Ethical justification Quotes

No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices they would call "hard but necessary" for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.

Ideology…is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure.

Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

A just cause needs no interpreting. It carries its own case. But the unjust argument since it is sick, needs clever medicine.

When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

Human reason can excuse any evil.

Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.

Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.

An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable.

The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

The result justifies the deed.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good.

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.

We are the victims of the world's most comprehensive robbery. Life demands a balance. It's all right if we do a little robbing now.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

A poor man defended himself when charged with stealing food to appease the cravings of hunger, saying, the cries of the stomach silenced those of the conscience.

Most of the time, those who use animals in experiments justify that use by pointing to alleged benefits to human and animal health and the supposed necessity of using animals to obtain those benefits.

There is a demand in these days for men who can make wrong appear right.

Nothing but a necessity invincible by any other means can justify ... a prostitution of laws, which constitute the pillars of our whole system of jurisprudence.

There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.

So often I wonder whether it is my right to capitalize, as I feel, so often, on the grief of others. But then I justify, in my own particular thoughts, by feeling that I can contribute a little to the understanding of what others are going through; then there is reason for doing it.