John Rawls Quotes

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.

Only our deep moral values and our strong social institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

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

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

Humans are born with a hard-wired morality: a sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. I know this claim might sound outlandish, but it's supported now by research in several laboratories.

Jesus did not get stuck in intellectual arguments with people. He did not go for the intellect; He went for the conscience. He spoke to that part of the person that knows the difference between right and wrong instinctively.

Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing, and, as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous.

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.

If you don't believe in God, then where is your moral barometer?

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.

All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.

The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.

There are religions and social and moral awareness in any society that gets passed immediately. Those human truths. All cultures address them.

Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling.

Morality is not defined and cannot be defined by individual choice.

I call that law universal, which is conformable merely to dictates of nature; for there does exist naturally an universal sense of right and wrong, which, in a certain degree, all intuitively divine, even should no intercourse with each other, nor any compact have existed.

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.

Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.

And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

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.

Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.