. Imagine the moral implications of that.

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

There is no right in acting.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

What is done cannot be effaced. We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us ...

If the end does not justify the means, what does?

doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right

Should I be the one to play God? We're both about the same age, but we grew up in different neighborhoods.

With a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness; for to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.

At the end of the day, if there are truly ethical considerations, those have to override scientific considerations.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.

I do not hold with those who think it is all right to do whatever you want so long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Who's to be the judge of that?