Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.

More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.

I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.

Of crimes injurious to the persons of private subjects, the most principal and important is the offense of taking away that life, which is the immediate gift of the great creator; and which therefore no man can be entitled to deprive himself or another of, but in some manner either expressly commanded in, or evidently deducible from, those laws which the creator has given us; the divine laws, I mean, of either nature or revelation.

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

At the end of the day, if there are truly ethical considerations, those have to override scientific considerations.

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.

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

My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

What matters is that you are doing what you think is right based on the standards which you hold.

Moral liberty is the power of following, in all circumstances, our sense of right and wrong, or of acting in conformity to our reflecting and moral principles, without being controlled by any contrary principles.

Must we always do our duty? If so, how are we always to know what is our duty?

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.

Opinions upon moral questions are more often the expression of strongly felt expediency than of careful ethical reasoning

All of us knows, not what is expedient, not what is going to make us popular, not what the policy is, or the company policy - but in truth each of us knows what is the right thing to do. And that's how I am guided.

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.'

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

I certainly know the difference between right and wrong.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

It is the business of the teacher ... to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.