Douglas Adams Quotes

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

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.

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 problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.

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 feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

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.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

If Truth is taken away from us, then Right and Wrong are taken from us as well. If we don't know Right and Wrong, then we can't, we won't control ourselves, but will look to someone else to bring order through brute force and raw power. We will be controlled by a tyrant, and we will no longer be free.

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

It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

The whole world is incapable of judging either right or wrong. but it is certain that actionless action can judge both right and wrong.

You can't slice up morals.

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.

My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.

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

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

I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.

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.

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.

The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.

Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.