Duff Goldman Quotes

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

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

It's easy to get into the grey zone [of ethics].

Moral certainty is never more than probability.

There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.

How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.

The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

I do not believe in the concept of good and evil in my personal life, in the real world. I just don't believe it. I never try to judge.

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.

What is right, what is wrong, how can anyone say? I view very, very, few things as Right with a capital R.

I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise.

Everybody is grappling with their own moral compass, and that needle, like any needle, can't just stick. It's always floating a little bit, and depending on where you're standing, it's hard to read.

I'm not a moral relativist, I do think at the end of the day there's right and wrong, there's good intentions, and then there's bad paths that you can go on even if you have good intentions and we believe that.

Good and bad, what's good and bad? I don't know.

Your ideas about right and wrong are just that-ideas. They are the thoughts which form the shape and create the substance of Who You Are. There would be only one reason to change any of these; only one purpose in making an alteration: if you are not happy with Who You Are.

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

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.

I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.

Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

The whole world is incapable of judging either right or wrong. but it is certain that actionless action can judge both right and wrong.