Julian Baggini Quotes

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.

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

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.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

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

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

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.'

There are no moral victories.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Modern morality is all about perception.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Morality is the weakness of the brain.

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

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

We should reserve the notion of 'morality' for the ways in which we can affect one another's experience for better or worse. Some people use the term 'morality' differently, of course, but I think we have a scientific responsibility to focus the conversation so as to make it most useful.