Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould Quotes

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

The main experiential determinants of moral development seem to be amount and variety of social experience, the opportunity to take a number of roles and to encounter other perspectives.

If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. 'The control of the appetites by right reason,' is how he defined it.

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.

At around nine or 10 years of age, young people start to decide for themselves what's moral or not, and that's why I like writing for that age group so much.

A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.

Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.

We need to get back to reasoning and thinking things through. The future generation is being brought up in greed and without a true understanding of civics. There is no more emphasis on knowledge and time. As a society we need to process ideas and understand what certain principles are based upon.

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

That a science, which distinguishes the criterions of right and wrong; which teaches to establish the one, and prevent, punish, or redress the other; which employs in its theory the noblest faculties of the soul, and exerts in its practice the cardinal virtues of the heart; a science, which is universal in its use and extent, accommodated to each individual, yet comprehending the whole community; that a science like this should ever have been deemed unnecessary to be studied in an university, is matter of astonishment and concern.

Students should learn about the long-standing values of truth, beauty, and goodness, think hard about them, and interrogate them skillfully.

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

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

Morality, a muzzle for the will; logic, a climbing iron for the mind.

The feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

An education which does not teach us to discriminate between good and bad, to assimilate the one and eschew the other, is a misnomer

People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices

I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.