Alfred Jules Ayer Quotes

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command.

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.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

The foundations of morality are like all other foundations: If you dig too much about them, the superstructure will come tumbling down.

Our moral philosophy determines our values - what we care about and what we don't care about - and our values determine our decisions, actions, and beliefs. Therefore, moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives.

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

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

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

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

Morality is a social necessity

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

If the Soviet Government orders me to act against my conscience, I do not obey …. Conscience is above the law. No law which is against the conscience can bind.

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

I have a moral conscience that is real central.

One needs to know what is right and what is wrong.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

I'm not any more moral than my neighbors.