Michael Shermer Quotes

According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.

How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

There are some fundamental values it's impossible to be wrong about.

I don't think that's healthy for the country when anyone thinks their morals are better than anyone else's.

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

I do not permit affection or lack thereof to influence my actions. There is good, and there is evil. The good must be protected, the evil eradicated. I have shown you the triumph of evil as a caution.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

Without God and religion you don't have moral truth, you have moral opinion

Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of human condition. No, they proclaimed morality was an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable

Freedom that ignores the transcendent difference between good and evil ends in the denial of freedom itself.

Not every action or emotion however admits of the observance of a due mean. Indeed the very names of some directly imply evil, for instance malice, shamelessness, envy, and, of actions, adultery, theft, murder. All these and similar actions and feelings are blamed as being bad in themselves; it is not the excess or deficiency of them that we blame. It is impossible therefore ever to go right in regard to them - one must always be wrong.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

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

There is only one morality, as there is only one geometry.

Morality, when formal, devours.

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.

Cruelty is the only sin.

On two subjects the overwhelming majority of people regarded their own opinions as Absolute Truth, and sincerely believed that anyone who disagreed with them was immoral, outrageous, sinful, sacrilegious, offensive, intolerable, stupid, illogical, treasonable, actionable, against the public interest, ridiculous, and obscene. The two subjects were (of course) sex and religion.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

Truth and right are above utility in all realms of thought and action.