Stephen Fry Quotes

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.

One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.

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.

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

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.

Even at school I studied ethics instead of religion.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

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.

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.'

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.

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

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

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

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

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.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

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

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

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

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

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.