Philosophical Ethics Quotes

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

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.

Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.

Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution.

The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.

What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can't have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.

Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind.

I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

There is a difference between happiness, the supreme good, and the final end or goal toward which our actions ought to tend. For happiness is not the supreme good, but presupposes it, being the contentment or satisfaction of the mind which results from possessing it.

Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

If what was said in the Ethics is true, that the happy life is the life according to virtue lived without impediment, and that virtue is a mean, then the life which is in a mean, and in a mean attainable by every one, must be the best. And the same principles of virtue and vice are characteristic of cities and of constitutions; for the constitution is in a figure the life of the city.

Some of our earliest codes of ethics in the so-called Western World are little more than a rewriting of the Ten Commandments. Eastern legal constructions likewise arise out of the earliest spiritual traditions and understandings.

We now possess four principles of morality: 1) a philosophical: do good for its own sake, out of respect for the law; 2) a religious: do good because it is God's will, out of love of God; 3) a human: do good because it will promote your happiness, out of self-love; 4) a political: do good because it will promote the welfare of the society of which you are a part, out of love of society having regard to yourself. But is this not all one single principle, only viewed from different sides?

If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

If the ethical - that is, social morality- is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.

I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.

To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.