Quotes about Ethics

Truthfulness is the main element of character.

Guard your integrity as a sacred thing; nothing at last is sacred except the integrity of your own mind.

When you choose the higher value over the lower, the more difficult over the easy, the right over the wrong, you feel good about yourself. Your self-esteem increases. You like and respect yourself more. You have a greater sense of personal pride.

Well, most of the time I do what feels right. But I admit there are times when I give in to my ego. Sometimes the rationalizations are so good that it's easy to sidestep what's right. But eventually you do always realize if you haven't been true to yourself. There's that tiny niggling but persistent voice at the back of your head that is not very easy to ignore for long.

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as human rights? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must consider him worthy of attempts at conversion?

I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam.

Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

TABLE OF PROPOSED RULES TO LIVE BY The Golden Rule Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Silver Rule Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. The Brazen (Brass) Rule Do unto others as they do unto you. The Iron Rule Do unto others as you like, before they do it unto you. The Tit-for-Tat Rule Cooperate with others first, then do unto them as they do unto you.

Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason: Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

The unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community—as well as the most broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy.

If the enemy can think and feel, you might hesitate to kill them. And killing is very important. Better to see them as monsters.