Ethical Dilemmas Quotes

We've all made bad decisions, but they haven't always been resulting in the deaths of innocent people.

With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there is the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, … he’s sure he can control the demon. But it doesn’t work out.

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.

Embryonic stem cell research is at the leading edge of a series of moral hazards.

Politics is a dirty business for a gentleman ...

We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as Nazi researchers did.

Very rarely do people make big compromises with their integrity. Almost every compromise is a small one that is easily justified. The downhill slide is usually a result of many little compromises.

Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing.

My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values, and transform people into little monsters.

The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

About specific social issues, there is a great deal to say that departs very far from truism and is, accordingly, significant and controversial.

Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?

I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

Bombing people for economic reasons is as horrible as killing a pregnant woman.

Men frequently do good only to give themselves opportunity of doing ill with impunity.

I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.

We were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life.

What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.

Saving lives is more important than preserving the quality of life. Quality of life is always amenable to improvement. Death is permanent.

Every organization does good and bad things.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

I think in general the ends do not justify the means.

Certainly I see no reason why society should prevent grieving parents from having a baby cloned from the cells of a dead child if they wish.

Some lines were never meant to be crossed, however good your cause may seem.