Moral Philosophy Quotes

If indeed good were a feeling....then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It will always remain pertinent to ask, whether the feeling itself is good; and if do, then good cannot itself be identical with any feeling.

~ G.e. Moore

Putting yourself in the place of others...is what thinking ethically is all about.

~ Peter Singer

…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…

~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

men, in so far as they live in obedience to reason necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man.

~ Baruch Spinoza

...moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.

~ Peter Singer

Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.

~ Christine M. Korsgaard

Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning....

~ Peter Singer

If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of of your power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having...a value conferring status.

~ Christine M. Korsgaard

[A} maxim's legal character must be intrinsic: it must have what I shall call 'lawlike form.' this is why legal character, or universality, must be understood as lawlike form, that is, as a requirement of universalizability.

~ Christine M. Korsgaard

There are people dying from famine on the roads, and you do not issue the stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, 'it is not owing to me, it is owing to the year.' In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying, 'it was not I, it was the weapon?

~ Mencius

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?

~ Stanisław Lem

Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.

~ Immanuel Kant