Ethical Analysis Quotes

Moralists have no place in an art gallery.

All evils are to be considered with the good that is in them, and with what worse attends them.

It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

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

Is it or is it not ethical to create an embryo, and to create a person for the purpose of getting an organ to give to someone else? Your knee-jerk reaction is 'absolutely not;' but you need the ethical analysis of that to show why and how that is something that you need to stay away from.

Several people I had conversations with were hugely influential. People who found internal inconsistency in Westboro's ideology. It was the first thing that allowed me to recognize that Westboro was wrong.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not over look the strength of the bad cause or the weakness of the good.

You cannot talk about evil without assuming a moral framework.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level.

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

These arguments on each side (and many more might be produced) are so plausible, that I am apt to suspect, they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and satisfactory, and that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions.

My question is about the head of the Office of Government Ethics. Is he acting ethically when he sent out nine tweets praising Donald Trump saying that his plan was brilliant. How did he come to that conclusion? And how does come to his current conclusions having never done an investigation and never looked at the paperwork in the point where he can actually come to a reasonable conclusion?I think that's unethical.

Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems.

In general, I think you can watch a movie in two different ways. One is the ethical point of view, one is the point of view of the story.

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson - the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.

Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment.

When you buy a used car, you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood. If you do not feel yourself an expert in automobile engines, you bring a friend who is. And you do this with something as unimportant as an automobile. But on the issues of the transcendent, of ethics, of morals, of the origins of the world, of the nature of human beings, on those issues should we not insist upon at least equally skeptical scrutiny?

One goal of ethical inquiry might be to uncover strategies available for use when values conflict or when rules are incomplete.

To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.