Albert Einstein Quotes

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

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

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

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.

That's the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I'm the most interested in - like the questions that religion takes on. And I think that, for those of us that aren't religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.

Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane, but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants.

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

The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

I am certainly not an intellectual relativist, nor a moral relativist.

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

We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.

Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.

Everybody has a different definition of the good side.

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

A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen