Moral Theory Quotes

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty.

Rough Johnson, the great moralist.

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world's most influential living moral philosophers. He has written 30 books on ethics and held a variety of professorial chairs over the past four decades in North America.

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.

I shall not fear to say that the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me of all the philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee against themselves that remains to them. The minds of the moralists of our day ought to turn, therefore, principally toward it. Even should they judge it imperfect, they would still have to adopt it as necessary.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books- theoretically at least.

Unfortunately for ethical egoism, the claim that we will all be better off if every one of us does what is in his or her own interest is incorrect. This is shown by what are known as "prisoner's dilemma" situations, which are playing an increasingly important role in discussions of ethical theory... At least on the collective level, therefore, egoism is self-defeating - a conclusion well brought out by Parfit in his aforementioned Reasons and Persons.

To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.

This, and no other, is justice: — to consider, under all the circumstances and consequences of a particular case, how the greatest quantity and purest quality of happiness will ensue from any action ... there is no other justice.

Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream, but if it is the other one who is beaten, then he constructs a theory.

The morals of men are more governed by their pursuits than by their opinions. A type of virtue is first formed by circumstances, and men afterwards make it the model upon which their theories are framed.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number. The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all.

The theory that music has a depraving effect on morals has now been abandoned to the old women of both sexes.