Joseph Smith Jr. Quotes

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some individuals … while the same acts are immoral for others …

Even if there is a God, how do you know that his moral judgments are the correct ones? Seems to me Abraham should have said, 'God, that's just not right.'

I cannot see how it can be argued that one should speak in tones of reverence and awe about the alleged divine instruction-in Psalms-to grab the defenseless bodies of innocent infants and dash their brains out against the nearest rocks or walls.

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.

Realizing that people should lie when they do makes me a little more open-minded, a little more tolerant, when my child or my partner lies.

Surely, nothing can be more dangerous than the doctrine that the moral obligations of men change with the latitude and longitude of a place.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

Without God and religion you don't have moral truth, you have moral opinion

Your ideas about right and wrong are just that-ideas. They are the thoughts which form the shape and create the substance of Who You Are. There would be only one reason to change any of these; only one purpose in making an alteration: if you are not happy with Who You Are.

They all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett Even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death would be relief.

Is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a Deity?

Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason there of until all of the events transpire.

Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.

We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver's skills or intentions.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

God is the creator of all things, right? He is the force that dictates the laws of the universe, and is therefore the ultimate source of ethics. He is absolute morality... We claim to be doing good. But the Lord Ruler - as God - defines what is good. So by opposing him we're actually evil. But since he's doing the wrong thing, does evil actually count as good in this case?

Science, by itself, cannot supply us with an ethic. It can show us how to achieve a given end, and it may show us that some ends cannot be achieved. But among ends that can be achieved our choice must be decided by other than purely scientific considerations. If a man were to say, "I hate the human race, and I think it would be a good thing if it were exterminated," we could say, "Well, my dear sir, let us begin the process with you." But this is hardly argument, and no amount of science could prove such a man mistaken.

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

Most things that are politically right are morally wrong

Our judgements of good and evil ... presuppose God as the standard. If there's no God, there's neither good nor evil. There's just nature doing what it does

When a plane crashes and some die while others live, a skeptic calls into question God's moral character, saying that he has chosen some to live and others to die on a whim; yet you say it is your moral right to choose whether the child within you should live or die. Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral. When you decide who should live or die, it's your moral right.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.