Alfred Jules Ayer Quotes

I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

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.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.

Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought.

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

We need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Even at school I studied ethics instead of religion.

Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution, or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

It's better to die doing good than to live doing evil.

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

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

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.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

Many are really virtuous who cannot explain what virtue is . . . But the powers themselves in reality perform their several operations with sufficient constancy and uniformity in persons of good health whatever their opinions be about them . . .