Julian Baggini Quotes

At the end of the day, if there are truly ethical considerations, those have to override scientific considerations.

The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

There is no right in acting.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.

Now here is a departure from the first principle of true ethics. Here we find ideas of moral wrong and moral right associated with something else than beneficial action. The consequent is, we lose sight of the real basis of morals, and substitute a false one.

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

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any methods.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

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

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

There is nothing politically right that is morally wrong.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

It didn't occur to me to go into something that didn't have an ethical return for me.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.