Ethical Pluralism Quotes

There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality.

If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.

We need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance - it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.

The logical conclusion of relativism is absurdity. Non-sense. A worldview that undermines its own premises.

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

I do not believe it right for one group to impose its vision of morality on an entire society.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.

[Reinhold] Niebuhr endorsed G.K.Chesterton’s observation that tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything.

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

Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among people, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral principles, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me-or conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different and infer from this that no morality is binding-both of which are equally childish.

There are no "standards of Right". Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with "moral principle"; there is no such thing.

It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.

If the world is an aggregate of relatively independent regions, then any assumption of universal laws is false and a demand for universal norms tyrannical: only brute force (or seductive deception) can then bend the different moralities so that they fit the prescriptions of a single ethical system. And indeed, the idea of universal laws of nature and society arose in connection with a life-and-death battle: the battle that gave Zeus the power over the Titans and all other gods and thus turned his laws into the laws of the universe.

The U.S. is not the holder of truth.

No civilisation can claim to have a monopoly on universal values and no one can claim to be always faithful to his own values.

You cannot ask which system is the better because you cannot standardize one system for the whole of the world. You cannot have one stereotyped code of morality for every country. One system may work very well in one country and very badly in another. You cannot grow a tropical flower in a cold climate.

To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits.

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.

I look to Islamic ethics to find something that can provide the basis for shared values with other traditions, and ultimately universal values. This ties into the point I made in a book, 'The Quest for Meaning', that the only way for values to be universal is if they are shared universal values. My main point is, in this quest for value the aim is not to express your distinctness from others, but about being able to contribute to the discussion of universal value.

If our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team.