Alexander Pushkin Quotes

It's very juicy to twirl your mustache and figure out why people do the horrible things that they do. It's not just because they are evil, but because that's how they somehow explain the world to themselves and justify themselves. It's always interesting figuring out how that happens.

Nobody sees themselves as being an evil person or doing something for a bad reason. There's always something that justifies it to themselves.

Moral licensing comes into play when people rely on past behavior to dismiss current prejudiced behavior. This is better known as the 'Some of my best friends are...' defense.

Some of our earliest codes of ethics in the so-called Western World are little more than a rewriting of the Ten Commandments. Eastern legal constructions likewise arise out of the earliest spiritual traditions and understandings.

All so-called revealed religions consist mainly of three portions, a cosmogony more or less mythical, a history more or less falsified, and a moral code more or less pure.

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

The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.

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.

The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.

In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior.

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions.

The right for the right's sake is the motto which everyone should take for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are moral beings, in how far not yet.

Most Christians with bitterness have a need to justify their sin. They usually do so with virtuous names for the sin like discernment, wisdom, etc. They attract people with complaints as it confirms their “discernment.

Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.

I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.

There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience and recent scientific findings.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. ... We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; but we must begin by refining these opinions and independently creating for ourselves new tables of values.

Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.

God's Word is your owner's manual for life. It contains principles for health, finance, marriage, other relationships, business, and much more.