Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Morality, a muzzle for the will; logic, a climbing iron for the mind.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

Sensibility appears to me to be neither good nor evil in itself, but in its application. Under the influence of Christian principle, it makes saints and martyrs; ill-directed, or uncontrolled, it is a snare, and the source of every temptation; besides, as people cannot get it if it is not given them, to descant on it seems to me as idle as to recommend people to have black eyes or fair complexions.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

The feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.

Ethics is inescapable.

The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.