Max Weber Quotes

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.

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

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.

They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn't specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get differences.

There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

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

Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.

Most of us follow our conscience as we follow a wheelbarrow. We push it in front of us in the direction we want to go.

One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.

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

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

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

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

Is there one specific source that determines correct morality and everybody should follow that? Or should individuals come up with following that source or not depending on their situation?

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

To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

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.

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.