Immanuel Kant Quotes

To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.

It is the greatest good to the greatest number which is the measure of right and wrong.

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

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

Any time the character is in a moral quandary is interesting. That's been true from the Greeks on down.

Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.

The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

I do not believe in the concept of good and evil in my personal life, in the real world. I just don't believe it. I never try to judge.

The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil - doers, only adds to the evil in the world.

If an action must be taken that will benefit the majority at the cost of the minority, is it morally indefensible? If an action taken for the benefit of a majority occurs at the expense of a minority, is it moral action?

Normal people, who can be good people but do bad things, are very interesting to me, and people that never get a parking ticket or never do a bad thing in their lives can be really dangerous.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

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

To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

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.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

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

Calculated risks of abuse are taken in order to preserve higher values.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number.